Remapping American-ness: Heritage Production and the Staging of the Native American and the African American as Other in 'Historyland'

The American tourism industry in the 1950s helped to produce certain notions of America, or what it meant to be American, at a time when these identities were in flux. Visitors to 'Historyland', an attraction that reconstructed a nineteenth-century Wisconsin logging town, could experience a living lumberjack community, as well as an 'authentic' Indian Village and a dining car restaurant with black waiters. The Native Americans and African Americans, by performing their 'historic' roles, were staged as examples of 'the other' which European American tourists could encounter, and against which they could define their own sense of American-ness.