Rewriting American Architecture

Contesting the Myths of National Culture

A critical reassessment of nineteenthcentury American architecture that uncovers how race, settler colonialism, and contested national identities shaped the built environment and its historiography.

Rewriting American Architecture offers a revisionist riposte to the canonical story of nineteenth-century American architecture. Drawing on new archival research and revisionist historiography, the essays in this volume reveal how American architecture was shaped not by inevitable progress toward a unified national culture but by the turbulent realities of race, labor, settler colonialism, and territorial expansion. Rather than treating architecture as an apolitical aesthetic expression, the contributors expose it as an active arena in which the meanings of nationhood were constructed, contested, and often violently enforced. From Indigenous spatial practices and Black institutional