Imagining the Holy Land

"The photographs, maps, travelers' accounts, and physical reconstructions that are the subject of this book once fired the popular imagination with fantasies of a place called "the Holy Land." It was a singular space of religious imagining, multi-layered and charged with ideology and symbolism. As Burke O. Long shows, there are many holy lands, and they have been visualized in many ways since the nineteenth century. At the Chautauqua Institution in New York, visitors could walk down Palestine Avenue to "Palestine" and a model of Jerusalem, or along Morris Avenue to a scale model of the "Jewish Tabernacle." At the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, a replica of Ottoman Jerusalem covered eleven acres, while today, 300 miles to the southeast, a seven-story-high Christ of the Ozarks stands above a modern re-creation of the Holy Land set in the Arkansas hills."--BOOK JACKET.