In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past," at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For part two of this session on the rural American West we look to the ways in which rural communities have fictionalized and whitewashed their history, erasing past and present diversity, framing Indigenous peoples as extinct, and creating a historical imaginary that is feeding into modern cultural divides. The papers in this session will reinvestigate these origin stories, explore the mechanics and motivations behind their creation and endurance, and highlight the importance of community engagement in efforts to challenge counterfactual narratives and recenter historically marginalized populations in local constructions of the rural American past.