Engaging the City: "Hidden St. Louis"

3 units

Geographer Peirce Lewis had argued that "our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography." It gives tangible form to our shared tastes, values, aspirations, and even our fears. It also reveals efforts to exert control––over people, space, resources, and collective identity. St. Louis represents an especially challenging case study in cultural geography, because much of its historical fabric has been altered or destroyed––and bears the imprint of White control and a history of racial segregation. This collaborative fieldwork course explores the city's "hidden" history, focusing on lost, endangered, or forgotten sites. Some are associated with vexing or violent histories, or contested memory; others are a product of disregard, "benign neglect," or worse--wholesale erasure, as is the case with a series of Native American burial mounds that once stood near the Arch grounds, not to mention immigrant and African American neighborhoods cleared in the name of urban "renewal. Drawing on a range of sources and disciplinary methods, we will engage creatively with elusive features of the cultural landscape, seeking to "locate" them spatially, materially, and historically, and to understand their sociopolitical significance, especially in relationship to better-known landmarks and celebrated sites. How have such features contributed to public culture and identity in the past? How might they yet be reclaimed, and incorporated into the public imagination, whether through storytelling and preservation or public history/memorialization? The course includes a variety of fieldwork and classroom activities, including site visits; fieldnotes and short analytical/reflections papers; and a final project on a site of the student's choosing. Note: This course fulfills the fieldwork requirement for AMCS majors.