Most Sundays, especially when the weather is pleasant, I go for long walks on a bucolic, peaceful landscape, whose gently rolling hills and farms are marked off by wood split-rail fences. The landscape looks like it could have been pulled straight out of mid-nineteenth century rural United States. And that’s because in many respects it was: the nearly 2500 hectares surrounding the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania are intended to look and feel like they did when a vicious, horrifically bloody battle was fought over the first three days of July of 1863.

There, is of course, no blood on the landscape now; that would scare away too many of the almost one million visitors who come to tour the town and landscape, pouring millions of dollars into the local economy. And for most of the time since the battle, nor was there any indication that African Americans, enslaved and free, lived and worked on this landscape. Incorporating their presence would clash with white supremacist rhetoric, which, despite the ending of racial slavery two years after the battle, merely morphed and adapted to new exigencies. The landscape, then, matched white supremacy’s persistent national chrysalis.

As the country’s first major effort to preserve a battlefield landscape, what would become Gettysburg National Military Park became a template for other battlefield preservation efforts, not only throughout the United States but in other countries. This paper tells the story of those attempts to both freeze the landscape in time, while simultaneously altering it to shape the rhetoric of the over 1300 monuments and memorials that dot the landscape. And although they had long been quite intentionally excluded from those preservation efforts, I seek to place African Americans back at the center by including the stories of Black people like Hester, an enslaved woman who attempted to escape from slavery, and whose stories are vital to understanding why there was a civil war in the United States, a battle at Gettysburg, and thus a deceptively bucolic landscape today. Fortunately, I am not alone in this endeavor; as my article notes, today’s Park employees welcome these stories, and have, over the last several years, been cautiously moving African Americans onto the landscape where they belong.

While I am passionate about the discipline of history, I have always been intrigued by how other disciplinary perspectives enhance understanding the past. I was, therefore, attracted to the 2024 AMPS conference in Barcelona, which was a welcome springboard into this fuller investigation. The disciplines of rhetoric and landscape studies enabled me to make sense of the seeming impossible conundrum of the Gettysburg battlefield landscape being simultaneously frozen and changing over time. Being able, then, to publish in journals like AMPS, that immerse scholars from a spectrum of disciplines around the globe, has been an invaluable opportunity.

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Transforming heritage discourse on the landscape at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by Scott Hancock (Gettysburg College, USA) is part of the AMPS series Socio-Cultural Theory and published in Architecture_MPS, volume 32.

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Scott Hancock is an associate professor of history and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College. His first career, 14 years working with teenagers in crisis, helped fuel his desire to tell the stories of people whom society and history have discounted as troublesome or unimportant. He is currently exploring how spaces, such as the Gettysburg battlefield, can usefully put African Americans and slavery back into the heart of stories told by landscapes and memorials, as well as how to combine scholarship with effective activism through respectful engagement with people in a variety of forums.

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amps amps blog American Civil War landscape memory commemoration white supremacy