Charting the American Bottom

Jesse Vogler, Angela Miller, Matthew Fluharty, Micheal Allen, Andrew Theising

Few regions in the United States exhibit a social and spatial fragmentation as extreme as that of the vast flood plains of the East St Louis region. As a coherent geographic interval stretching from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers down to the confluence with the Kaskaskia River, this flood plain, known to geographers and anthropologists as The American Bottom, is site to the social and spatial aspirations of pre-contact Native Americans, 19th century industrial expansion, 20th century infrastructural consolidation, and 21st century ecological precarity.

Yet this region is currently defined less by its inherent ecological and geological continuities and more by the industrial patterns that have effectively fractured this region into closed parcels of extraction, production, and displacement. It is a territory where the Cahokia Mounds UNESCO heritage site abuts an EPA Superfund Site, where French Colonial settlement patterns shape 20th century urban forms, where the first incorporated African-American town in the U.S. abuts the site of this country’s most notorious race riot, and where a powerful Mississippi river flows disconnected from its still-vital flood plain. Through this rather compact region, then, an entire history of North American settlement and aspirations can be told.

“Charting the American Bottom” is a multi-platform project in digital humanities that looks to define a new category of narrative geography and landscape curation. Pulling equally from the legacy of illustrated County Atlases of the late 19th century, the “tour” structure of the 1930s WPA American Guides, and the evolving interconnectivity of online frameworks, this project provides an urgent model for the construction of landscape publics. Importantly this website is designed to serve as an invitation that facilitates actual navigation of this region—a threshold between the world out-there and the world of the archive—and as such promotes a kind of spatial encounter with an empowered, literate, landscape public. Our goal, then, is to provide a framework for deciphering the irreducible geography we find today.

It is our hope that people familiar and unfamiliar with this region alike will find something instructive in this project. As a specific geography, the American Bottom has seen a history of human settlement, ecological transformation, and social convergence that we truly find singular in the American context. At the same time, as a typical geography, the American Bottom picks up on patterns that might be recognizable at the divided urban periphery of every large American city at the beginning of the 21st century. And it is to both these registers—the specific and the general—that we hope this project speaks.

From the standpoint of audience, user interaction, and design, we conceived the site as an invitation—an invitation to the landscape. The primary idea animating our work was to set in motion a narrative sequence wherein real and virtual places flicker across this lingering digital divide. In a moment of social media and user-generated-content, rarely is a content-rich website designed and framed to invite a new kind of landscape encounter. On this site, meaning, history, memory, description, and representation are all mobilized in a way that we hope build on one another toward an ever-evolving understanding of the complexity of landscape.

Organizationally, the project is composed of two primary parts: 100+ individual site narratives and a growing set of thematic itineraries. The site narratives are meant to be short windows of description into the incredible, and incredibly disparate, spatial histories that can be found in this region. Entry into each site is invited by a single, rich, curated photograph of that place, taken by our project photographer. This photograph then sets in motion a range of additional cartographic and representational techniques—many involving creative use of the Google Maps API. Using the curated photograph as a starting point, we attempt to match that expertly framed photo with its Google Streetview equivalent—dropping the user into the navigable environment in which that photo is taken. From here, the user can hover over the ‘directions’ panel to drop into a Google Earth view that has a related pull-out tab with a pre-loaded destination to facilitate actual, on-the-ground navigation to the site. Finally, each site has a succinct narrative that places it within its spatial, historical, and/or social context.

The itineraries, on the other hand, look to chart a more coherent thematic course through this otherwise irreducible landscape. Built around a variety of themes such as historical settlement patterns, productive landscapes, Native-American geography, public space, music vernaculars, race relations, and an abiding pattern of erasure, the itineraries each take on the task of navigating the user through this heterogeneous region. The itineraries are all newly commissioned essays by leading scholars in the field, and each provides an accessible but rigorous entry into the concerns of their discipline. The research of the contributors and their provocative essays all look to communicate a basis for understanding latent continuities in this landscape—with the resulting message being one where patterns and frameworks begin to take hold across this otherwise politically and socially divided landscape.

“Charting the American Bottom” has brought together ten scholars and artist from across numerous disciplines—architecture, art, anthropology, art history, social history, archeology, historic preservation, rural studies, ecological history, and urban history—to contribute innovative, cross-disciplinary essays that cut across abiding disciplinary divides. By constructing a platform where these voices can mingle, it is our hope that this project provides a model for the kind of interdisciplinary conversation that is are needed to interpret and make sense of the complexity of our divided geographies. In addition, each contributor looks to connect their historical and theoretical work with the actual landscape we find today—providing temporal continuities that ground this work in our precarious present.

In framing the sorts of conversations that this project has attempted to set in motion, I will let a few summary reflections suffice. In reading Charles Lumpkins’ narrative recounting of the 1917 East St. Louis pogrom, we are not only reoriented to the critical urban erasures that we find in today’s East St. Louis, but also and importantly to abiding racial divisions that continue to haunt our lived and discursive imaginaries today. His implied call for an embodied experience of urban disinvestment asks us to take seriously the ways that ideas—even those as destructive and evil as white supremacy—can shape our urban landscapes. Gayle Fritz and Angela Miller invite us to think this region from its most foundational and unacknowledged resource: the soil itself. Here, they draw on a millennium of agricultural practices—from pre-contact Cahokian plots to French Colonial common-fields to contemporary commodity extraction—that have marked and shaped the bottomlands. From this perspective, they are able to ask far-reaching questions that mingle migration patterns, cross-cultural belief systems, and landscape interpretation with self-reflective, methodological questions that ask what it means to represent and re-tell these histories in the first place. We may do well ourselves to remember their warning that “public memory is a collage of contemporary experience; fragmentary knowledge of the past; wishful projects; and fear.” And finally, Michael Allen frames an understanding of what I would call a politics of the visible, where questions of artifacts, evidence, and meaning are loosened from their geographic support—as the floodplain and its volatile ecologies and economies effectively erase and overwrite the marks of habitation. What matters? What stories are told? What stories are not? And how is value ascribed? These are just some of the overarching questions that this project seeks to address though its focus on this under examined region.

Visit “Charting the American Bottom” website here.

Please click here to see an article on this project in Art in America magazine.

Jesse Vogler is a visiting assistant professor of landscape architecture in Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and director of the Institute of Marking and Measuring.
Angela Miller is a professor of art history and archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.
Matthew Fluharty is a post-doctoral research fellow in the American Culture Studies Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and director of Art of the Rural.
Michael Allen is the University College coordinator in American Culture Studies Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and the director of the Preservation Research Office.
Andrew Theising is associate professor of political science at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville and founding director of the Institute for Urban Research.