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Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Landscape

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Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her―paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land―lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories―natural, personal, cultural―to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory―and to be one.

225 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2015

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About the author

Lauret Savoy

8 books66 followers
Tracing memory threads Lauret Edith Savoy’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, re-membering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she writes about the stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape; The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast. She is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College, a photographer, and pilot. Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Lauret has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 178 reviews
Profile Image for Kris.
175 reviews1,609 followers
January 30, 2018
Writing social history can be a radical act. For centuries, history focused on the stories of elites, from their perspectives. A form of power is the ability to tell your own story -- or to hire people who will tell it for you. These stories are told in written words, but also in artistic representations, material objects, even place names on maps.

For individuals whose ancestors belonged to groups who did not exercise economic and political power, picking up a history book and not seeing your ancestors' experiences written into the main historical narrative is akin to being erased. I gravitated to social history partially because of the intellectual and imaginative challenge involved in uncovering these hidden lives, and partially because I feel strongly that everyone deserves a connection to the past, and an acknowledgement by others of that shared history.

Lauret Savoy bears eloquent, personal witness to the impact of having your family's story erased in a myriad of ways -- through scattered and incomplete historical documents, through published histories that diminish your ancestors' experience, through racist place names that continue a cultural campaign of aggression and violence against your family. Early in her book, she notes,

I’ve long felt estranged from time and place, uncertain of where home lies. My skin, my eyes, my hair recall the blood of three continents as paths of ancestors— free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land— converge in me. But I’ve known little of them or their paths to my present. Though I’ve tracked long-bygone moments on this continent from rocks and fossils— those remnants of deep time— the traces of a more intimate, lineal past have seemed hidden or lost.

Trace: Memory, History, Race and the American Land is a beautifully written record of Savoy's search for tangible traces of her past through archival documents and family stories, places unnamed on maps but known to a few through oral memory, and the visceral physical connection experienced when walking through a landscape that your ancestors strode through centuries before.

My sense of the power of people having their stories told is theoretical, compared to Savoy's lived experience of the cost of silence. She understands connection with the past as emotional rather than intellectual, with the cost of a lack of connection paid in tears, anger, frustration, confusion, sadness:

SILENCE CAN BE a sanctuary or frame for stories told. Silence also obscures origins. My parents’ muteness once seemed tacit consent that generational history was no longer part of life or living memory. That a past survived was best left unexposed or even forgotten as self-defense. But unvoiced lives cut a sharp-felt absence. Neither school lessons nor images surging around me could offer salve or substitute. My greatest fear as a young girl was that I wasn’t meant to exist.

Yet one idea stood firm: The American land preceded hate. My child-sense of its antiquity became as much a refuge as any place, whether the Devil’s Punchbowl or a canyon called Grand. Still, silences embedded in a family, and in a society, couldn’t be replaced even by sounds so reliable: of water spilling down rock, of a thunderstorm rolling into far distance, or of branches sifting wind.


When reading this sad, honest, eloquent book, I journeyed with Savoy through the American landscape as she sought her past through the traces remaining to her. Often her discoveries are fragmented and partial:

I’ve not yet found the antebellum lives of my mother’s people beyond an estate inventory from Marengo County, Alabama. But I’ve come closer to understanding why I don’t know about them, why Momma told me nothing, why silence is residue of memory’s erosion. Ancestors disappeared— into paper records of property rather than human lives remembered in story, into a plantation owner’s surname, into graves unmarked or forgotten long ago.

However, Savoy learns, and teaches her reader, that making the effort, voicing the silence of the past, and remembering what is forgotten is a means to reverse the erasures of the past, to embody agency through her words, and to assert her centrality to the American story through her family history:

Trace. Active search. Path taken. Track or vestige of what once was. These narrative journeys have crossed textured lands seeking both life marks and home. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to 'Indian Territory,' from Point Sublime to burial grounds, from a South Carolina plantation to the U.S.– Mexico border and U.S. capital. Their confluence articulates— that is, helps me both join together and give clearer expression to— the unvoiced past in my life. Remembering is an alternative to extinction.
Profile Image for Tony.
1,016 reviews1,880 followers
February 10, 2018
To inhabit this country is to be marked by residues of its still unfolding history, a history weighted by tangled ideas of “race” and of the land itself.

That’s really a remarkable sentence appearing near the very end of this book and it goes a long way towards explaining what the book is about.

