Alicia Puglionesi

Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless economic growth—particularly to Indigenous people—In Whose Ruins illuminates the myth-making intimately tied to place. Every nation tells some stories and suppresses others:  this book illustrates the way American myths have overwritten Indigenous histories, binding us into an unsustainable future.

“In Whose Ruins is a haunting meditation on how white Americans have dug into the earth to uncover the past and secure their own power. Compelling and insightful . . . a new way to understand how Americans created an empire out of destruction.” — Megan Kate Nelson, author of Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America

Alicia Puglionesi is a writer and historian. She earned a PhD in the history of science, medicine, and technology from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, and has taught at Johns Hopkins and Maryland Institute College of Art. Her first book, Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science, explores how the practices of seances, clairvoyance, and telepathy both questioned and reinscribed social boundaries.

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In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire

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