Above the Oxbow
Stories Entangled with a Mountain
Above the Oxbow is a journey through the tangle of rich narratives surrounding Mount Holyoke, a locally cherished mountain in Western Massachusetts. It explores how visitors have forged connections with the mountain through various activities over the past two centuries. In an accessible blend of storytelling and scholarly analysis, Danielle Raad shows the significance of the landscape, historic sites, and material culture, revealing how cultural perspectives, community activism, collective memory, and personal experiences shape our understanding of a place. Situated at the intersection of public history and environmental history, this ethnography of place also discloses the curious stories of the Summit House, an erstwhile tramway, an airplane crash, and the local fight to conserve Mount Holyoke as a natural space and celebrates its myriad uses today.
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 – The Ascent: An Introduction
Chapter 2 – Narrating the Mountain’s Past
Chapter 3 – “Is Not the Scene Magnificent?”: The View from Mount Holyoke
Chapter 4 – Participation and Parcel: Conserving and Experiencing Nature
Chapter 5 – Ruin to Museum: Historical Engagement at the Summit House
Chapter 6 – Materializing Memory on the Mountain
Coda – The Descent
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
“Raad brings new ideas to play in this inquiry such as a different sense of place created by a mostly natural rather than constructed setting…a good addition to a bookshelf containing histories of places and their cultural significances and meanings.”
