| Every year millions of tourists visit historic sites throughout the world. In the American South, these sites encompass diverse cultural landscapes, such as plantations. In many cases, visitors do not receive representative pictures of early lives. Rather, they encounter sanitized versions of the past that are acceptable to conventional views of slavery and that avoid conflict and expressions of deep emotion. Therefore, one of the primary goals of this research is to create a model for interpretative programs targeting plantation sites. Through an analysis of current programs and archival information, this model addresses the expressions of race, social class, and identity in the cultural landscape.; Since the late 1960's, plantation sites have been visited with increased frequency. At this point, researchers began to re-evaluate plantations in regard to slave occupations and their physical settings. Although scholars have dedicated their research to studying these sites, the information they gather typically is buried in professional reports and academic dissertations, rather than being incorporated into the main interpretative programming. Until recently, treatments of this subject rarely considered the contemporary context of plantation archaeology and the social and cultural products of slavery. These applications inform visitors about the historic remnants in the existing landscape and depict a dynamic understanding of the past. These view suggest that the history of the plantation as a whole informs the present and allows visitors to see the present as part of a process of development over time.; This research on James Madison's Montpelier, George Washington's Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Poplar Forest attempts to remedy these shortcomings while providing a model to be used for the interpretative programming at plantations throughout the South. It addresses the following questions: (1) In the context of Madison's Montpelier, how can slave space and artifacts be presented to the public in order to acknowledge the inherent contradiction between Madison's roles as the Father of the Constitution and the owner of slaves? (2) How can landscape approaches at Montpelier be used to suggest a continuity of the activities accommodated by specific spaces over time for the slave population?... |
