Cornell University Press Claiming The City

Mary Lethert Wingerd brings together the voices of citizens and workers and the power dynamics of civic leaders including James J. Hill and Archbishop John Ireland. She crafts a portrait of St Paul remarkable for its specificity as well as its relevance to broader interpretations of place-based culture and politics. Wingerd's rich and lively history of St. Paul is a clear demonstration that place - the lived experience and memory located in a specific spatial context - is a constitutive element of all other aspects of identity.