Taking up space

Frontier cities. Las Vegas. Land Art. The Dust Bowl. Suburbia. Fifth Avenue. Times Square. Boxing arenas. The Lower East Side. South Street Seaport. The 'shrinking' Atlantic. Berlin seen by Americans. Leipzig University and its US women students. And: American colonial architecture on the Philippines. These are the territories of American History Taking up Space investigates. Space, the authors argue, should be seen as a protagonist of history – and should receive more conscious attention. Earlier generations of scholars have frequently used the category only implicitly. Now, historians explore the cult ural construction of the concept. They have come to reflect more critically on discourses about space and the spatial metaphors in language, literature, and the arts. They study how spaces become places, and what the countryside, the city, the neighbourhood or the street have meant to Americans of different racial, gender, class, and ethnic backgrounds. Taking Up Space presents 15 interdisciplinary case studies by European and American scholars from the fields of history, architecture, urbanism, literary criticism, and art history.