| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sarah Luria. Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C. Hanover, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press in association with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, N. Mex. 2006. Pp. xxxi, 196. Cloth $65.00, paper $26.00.
Sarah Luria's book argues that the meaning of the term "speculation" changed in the 1770s. Once defined as deep philosophical thought, "speculation" came to mean a strategy of financial investment involving some risk. Luria explores how the capital became a stage for visions of subsequent reformers through the political and financial speculation that built the city. Seeking the connections among literature, material and visual culture, and the built environment, the author analyzes correspondence, speeches, and other texts by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, George Washington, Pierre L'Enfant, Walt Whitman, and Henry Adams as well as photographs, paintings, buildings, physical space, and multiple secondary sources. Luria argues that political visions were expressed through the city's built environment, which in turn promoted and transformed those visions into political fact. The speculative nature of Washington's initial development has been well documented, but Luria's work explores how financial and political speculation continued to shape the city's space after its creation.	1
Washington, D.C., became the embodiment of nationalism, and to Luria, the city remains a space for the projection of political visions. The author takes particular issue with the use of the term "reading" when applied to houses and spaces, arguing instead that the authors she examines were obsessed with city space and architecture precisely because houses and spaces are not "readable" texts but must be experienced physically. "Both Washington's successes and its failures," Luria writes, "can be traced in large part to the practice in which politics, literature, architecture, and urban planning intersect: speculation" (p. xxii).	. . .

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