Landscapes and Buildings

So far, David Kyvig and Myron Marty's book, Nearby History, has been my favorite book to read in class. The book is an easy read and covers very interesting topics having to do with nearby history. The chapter I read for class was about Landscapes and Buildings (Chapter 9). The chapter talked about looking at the cultural landscape to understand the history of a particular place. The cultural landscape allows you to see how a place has changed over time by looking at, for example, migration patterns, transportation routes, architecture etc (165). It was stressed that "historical evidence found in the landscape must be supplemented by information derived from written documents" (165). A building needs some sort of background to describe why it's important, otherwise it just stands alone.

To understand the cultural landscape, Kyvig and Marty recommend the starting point be to see the whole and its parts. A historian should look for form, balance, harmony, and unity as well as shapelessness, imbalance, incongruity and disorder (168). It also means looking at the natural landscape and seeing how that affected constructing the cultural landscape.

The chapter also focused on buildings because they are "not only the most prominent artifacts on the cultural landscape but the centers of human activity as well" (170). When looking at buildings, historians should pay attention to their function, structure, and symbolism. The point of this chapter was to show that the cultural landscape is full of materials and it is up to historians to understand these materials and use them to recreate the past (176).