This a social history, of sorts, written by a multi-racial geology professor. She traces her history, and in so doing traces the country’s history as well. Oh, she’s done interviews; and there’s pages in the back full of primary and secondary sources. But she also gets in her car and travels: to the line which separates Arizona and Mexico, a place where once a massacre occurred and where now a wall might be; to a Virginia plantation where some graves are nicely tended and many more others are unmarked and fleetingly described by a tour guide as those of resident workers; to the Capitol, to see the 44th American President inaugurated, and yet convenient to the slave-fueled industries of Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and Jackson. And once there, in those places, she looks at the ravines, the mountains; she gets down and rubs the pebbles in her hand. She finds fault lines of many kinds.

We are indeed a country weighted by its history. We are marked by its residue. That history is still unfolding. And the ideas of race are nothing if not tangled. I like, too, that the author put “race” in quotation marks.

I was greatly moved by the images Savoy paints, and the memories. Imagine being a very educated young woman, nailing a phone interview for a first job, and then having a door slammed in your face when the employer finally sees the color of your skin. Imagine finding, only after his death, a novel written by your father about an African-American man who could “pass”.

Lauret Savoy tells us her story but all along invites the reader, too, to the land itself. Here’s an example:

I take many lessons from Madeline Island. One is this: I am both a collector and an arrangement. I might gather stones, collect books, or save momentos. But my own experiences, too, are gathered up and swept along by currents of a still-unfolding history on this vast continent. This northland touched me as a child and knows me still. Though I was unaware, its own life included mine. I suspect it might include yours, too.

Yes, I was personally drawn into the book. I could not help but reflect on my own life and follow the traces, of family and places and moments. My own ideas on race are well-intentioned, I believe, but probably naïve. There are numerous American racial issues and many more sub-issues. It is foolish for one to state his thoughts on these. So, you know, I’ll only broach three of them.

-- Many people here on Goodreads are chagrined, to say the least, that Donald Trump has been elected President. I understand that. But a surprisingly large percentage of those people believe this is evidence of a pervasive and endemic American racism. Yes, racists voted for Trump and found comfort in his rhetoric. But racists alone could not have elected Trump. Racists and the Russians together would not have been able to elect Trump. He did not even win a majority of the popular vote. It is so easy to forget: Americans elected Barack Obama twice by a majority of votes. No, that’s wrong. America elected Barack Hussein Obama twice. We are a diverse population . . . with diverse views. Even in our self-loathing, we should never forget our capacity for hope.

-- I mentioned above that the author is multi-racial. That was not gratuitous. Like the Rockies and the Appalachians, Lauret Savoy is the product of fault lines. It was fascinating watching her trace these threads. And sad, too. Savoy traced her African-American ancestry. She traced her Native-American ancestry. She only acknowledged her European, Caucasian genes. Not the people. And that is: 1) her choice; and 2) understandable. Here’s where, perhaps, the naivete comes in: why must we classify? Sure, I understand there might be scientific reasons. But once we start a classification of races for sociological, political or media discussion or analysis, we oversimplify, we create prejudices and biases, we de-humanize. I cringe when Donald Trump says, “the Blacks”, but I cringe when Wolf Blitzer says that, too. As if we must view certain people as a voting bloc or an unfortunate statistic. Harken back to the unfolding history. You may not always see it even if you look. Anonymous gravestones in a State Registered Plantation; and anonymous statistics in a college survey, a campaign precinct, or the nightly news.

I remember that Tiger Woods, when he turned pro, was very proud that he was African, Caucasian and Asian. He saw himself as all three. We would not let him be all three. Liberals, conservatives; it didn’t matter. He would have to be Black.

I have three bi-racial grandchildren. Must we eliminate the traces that lead to me?

-- And what about me? I was not here when slavery was here. Nor was any ancestor of mine. The author suggests this doesn’t matter. Well, where does this stop? Forget me. Classify me. Convict me. And throw away the key. But what of last year’s immigrants? What of this year’s Dreamers? Have you considered the irony?

I believe that I, too, am both a collector and an arrangement.

----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Back to the book. Let nothing I’ve said dissuade you from reading this. It is a special journey. The fact that it made me think these things, and ruined more than a few nights of sleep making me think about these things, is the best praise I can give.

