| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee. By Lisa C. Tolbert. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xx, 294 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2466-6. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4768-2.)

Making landscapes, as the late J. B. Jackson put it, is a social process that functions and evolves to serve communities: the built environment offers tangible evidence for the collective projects that we normally call culture. The ordinary homes of working Americans, for instance, speak volumes about lives that are frequently voiceless in the archives. Even when those vernacular landscapes have been replaced by subsequent building, their legacy often remains in street layout, fire insurance maps, historical photographs, and a group's collective memory. Lisa C. Tolbert makes excellent use of those and many more elusive sources in her recent study of small-town landscapes in antebellum Tennessee. While she refers only in passing to Jackson's classic work of landscape studies, Tolbert's book is clearly indebted to his vision of landscape, a social space that "evoked multiple meanings based on particular group experiences." She convincingly demonstrates not only how diverse groups produce space differently, but also how their use of a shared space contrasted. . . .

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