Militarized Landscapes From Gettysburg To Salisbury Plain

About this book

"War and the preparation for war generally take place outdoors, in fields, forests, grasslands, deserts, and other environments. Militarization, then, is a process that requires the active deployment and exploitation of various landscape features, including topography, vegetation, and climate ... Militarization is a process that occurs through, and leaves its mark on, societies, economies, cultures, and political structures. It also operates through landscape, which it changes or maintains, in both a physical and cultural sense ... Taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume capture a sense of the constantly changing meanings and materialities of militarized landscapes and the ways in which sites as diverse as Gettysburg, Salisbury Plain and the Korean DMZ have been created, transformed, narrated and represented. And while these sites may have been accorded predominantly military meanings and objectives, such as the training of soldiers or the pursuit of battle, they cannot be divorced from the wider and overlapping civilian histories and geographies. The role of militarized landscapes as places of environmentalism and heritage, two processes normally conceived of by default as exclusively civilian ventures, indicates the importance of shedding light onto these camouflaged places by digging into their multi-layered histories and geographies"--Introduction.