Two final lessons. Because parents know best. Her father once stood by her at the Grand Canyon and told her that once there was a land here before hate. And her mother told her: I am not a race, I am a human being.
Profile Image for Lark Benobi.
Author 1 book3,724 followers
June 3, 2022
These essays frequently hit the same combination of extreme beauty with detailed observation that the best of Loren Eiseley's essays do (and Savoy quotes Eiseley in the first essay in the collection). Reading these, I felt exalted, and instructed, and more often than not a little weepy too--as with Eiseley, there is an underlying sadness and the tone of an elegy in many of these essays. They leave me with a feeling not unlike being sad to see your child grow up however happy you are about the way they've turned out.

The excellent writing would be reason enough to pick up this collection and read it, but also, read it for the subjects it covers, for the unique way Savoy blends observations about "memory, history, race, and the American landscape." Savoy draws on many disciplines, as well as from her own experiences, to reveal new ways of looking at the world.
Profile Image for Cheryl.
517 reviews821 followers
June 22, 2020
I should start by saying this book underscores the importance of African Americans participating in the 2020 Census. Lauret Savoy was able to trace some of her family's history through census records. Reading this distillation of information so immaculately postured is a searing experience because it speaks not only of one black family's history but also of the history of African American families in America. This notion of black history planted so deeply into the American soil, and yet so adeptly uprooted and erased, is confounding.

Illusions of rootlessness in one's own home could only grow in such depleted and contested soil. To inhabit this country is to be marked by residues of its still unfolding history, a history weighted by tangled ideas of 'race' and of the land itself.


Trace is Savoy's story of collecting and arranging her family's history while using landscapes and her geologist's eye to reconcile her own estrangement, a story of finding "traces beneath familiar surfaces to where ancestral structures lie." Put simply, Trace is about asking questions about the absence of historical records that show the contributions of African Americans to the American economy and landscape; the absence of stone markers on African American graves; plantations and colonial attractions that do not acknowledge marks made by African Americans; stories that are "uncritical or unquestioning of convention;" tourist attractions that conveniently erase the history of slavery; landscapes that "privilege particular arcs of story while neglecting so many others."

Ancestors disappeared - into paper records of property rather than human lives remembered in story, into a plantation owner's surname, into graves unmarked or forgotten long ago.


Silence is a theme here, not only historical silence, but also Savoy's mother's silence, which she traverses by conducting research of her own. She is able to trace the economic gap that separates the African American community today by tracing the history of land ownership and job availability. I cheered when she was able to trace her ancestors through Census records, back to the American landscape where they settled. Savoy is a professor of environmental studies and geology and she often researches natural and cultural histories. This memoir was a well-deserved Pen Literary Award Finalist. I closed it and thought of how vital a read it is, especially during these times.
Profile Image for Lauren .
1,833 reviews2,542 followers
June 22, 2017
Be still my heart: A scientist (geologist) who writes like a poet!

Essays that combine family history with geologic time: childhood memories of the Grand Canyon and desert and coasts of California, retracing her father's work while also describing the alluvial plains and glaciation that created the Great Lakes, southern plantations where her ancestors and many thousands of others lived and died in slavery, the Potomac River and surrounding marshlands and the various cultures of Washington, DC. Each essay is so rich and full.



While each of the eight essays were extraordinary, I had three that stood out to me - one for personal reasons and my own "closeness" to the subject matter, and the other two because Savoy's research and passion for the subject came through so strongly.

* Madeline Trace is a continuation of sorts from the previous essay, Alien Land Ethic, and they really should be read together (the way she juxtaposes the work with Aldo Leopold is brilliant). Savoy's father died when she was young, and she did not get to know him. In Alien she shares that many years after his death, in her own adulthood, she learned that her father wrote a novel, based on many of his own life events as a young black man in 1949. Madeline Trace picks up on this previous essay with Savoy, her father's boxes of book research materials in hand, moves into her friend's cottage on the south shore of Lake Superior for the summer. While describing the natural history, the cultural history of the indigenous people, she learns more of her own personal history, by acquainting herself with her father through his materials.

* What's In a Name? A geographical linguistic journey of place names, their meaning, their politics, and the way places are remembered in codified form (maps) and in memories. This one was of particular interest to me - before I left research/academia, I served as a contract map archivist at a large federal agency. Place names, their history, and the way they appeared on maps and nautical charts was my daily work. (That and making sure that they were digitized and cataloged properly!) This essay obviously had that connection for me, and I am grateful that Savoy drew attention to the importance, and the consequences of naming conventions.

