[If you’re in
New England, there are few more beautiful spots for a spring walk than Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. In this
series, I’ll highlight a few American connections for this unique site and all
it includes. Please share your thoughts, on this site and any other beautiful
or evocative spaces you’d highlight, for a crowd-sourced weekend walk!]
On three
inspiring sides to a hugely influential scholar.
If you want to
learn more about Mount Auburn Cemetery, or simply to read one of the most
impressive works of American Studies scholarship ever produced, there’s no
better place to go than Blanche Linden’s Silent
City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn
Cemetery (1989; new
edition reissued in 2007). Linden’s book, based on her groundbreaking PhD dissertation,
became the starting point for a lifetime
of work exploring, analyzing, and sharing Mount Auburn’s histories,
stories, and meanings; as she contributed the most of any single voice to the cemetery’s
audio tour (now converted as well into the mobile app available at that
link), it’s fair to say that she will continue to share her perspective on and
researches into the cemetery with its visitors for many years to come. But even
if you never get to set foot in the cemetery, Linden’s book is a pioneering
work of interdisciplinary scholarship well worth your time, a project that contextualizes
its seminal landscape architecture and 19th century histories within
philosophical and literary reflections, art history and material culture analyses,
urban and environmental studies, and much more.
Moreover, Linden’s
influences on American Studies and related scholarly endeavors and communities aren’t
found solely in her published works. I first encountered Linden’s work through
my connection to the
New England American Studies Association (NEASA): during the late 1970s and
80s, first as a graduate student at Harvard University’s History of American
Civilization program (from which she received her PhD
in 1981) and then as a junior faculty member at multiple local institutions
(including Brandeis
University and Emerson
College), Linden helped found NEASA, and then served as one of its first
presidents during this crucial formative moment. Decades later, during my own
2011 term as NEASA President, Linden contacted me from retirement in Florida,
both to express her continued support for NEASA’s efforts and to offer
invaluable materials from the organization’s early years. Coupled with her 1994
editing of the national American Studies Association’s Handbook
for Regional Chapters, this 2011 moment reflects just how lifelong were
Linden’s contributions to the field, practice, and community of American
Studies, both within her beloved New England and well beyond it.
In July 2014, at
the far too young age of 68, Dr.
Linden passed away at her home in Florida. Because of the connection we had
made through NEASA, I was fortunate enough to be invited by Linden’s NEASA
colleague and friend (and pioneering
American Studier in her own right) Patricia
Palmieri to the September memorial service held at (where else?) Mount
Auburn Cemetery. The service of course highlighted Linden’s lifelong
contributions to Mount Auburn, as well as how much she meant to her wide and
deep community of friends and family; but through the voices of a number of her
former students, all of whom have gone on to impressive careers in their own right
and had stayed in touch with her while they did so, it also provided a
compelling glimpse into how successful she was as a teacher and mentor. Too
often, I have found, the different sides to this profession are treated as
distinct choices or emphases: of course most of us teach, write, and perform
service at both the institutional level and beyond (such as in organizations
like NEASA); but nonetheless there remains a sense that we have to choose where
and how we dedicate our time and make our most lasting impacts. Yet as the life
of Mount Auburn’s most significant historian demonstrates, we can and should instead
strive to succeed in all those arenas.
Next connection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sites or spaces you’d share?
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