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Research ArticlePeer-Reviewed Articles

Landscapes and Archives: Notes on a Method

John Dean Davis
Landscape Journal, January 2021, 39 (1) 71-85; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/wplj.39.1.71
John Dean Davis
Environmental and engineering historian and assistant professor at Ohio State University, where he teaches landscape history. He is currently working on a book about engineering and landscape in the Reconstruction era following the US Civil War.
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Abstract

This article proposes reevaluating the methods for consulting archives to write landscape histories. Archives hold immense amounts of human and non-human data, but approaching them purely to extract information causes the historian to miss past networks of affinity. By using a field method, one grounded in an ethic of care and focused on maintaining the ecologies of the past, researchers can identify important actors and events among their archival traces and write landscape histories that animate social, political, and biological processes and struggles important to that landscape and beyond its borders. Using important debates in the humanities around archival inclusion and composition, avenues of interpretation, and the pleasures and frustrations of working with incomplete information, I argue that landscape is a particularly insightful and inclusive way to organize historiography. The article concludes with four methodological episodes, each highlighting a different dimension of landscape history as a practice of radical empathy and affirmative maintenance.

  • History
  • methodology
  • historiography
  • narrative
  • care ethic
  • © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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Landscape Journal: 39 (1)
Landscape Journal
Vol. 39, Issue 1
1 Jan 2021
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Landscapes and Archives: Notes on a Method
John Dean Davis
Landscape Journal Jan 2021, 39 (1) 71-85; DOI: 10.3368/wplj.39.1.71

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Landscapes and Archives: Notes on a Method
John Dean Davis
Landscape Journal Jan 2021, 39 (1) 71-85; DOI: 10.3368/wplj.39.1.71
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Keywords

  • history
  • methodology
  • historiography
  • narrative
  • care ethic
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