* Migrating in a Bordered Land is the longest essay in the book, and encompasses another family history, as well as natural history of the deserts of Arizona at a very specific time: during WWII. Savoy's mother, a nurse in the Army Nurse Corps during its desegregation in 1944, worked at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Through her extensive research at the National Archives, Savoy has pieced together the story of her mother and many others like her who were sent to the southwest to nurse prisoners of war and other patients. This essay is deeply personal for Savoy, and by telling it, she pulls the curtain back on this forgotten segment of society - nurses, aids, and doctors who had less rights as African Americans than the Nazi POWs that they were treating.

I spent time with this book - reading the end notes, the bibliography, the acknowledgements, and several portions of essays over again. I am so glad I did.
Profile Image for Bob Brinkmeyer.
Author 8 books85 followers
January 9, 2021
A professor of Environmental Studies and Geology, Lauret Savoy has studied the history of the earth by examining geologic formations. In Trace, part memoir and part cultural history, Savoy uses her knowledge of geology as a metaphor for investigating the inscribed histories found in individuals, families, communities, and nations—and landscapes, which as she notes, are always political, always inscribed with history no matter how blank they appear. Her own family history is at the center of her work. Unearthing and recovering inscribed histories is more difficult than her recovery work as a geologist. “It did seem easier to piece together the geologic history of almost any place on Earth than to recover my ancestors’ past,” Savoy writes. “Easier to construct a plausible narrative of a long-gone mountain range than to recognize the braiding of generations into a family. Than to know my parents’ reasons for turns taken.”

To piece together her family’s history, the central thrust of her study, involves unearthing traces not only of her family’s past but also more generally those of the nation, particularly those left from its history of race. Her quest takes her to an assortment of sites, including, among others, a South Carolina plantation; the borderlands between the US and Mexico; Washington, DC; and Native American tribal lands. In all these places, Savoy seeks to find both the scars and the erasures of generational history; she doesn’t merely want to have things remembered, she wants to construct a fuller history that will “re-member” those who have been marginalized by American culture and scoured from its master narrative. Savoy explains the larger significance of her work: “For if the health of the land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating ourselves within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of Earth. Democracy lies within ever widening communities.”

Given the tremendous divide now fracturing American society (I’m writing this a few days after the storming of the US Capitol), Savoy’s work seems particularly relevant and important. Let’s hope a process of “re-membering” in the US will soon be underway.
Profile Image for piperitapitta.
1,047 reviews459 followers
October 19, 2022
Origini




Forse il più complesso fra i libri pubblicati nella collana This Land, quello con una presa meno immediata, ma non per questo non altrettanto bello, non altrettanto intenso.
La scrittrice, docente di studi ambientali e geologa Lauret Edith Savoy, ripercorre e indaga sulle origini della sua famiglia e sulle possibili discendenze da schiavi afroamericani e, muovendo da questa esigenza interiore, allarga le sue ricerche alle tracce lasciate sul continente americano non solo dalle moltitudini di persone provenienti dal continente africano di cui nulla è stato tramandato, ma anche da quelle vissute ai confini con il Messico e alle tribù di nativi ingannate e annientate nel corso della fondazione del più grande stato democratico del mondo; ne deriva un un viaggio che è sì geografico e naturalistico, storico e sociale, ma anche intimo e spirituale, in una ricerca continua di connessione con la terra, con le moltitudini di persone che l'hanno popolata, con le proprie origini.

Letter to America

Dear America,

An old and perhaps unanswerable question has troubled me since my childhood. Now it won’t let me rest.

The Revolutionary War had entered its final years, still undecided, when J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked, What then is the American, this new man? Most of the soon-to-be former colonists would probably agree with his response, published in 1782 in Letters from an American Farmer: “He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, . . . who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” He makes “a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

So many others were excluded from this definition: women, Indigenous peoples, as well as one-fifth the population of the fledging United States “whose labours” had driven the economies of all 13 colonies. [...]


https://www.terrain.org/2018/currents...
Profile Image for Shirleynature.
257 reviews81 followers
February 18, 2022
An excellent retrospective to connect race and history in the landscapes of the U.S. while also reflecting the author's personal ancestry; relevant now as educators may or may not be allowed to teach about racial injustice. This also reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s thought-provoking book, We Were Eight Years in Power.

