Good for Whom? Olmsted, Parks, and Public Good
Adding Contexts of Settler Colonialism and Systemic Racism
Whose Land?
Contextualizing "Public Spaces" and Colonization
This panel reads in part, "Olmsted believed that parks and landscapes are essential public spaces, belonging to all Americans." This philosophy is communicated throughout the exhibit and informed not only Olmsted's work but also established a popular and celebrated conception of landscape architecture and urban planning for the future.
Critical Inquiry:
Who do you think Olmsted had in mind in his definition of "all Americans"?
Who did public spaces belong to prior to the creation of National Parks and other public parks?
Do you think Manifest Destiny (the idea that white settlers had divine entitlement to territorial expansion) that was a prevailing belief of the time held by those in power influenced Olmsted's ideas about public parks? Why or why not?
The books listed below offer thorough overviews into ideologies like Manifest Destiny, Enlightenment, and others that have informed the founding and development of the United States. Both books also have Young Adult versions available:
Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. As the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative
Author: Ibram X. Kendi
Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation's racial inequities in everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited.
Continue the Conversation
Connect with the Gordon Library at www.wpi.edu/library.
If questions about digital scholarship, curation, social justice and sustainability align with your research interests, we'd love to connect. Email us at gr-dswp@wpi.edu.