Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
    Unavailable
    Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
    Unavailable
    Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
    Ebook274 pages4 hours

    Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

    By Lauret Savoy

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land.

    Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost.

    A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past.

    In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America.

    "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateNov 1, 2015
    ISBN9781619026681

    Related to Trace

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Topos. Graphein.

      Sep 27, 2021

      Topos. Graphein.
      6 min read

    • Article

      An Open Palm

      Apr 14, 2022

      An Open Palm
      10 min read

    • Article

      Earth Lines

      Sep 1, 2022

      Earth Lines
      4 min read

    • Article

      Elegy Of The Walker

      Apr 22, 2021

      Sojourn into a world so foreign was the birthright of the first humans, and it still is today, if you choose it. The post Elegy of the Walker appeared first on The Millions.

      20 min read

    • Article

      Is this Land Your Land?

      Mar 25, 2022

      Is this Land Your Land?
      18 min read

    • Article

      No Trick of Light

      May 1, 2020

      It’s just out of reach, the source of this memory: An image from a film on a loop, flickering like the California Dream itself. A critical scene shift. An establishing shot locates us in a sleek, dim bedroom: Drapes, pulled apart, allow a streak of c

      20 min read

    • Article

      Triangle of Light

      Aug 25, 2022

      Triangle of Light
      10 min read

    • Article

      All This Blood and Love

      Nov 22, 2017

      All This Blood and Love
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Boatman And The Bear

      May 27, 2022

      The Boatman And The Bear
      9 min read

    • Article

      Komorebi

      Nov 6, 2023

      Komorebi
      6 min read

    • Article

      Fresh Look

      Jan 1, 2022

      I had never hiked any of the Northville-Placid Trail’s 135 miles before the morning of Nov. 15. I had no expectations. I was coming back from two weeks of traveling, and I was excited to get back to the land I call home, upstate New York. What better

      3 min read

    • Article

      The World Beneath Our Feet

      Sep 1, 2020

      The World Beneath Our Feet
      8 min read

    • Article

      W. J. Herbert

      Dec 15, 2021

      W. J. Herbert
      2 min read

    • Article

      “Time Like A Ball And Elastic”

      Jul 1, 2022

      “Time Like A Ball And Elastic”
      17 min read

    • Article

      Lee’s Death Anniversary

      Sep 1, 2019

      They say that the Appalachians are the oldestmountain chain in the world, and that our HillCountry through gorgeous Central & SouthwestTexas in the river canyons we live in or look north to,are part of that same Appalachian chain. There weretectonic

      1 min read

    • Article

      Wild Things

      Jun 3, 2018

      The ground was spongy and green, the accents Irish, the light atmospheric and ‘soft’ (in other words, it was raining); the scene was set for a storytelling session about epic battles and strange worlds, good versus evil. Especially as we were standin

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      More Poetry, Please

      Oct 6, 2021

      I’LL never forget the first time I read Edward Thomas’s As the Team’s Head-Brass. I had been familiar with Adlestrop from school and, later, had been introduced to Old Man and The Manor Farm (all three beautiful, rural vignettes), but the gentle pace

      5 min read

    • Article

      Native American Poetry Anthology Vibrates With Powerful Voices

      Sep 16, 2020

      U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo serves as lead editor of this new collection, which showcases a range of poems as vast as the continent.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Deep In Bears Ears Country

      Jan 8, 2019

      Deep In Bears Ears Country
      9 min read

    • Article

      We Were Known for Our Rivers

      Jun 20, 2023

      We Were Known for Our Rivers
      10 min read

    Reviews for Trace

    3/5

    2 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Parts of this book I really loved, but in the end it didn't quite all come together for me as a coherent whole. (Maybe that is part of the point, but it made for a disjointed, and at time tedious, reading experience.)