I am grateful to finally read Trace by Savoy.
It's serendipitous to have read this as legislators try to restrict educators from revealing truths of our unjust history, as if the traces aren't clearly apparent. I feel compelled to re-read We Were Eight Years in Power by Coates and to revisit some or all of Trace too.
I also want to read others in my list of more ecological & social justice reads: https://bit.ly/2C7Rfh3
Profile Image for Kaa.
614 reviews66 followers
Want to read
April 22, 2019
Somehow this wasn't already on my TBR, despite the fact that I've been carrying it around in my purse (where next-to-read physical books live) for at least a month???
Profile Image for Ali.
202 reviews
December 16, 2017
I love the subjects covered in this book: travel, genealogy, race, and history. But the writing was just not my style. Very lyrical, with the author using lists as a device that becomes tiring to read. I think if I listened to the book I would enjoy it more. It was also very academic in that it relies heavily on quotes, and sometimes I felt I was reading a graduate thesis. There were shining moments where I felt like, yes, now I’m interested. This was mainly when she was talking about her own story and her family’s genealogy. But, it would abruptly end. I need something to grasp onto, and unfortunately I found this to be stream-of-consciousness writing. Just not my cup of tea.
Profile Image for Viv JM.
730 reviews173 followers
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June 24, 2020
Trace is a difficult book to classify, with elements of memoir, travelogue, social history, geology...and more. At times I felt intimidated by it, that I am not intellectual enough to appreciate the nuances, but Savoy's prose is certainly beautiful and never overly flowery or dramatic and I learned a lot about American history in relation to slavery, race and colonisation.

I think this is a book that needs to be read closely and re-read to be fully appreciated and hence I am going to leave rating it for now, until I have had a chance to revisit.
Profile Image for Laurie Neighbors.
201 reviews213 followers
May 15, 2016
This book will be placed alongside Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past in the mental bookshelf on which I keep my favorite meta-history books.

Goodreads has truncated the title, which is actually Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. Deleting "race" from the title feels like an attempt to drain the blood from the narrative -- this is definitely a book about race.

Savoy is a woman of mixed-race heritage and a professor of geography and environmental studies, and while the book's structure relies on her parents' and ancestors' geographic migrations, Trace is much less a book about genealogy/finding the historical self and much more a book about our very young, very complicated, very self-contradicting country.

Natural history, social history, economic history are seamlessly entwined with nuanced considerations of what constitutes and has constituted social justice in the formation of the United States.

Plus, the writing is gorgeous. This will be one I re-read many times, probably starting in the very near future.
Profile Image for Sue.
1,064 reviews2 followers
December 6, 2022
Lauret Savoy, a mixed-heritage professor of Environmental Studies and Geology, writes poetically about her life, race, history, and the environment. She contemplates the names we use for the landscape, the names that we've lost, the border, the Capitol, the men whose environmental or poetic legacies loom large in American lore but who ultimately failed to recognize the humanity of non-white people, her family, and more. I really enjoyed the audiobook. I would recommend this to anyone, and definitely for people who enjoyed On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed. I found her discussion of Aldo Leopold's writing interesting, as well as the discussion of the history of Washington, D.C.

