Summary

Above the Oxbow is a journey through the tangle of rich narratives surrounding Mount Holyoke, a locally cherished mountain in Western Massachusetts. It explores how visitors have forged connections with the mountain through various activities over the past two centuries. In an accessible blend of storytelling and scholarly analysis, Danielle Raad shows the significance of the landscape, historic sites, and material culture, revealing how cultural perspectives, community activism, collective memory, and personal experiences shape our understanding of a place. Situated at the intersection of public history and environmental history, this ethnography of place also discloses the curious stories of the Summit House, an erstwhile tramway, an airplane crash, and the local fight to conserve Mount Holyoke as a natural space and celebrates its myriad uses today.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

One The Ascent: An Introduction

Two Narrating the Mountain’s Past

Three “Is Not the Scene Magnificent?”: The View from Mount Holyoke

Four Participation and Parcel: Conserving and Experiencing Nature

Five Ruin to Museum: Historical Engagement at the Summit House

Six Materializing Memory on the Mountain

Coda The Descent

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Author

Danielle Raad is assistant professor of history and museum studies at the University of Georgia. She is a public historian, anthropologist, archeologist, and curator with a focus on how people in the present make meaning from the material culture—art, artifacts, and historic sites—of the past.

Raad held positions as the curator and assistant director of the Stanford University Archeology Collections and as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University Art Gallery. She has been published in Historical Archeology, Journal of Cultural Geography, Journal of Archeological Science, and University Museums and Collections Journal.

Reviews

“Raad brings new ideas to play in this inquiry, such as a different sense of place created by a mostly natural rather than constructed setting . . . a good addition to a bookshelf containing histories of places and their cultural significances and meanings.” 

—Dan Allosso, author of Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History