Presidents and Place

Presidents and Place: America's Favorite Sons examines the interrelationship between America's leading political icons and various facets of space and place, including places of birth and death as well as regional allegiances.

Presidents and Place: America's Favorite Sons highlights the interrelationship between America's leading political icons and various facets of space and place, including places of birth and death as well as regional allegiances, among others. The chapters examine the legacy of relationships between presidents and place in a variety of social and cultural forms, ranging from famous political campaigns to television series to developments in tourism. Beginning with the political iconography of New York's Federal Hall in early eighteenth-century America and ending with a focus on the Republican Party's electoral relationship with the South, the interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse nature of the chapters reveals that place has more than a biographical significance in relation to US presidents.

Chapter One - Gotham Remembers: New York Presidential Commemoration from the Confederation Congress Through the Virginia Dynasty

Keith J. Muchowski

Chapter Two - “A Land of Pharaoh and His Plagues”: John Randolph of Roanoke’s Mission to Russia and the Jacksonian Presidency

Olga Akroyd

Chapter Three - “Just Folks?”: Jack Downing, The West Wing, and the Yankee Struggle for “Real America”

Jeff Smith

Chapter Four - William Henry Harrison and the Making of the Politically Imagined American Midwest

Wesley Bishop

Chapter Five - Andrew Johnson: Reassessing the Political Impact of the Tailor from Tennessee

Frederick David Gordon

Chapter Six - A President’s ‘Pilgrimage of the Heart’: Place, Ancestry, and Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 Visit to Carlisle

Sam Edwards

Chapter Seven - “Dear Mr. President: Herbert Hoover & Harry Truman’s Unique Friendship, 1945-1964”

Lisa Payne Ossian

Chapter Eight - “JFK in Dallas: Collective Memory, Media Events, and Don DeLillo’s Libra”

Laura Álvarez Trigo

Chapter Nine - How Barry Goldwater Merged Arizona’s “Rugged Landscape” with “Rugged Individualism”

Ilias Ben Mna

Chapter Ten - “I’m a Southerner”: The Regional Pride and Burden of President Jimmy Carter

D. Jason Berggren

Chapter Eleven - Plains and Simple: The Influences of Plains, Georgia, and Small-Town Nostalgia on Jimmy Carter’s Public Persona

Elizabeth Rees

Chapter Twelve - The Carter Mystique: The Effects of Jimmy Carter's Election on Tourism in Georgia and the South

Giuliano Santangeli Valenzani

Chapter Thirteen - Tennessee Over Texas: How Appalachia’s Shift to Republican Primacy Predated Trump’s Presidency

Thomas J. Cobb

Chapter Fourteen - The American South and Presidential Politics, 1964-2020

Scott E. Buchanan