CW has the n-word in it several times, in historic context.
Profile Image for Megan O'Hara.
216 reviews70 followers
March 9, 2020
this book gave me galaxy brain. absolutely crazy to think every single inch of inhabited earth/land has both a geological and human history!! lots of Native history and history of slave labor esp in the American Southwest that I was completely ignorant of. she writes beautifully and her thorough exploration of place in all its iterations maybe changed my life but I'm giving it 4 stars bc the 2nd to last chapter dragged SO hard.
55 reviews
October 10, 2024
Lovely prose, powerful reflections, moving in a lot of ways. I got a little lost in the different threads by the end, but maybe that was part of the point?
Profile Image for Abby.
601 reviews103 followers
July 15, 2016
A very different sort of nature writing. Savoy is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke, and a person of mixed racial heritage. In this lyrically written meditation on race, history and geography, Savoy traces her family history across the continent while unearthing forgotten stories about the ways in which encounters between free and enslaved African Americans, indigenous peoples and white settlers shaped the history of the places we call home today. So much of mainstream American history seems predicated on willfully forgetting the violent acts of erasure that made this country possible; this book is a graceful and strong corrective to that impulse. I especially appreciated her chapter, "What's in a Name" where she describes how most of the place names we associate with native tribes are based on inaccurate and corrupted translations of tribal names and words. But "Migrating in a Bordered Land" might be the strongest chapter, in which she returns to the site of segregated barracks at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where her mother worked as a nurse during WWII. Here she skillfully interweaves numerous histories, including that of the tribes we call the Apaches, the Spanish conquistadores, and African American soldiers serving in a Jim Crow army. Highly recommended for anyone interested in more complex and layered accounts of American history that highlight the experiences of voices normally absent from the historical record.
Profile Image for Cat.
924 reviews166 followers
December 31, 2017
A lyrical and powerful book about the painful erasures effected by U.S. maps and popular histories. Savoy delves into what Wai Chee Dimock might call "deep time" to connect geology and landforms with place names and colonial histories; the obfuscation of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in museums and landmarks with the traces of indigenous and enslaved African histories; the constant fact of migrations, both non-human and human, with the violent use of borders to assert national (and white) power. By unearthing the scant records of her own family history, Savoy writes back against nature writing that both taught her to value the non-human world aesthetically and philosophically (Aldo Leopold) and also universalized an American past that applied onto the European settlers and not the people they displaced, killed, and erased. Savoy reminds us that all landscapes are political, that environmental history is also racial history, and that these stories can and should be woven together and placed against the grain of the oversimple regnant narratives.
Profile Image for Melissa.
922 reviews16 followers
November 28, 2020
The subject matter and the telling of the author's history with the land fascinated me, but I found this unreadable. This has been on my night stand for a month. I took it on a trip. I would read ten pages and have no idea what I'd just read, and turn to a more difficult book or an essay instead. In the end, this book is one that I dipped in and out of, wishing I were a different sort of reader.
Profile Image for Emily.
9 reviews2 followers
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October 12, 2021
I couldn’t get through the last 50 pages of this book despite it being my book club pick (sorry fam) it just seemed too inconsistent with what type of book it was trying to be, either historical deep dive or memoir. It sparked some good discussions and I really liked the trace of names section, but in the end it wasn’t for me.
Profile Image for Kaj.
53 reviews1 follower
December 8, 2018
Chalk this one up to false advertising. When a book cover includes "American landscape" I expect that at least part of the book will actually say something about said landscape. So I went into "Trace" expecting something part natural history and part Ta-Nehisi Coates. Instead, the only mentions of anything to do with the landscape are brief bits of exposition with no relation to the rest of the text. The closest thing we get are long laundry lists of place names, categorized by some common identifier like language of origin. Place names might be history (or present) but they're not landscape. Without the landscape element, "Trace" is an able collection of reflections and experiences around the country. The stories are compelling (or, in many examples, enraging) but ultimately "Trace" doesn't distinguish itself from other books on the same topic.

It's not that landscape has nothing to do with identity. For example, the human border is also a border against animal movements. How do we think about migrations? Or, the Black Belt in the American South originated in the shallow seas of the Cretaceous Crescent. What does this say about place? Being against invasive species has been compared to Nazi nativism (e.g. by Michael Pollan). How do we think about indigenous plants? These are just my examples, and obviously it wasn't my book, but I was hoping to see more of this kind of analysis.

The disappointing part of it is that Savoy clearly has the chops to make a book on the same topic, but rooted in something more deep than the Rand McNally black print. The final chapter, describing the incertae sedis find, was everything I was looking for- surprising connections to the land and identity, written by someone who understands both very well.
Profile Image for Charlie Quimby.
Author 3 books41 followers
October 7, 2017
This is a subtle book as befits the title, a gentle correction and amplification of the views of classic American writers about landscape, such as Wallace Stegner and George R. Stewart.

Savoy is of mixed heritage. She applies her writing skills and academic understanding of how to read the land to places familiar to me—including Madeline Island, WI, and southeastern Arizona—and references texts also familiar, to show what I have missed. And what American histories have missed as well.

No, not missed, so much as obscured, hidden, denied. The records of land and the land itself still bear trace marks of those histories. America's slave history shows up in surprising places, not just in the south but in the building of Plymouth colony, New York City as a financial capital and Washington, DC, as the nation's capital, instead of Philadelphia.

The pilgrims shunned owning slaves, for example, except when they were taken in just wars, traded for, surrendered voluntarily, or sold. George Washington made certain the capital was lodged in a slaveholding region and close to his own property, which increased its value. And on to the West, where Indian treaties shifted with the discovery of minerals and a segregated military could be managed.

