Writing Place

Dear Sam. I was pleased with this essay. It provides a well-paced account of the discovery of the African Burial Ground and points to some of the ways that this prompted the broader NY population to reimagine Manhattan. The key limitation to this paper was the very small amount of primary research it drew upon: a few articles from the NYTimes. You used these sources well, but they didn't allow you to convey a rich sense of popular debate about the Af. Bur. Ground,whether from within the Afro-American community or outside it. (Material from action groups or the local press as the site was discovered would have been useful here).

I liked the way you opened up yr discussion on pp.13-14 to situate debates about the Af. Bur. Ground in the context of broader developments in the understanding of urban place and place-preservation. You could have gone further here, however, to situate the discovery of the site in the context of broader political debates about race in the 1990s (whether just in NYC, or in America, or the world at large). You might also have provided more commentary about the concept of sacred place, and how notions of the sacred were involved in debates about the site. (You certainly touch on this issue, but it wasn't developed as a point of discussion).

Along with more primary research, then, what you needed to do here was make this paper into a broader story about the emerging signficance of place to understandings of race, sacredness, urban heritage and social justice in the 1990s. There is certainly enough of a sense of this in your paper already, however, to make it thought-provoking.