Home in America : on loss and retrieval / Thomas Dumm.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dumm, Thomas L., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Home--United States--History.

Home.

Home in popular culture--United States--History.

Home in popular culture.

Home in literature.

History.

United States--Race relations--History.

United States.

Race relations.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xi, 297 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.

Summary:

"Home as an imagined refuge. Home as a place of mastery and domination. Home as a destination and the place we try to escape from. Thomas Dumm explores these distinctively American understandings of home. He takes us from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Henry David Thoreau's Walden to Laura Ingalls Wilder's little house on the prairie and Emily Dickinson's homestead, and finally to the house Herman Wallace imagined and that sustained him during his forty-one years of solitary confinement at Angola State Penitentiary. Dumm argues that it is impossible to separate the comforting and haunting aspects of home. Each chapter reveals a different dimension of the American experience of home: slavery at Monticello, radical individuality at Walden, Indian-hating in the pioneer experience, and the power of remembering and imagining home in extreme confinement as a means of escape. Hidden in these homes are ghosts--enslaved and imprisoned African Americans, displaced and massacred Native Americans, subordinated homemakers, all struggling to compose their lives in a place called home"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prologue: Dad

Habitations of the human

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House

Emily Dickinson's House of Possibility

Herman Wallace's Dream House

Epilogue: Mom, revisited.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674057715

0674057716

OCLC:

1110125695