| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Myths in Stone: Religious Dimensions of Washington, D.C. By Jeffrey F. Meyer. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xii, 343 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-520-21481-1.)

Presenting a fresh look at a city that millions of American and foreign tourists visit every year is a daunting challenge, but Jeffrey F. Meyer manages to take readers on a newly revealing tour of the U.S. capital. Meyer, professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, reexamines the planning of Washington's monumental core as envisioned by Pierre-Charles L'Enfant in 1791 and redefined by the McMillan Commission in 1901. He also explores the design of the city's most politically charged landmarks, including the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Capitol (silhouetted on the book's cover against a backdrop of menacing clouds and mysterious sunlight). Meyer argues that 1

there is a religious message implicit in most of the buildings, memorials, art, and iconography of Washington that recalls the original conviction, often stated by the Founding Fathers, that the Almighty stood behind the American experiment.

And it is true that downtown D.C. splendidly accommodates presidential inaugural parades (along Pennsylvania Avenue) and other rituals of collective memory that "reaffirm the unity of the nation" and that spirituality is tangible in the capital of a country in which God and politics are never far apart. . . .

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