When Europeans invaded the edges of the newly discovered
continent of North America, the stories they told to make
sense of their world came from their homelands In popular
literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings and many other
forms, European-Americans invented foundation stories as they
entered new regions of North America and used powerful technologies
to transform these spaces into familiar landscapes. (pp. 1-2)
Native Americans' stories of origin provide an instructive
counterpoint to those of European-Americans. Native Americans'
stories express their sense of oneness with the land. The
first people are said to have emerged out of the earth or
to have come into the world through the intervention of
spiritual beings. (p. 2)
By the 1970s, log houses had become a "lifestyle" choice.
More than 10,000 were built each year, many of them assembled
from pre-cut kits with numbered parts ö With the mass production
of pre-cut logs for easy assembly, the narrative of the
log cabin reached the point of logical self-contradiction.
Not only had the machine displaced human muscle power, but
the purpose of the structure itself was no longer shelter
from the wilderness. Its purpose now was escape from civilization.
(pp. 83-84)
Railroads remain a vital part of the American transportation
network. In 1990, freight trains still carried more than
trucks, even though 90,000 miles of track had disappeared
since 1920. Yet because American railways carry so few passengers,
they exist at the margins of public consciousness. Some
of the great passenger stations, like those in Omaha and
Kansas City, long stood unused and empty. Others have been
torn down. In Washington and Indianapolis the central stations
have been converted to shopping malls. (p. 203)
Norris, Muir and others of the Progressive Era who attacked
the railroads for their selfish pursuit of wealth and power
were writing in the tradition of what Sacvan Bercovitch
has called the "American jeremiad." The railroad's original
promise that it would foster development and democracy was
followed by its "declension" or spectacular failure to fulfill
its social mission. The railroad had stimulated wasteful
land speculation, created ghost towns, undermined and destroyed
existing communities And yet the railroad might still serve
its original purpose if it were better regulated (or owned)
by the state. Thus the critique of the railroad often ended
in a hopeful prophecy of what it could be in the future.
(p. 195)
One could imagine the settlement of the United States
from the viewpoint of animals. Jim O'Brien's often-reprinted
essay "A Beaver's Perspective on North American History"
begins before any humans had arrived. Beavers dammed streams,
created small canals and ponds and reshaped the landscape
in ways that affected the larger biotic community. The beaver
population, which may have reached 60 million at its height,
went into decline with the arrival of the European fur trade.
O'Brien's narrative radically reconsiders American history
as a catastrophe. (p. 298)
