Hallow This Ground [Paperback]

Beginning outside the boarded-up windows of Columbine High School and ending almost twelve years later on the fields of Shiloh National Military Park, Hallow This Ground revolves around monuments and memorialsphysical structures that mark the intersection of time and place. In the ways they invite us to interact with them, these sites teach us to recognize our ties to the past. Colin Rafferty explores places as familiar as his hometown of Kansas City and as alien as the concentration camps of Poland in an attempt to understand not only our common histories, but also his own past, present, and future. Rafferty blends the travel essay with the lyric, the memoir with the analytic, in this meditation on the ways personal histories intersect with History, and how those intersections affect the way we understand and interact with Place.

Acknowledgments

Afterwards: an Introduction

A for Absence
Surfacing

A for Ancestry
The Path

A for Answers
Notes Towards Building the Memorial

A for Anatomy
Bystanders: The Yellow Flowers
Victims: The End of the World
Perpetrators: Undrawn Lines

A for Ache
The Definite Article

A for Accident
This Day In History
Doors

A for Accumulation
What I Was Doing There
Phantoms (a Correspondence)
Reflecting Mirror: Orlando, the Day After
Hallow This Ground

Aftermath: a Conclusion

Notes

Colin Rafferty has written about the spaces between before and after, time and place, memory and imagination, fact and story.? He acts as a guide across our land and beyond to show us how we stand before the monument or the memorial to remember what has been forgotten, to imagine what happened, and to separate history from mythology.? These essays reveal how the words On this site can never bring back all that happened, but they can resurrect the phantoms that haunt our history, both private and public. Hallow This Ground is a stunning and moving tour thlã