Reconstruction Era in America saw a paradigmatic realignment of the country’s core institutions and values, there was a physical quality to Reconstruction as well: the country was not only rebuilding the South after the Civil War, but flat-out building as it expanded westward.
In Reconstructors, John Dean Davis details how the Army Corps of Engineers and its subcontractors designed and redesigned the infrastructural landscape to support the republic’s rebirth.
The Corps’ projects not only transformed the landscape; they created markets, fostered a distinctive expansionist culture, and—for a time—enacted a less discriminatory economic and social agenda across the South and West. Davis aims to bring federal power, environmentalism, and capitalism into a frame that reveals the landscape’s power to further ideology.
John Davis, The Ohio State University
John Davis is an environmental and architectural historian and associate professor at the Knowlton School, where he teaches courses in landscape history. His primary research area is on technology, construction, and environment in the Americas in the modern era. His recently published book, Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering after the Civil War (University of Chicago Press, 2026), deals with military and civil engineering and environment in the U.S. South after the American Civil War, examining the physical processes of building that undergirded the central political metaphor of the Reconstruction Era. He is the coeditor of the volume Military Landscapes (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press, 2021). He is the author of numerous articles and essays, most recently publishing the article "Hope, Anger, and Engineering in a Reconstruction Landscape" in Buildings & Landscapes and "Owner, Occupier, Intruder: The Fight for US Public Lands" in Harvard Design Magazine.
This event is a cohosted by the Knowlton School of Architecture.
