Overview

Above the Oxbow is a journey through the tangle of rich narratives surrounding Mount Holyoke, a locally cherished mountain in Western Massachusetts. It explores how visitors have forged connections with the mountain through various activities over the past two centuries. In an accessible blend of storytelling and scholarly analysis, Danielle Raad shows the significance of the landscape, historic sites, and material culture, revealing how cultural perspectives, community activism, collective memory, and personal experiences shape our understanding of a place. Situated at the intersection of public history and environmental history, this ethnography of place also discloses the curious stories of the Summit House, an erstwhile tramway, an airplane crash, and the local fight to conserve Mount Holyoke as a natural space and celebrates its myriad uses today. 

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9781959000686

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Reviews

""Raad brings new ideas to play in this inquiry such as a different sense of place created by a mostly natural rather than constructed setting…a good addition to a bookshelf containing histories of places and their cultural significances and meanings."" — Dan Allosso, author of Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History

Author Information

Danielle Raad is assistant professor of history and museum studies at University of Georgia. She is a public historian, anthropologist, archeologist, and curator with a focus on how people in the present make meaning from the material culture—art, artifacts, and historic sites—of the past.

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