THE HISTORIC AXIOM In trying to unravel the meaning of contemporary landscapes and what they have to "say” about us as Americans, history matters. That is, we do what we do, and make what we make because our doings and our makings are inherited from the past. (We are a good deal more conservative than many of us would like to admit.) Furthermore, a large part of the common American landscape was built by people in the past, whose tastes, habits, technology, wealth, and ambitions were different than ours today. Thus, while we live among obsolete artifacts of past times – "old-fashioned houses" and “obsolete cities" and "inefficient transportation" or "bad plumbing” – those objects were not seen to be "inefficient" or silly by the people who made them, or caused them to be made. To understand those objects, we must try to understand the people who built them – our cultural ancestors – in their cultural context, not ours.
THE COROLLARY OF HISTORIC LUMPINESS Most major cultural change does not occur gradually, but instead in great sudden historic leaps, commonly provoked by such great events as wars, depressions, and major inventions. After these leaps, landscape is likely to look very different than it did before. Inevitably, however, a lot of "pre-leap" landscape will be left lying around, even though its reason for being has disappeared. Thus, the Southern landscape is -7- littered with share-croppers’ houses, even though the institution of sharecropping has nearly disappeared – a victim of the boll weevil and a concatenation of other forces that combined to destroy the old Cotton Belt of the early 1900s, and provoked a migration of black farmers northward, eventually to change the entire urban landscape of industrial America. Most small towns in America – at least of the Norman Rockwell ilk – are like the Cotton Belt: obsolete relicts of a different age. There are no more being built today, and, unless things in America change radically, there never will be.
paraphrase the historicial landscapes (north and south)