The author's own family history runs through the story, and it, too, must come from traces. Her mother doesn't talk about running segregated surgeries at a military hospital. Her father never mentions a youthful novel published. An aunt insists Savoys were never slaves.

Fragments of the truth are found. But writing history eliminates more than it describes. It's up to us to read the traces.
Profile Image for Jen.
343 reviews1 follower
January 7, 2017
In this excellent book, Lauret Savoy sets out to explore and better understand the history and landscapes that shaped her parents, and in the process, uncovers many hidden and painful truths about the histories and legacies of these places that have so often been minimized, ignored, or completely silenced. As she delves into the natural and cultural history of places like the Potomac River in D.C., Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Walnut Grove plantation in South Carolina, and the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, Savoy braids history with personal memory and story in an incredibly captivating way. Along the journey with her, we understand the word "trace" in a number of ways-- we think of it as literally following the roots of family history and legacy, but we also begin to see it, as she clearly does as well, in terms of a faint line that has been deliberately erased, but is still visible to those with intention and perception. This book is a blend between memoir and history and belongs on the shelf of every reader who wishes to fully understand the roots of the racial divides in America, and the ways in which they are inextricably linked to our relationship to the American landscape.
Profile Image for Emily.
1,252 reviews21 followers
April 13, 2017
Lyrical writing that revels in the geographic and geological names of North America, and history that is a necessary supplement to and critique of what most of us learned in school. It sounds incredibly difficult to weave together billions of years of geological history with mere hundreds of American history and a few generations of an individual family history. (Clearly it was, in fact, difficult; this is a book where you see not only the work than went into it but also the years of life experience and research that went into thinking about it in the first place.) But Savoy pulls these threads together so gracefully, taking the reader through diverse landscapes and eras. Each essay has a personal angle, like a childhood memory or family connection, and that flows seamlessly into the story of the physical and social history of the places involved.

Recommended if, like me, you have childhood memories of reading maps and wondering what all those names and places could possibly mean, and now you're ready to think more deeply about them and understand what you've missed.
Profile Image for JayElAitch.
9 reviews3 followers
December 2, 2018
I love everything this book sets out to do and I love the intent behind it as gleaned from reading and listening to interviews of Savoy, but the actual execution is excruciating. It left me feeling empty, not in emotionally, spiritually or intellectually drained, but as in “why did I read this?” Which is never the kind of emptiness you want to have as a reader.
Profile Image for Josh.
348 reviews38 followers
March 30, 2025
I enjoyed this book. It was a compelling personal narrative about the ways place, history, and family feed each other. However I guess I was a little disappointed as I was hoping there would be more geology or deep history in it. The book is great but I think I had too high expectations going into it.
Profile Image for Maria.
484 reviews
October 31, 2022
I think I should have liked this more give the subject matter, but for whatever reason, I just couldn't get into this book. As I listened to it, I often realized my mind had been wondering and would have to rewind. I found the author's personal and often heart-breaking stories engaging.
Profile Image for Christo.
28 reviews2 followers
September 26, 2021
Promised both a compelling family memoir and an interesting historical hermeneutic—and unfortunately delivered neither. Never became more than the sum of its parts :/
Profile Image for Kat G.
14 reviews
January 2, 2024
Awesome introduction to those beginning to make connections between their ancestors/ecosystems of the places they live in/histories of systemic oppression and migration.

The descriptive language of the landscapes Savoy visits on her journey across the American Southwest is reminiscent of the Great American Roadtrip genre, but the consequences of that language is so much more impactful.
Profile Image for Dave.
532 reviews13 followers
August 18, 2020
At its best when it embraces the personal and stumbles a bit when the academic shows. A very readable, compelling, and radically different narrative of place that stands tall among the many other texts that try to make sense of place amid the American landscapes.
Profile Image for AJ Nolan.
889 reviews12 followers
January 4, 2024
Beautiful and heartbreaking book of Savoy exploring the layers of meaning of trace as she, a geologist, a black woman, explores her ancestral roots and through them out country’s history built on slavery and racism. While I wanted even more language and exploration of the geology of the land underlying the history (like she does so perfectly in the epilogue), ultimately Savoy had to make choices between conveying personal and social history versus geological history. Worth the read.
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