I study how people have constructed--physically and metaphorically--the urban
environment in which they live. I am completing a book manuscript in which
I explore how urban memorials and public art reveal the changing nature of
cities and community identity in the twentieth century. The Cleveland Cultural
Gardens and Northern Ohio's vernacular landscape serve as a lens through which
to refract a broader story of national change. I am also researching air racing,
exploring how Americans constructed identity, risk, and spectacle in the first
half of the twentieth century.
In 2003, Johns Hopkins published my study of firefighters an fire insurers, Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800-1950, which examined how firefighters and insurers sought to curtail the risk of fire, and in the process gave shape to city development.
Mark Tebeau
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