Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War
Friday Sept. 25, 2026 , noon to 1:30 p.m.
John Dean Davis will discuss his new book, Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War. The discussion will be moderated by Assistant Professor Bryan Norwood, as part of the Architecture PhD Colloquium Series.
John Dean Davis will discuss his new book, Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War (University of Chicago Press, 2026). The discussion will be moderated by Assistant Professor Bryan Norwood.
While the 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, 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 Dean Davis is an environmental and architectural historian and associate professor at the Knowlton School at Ohio State University.
Building Dialogues is a series supported by the Architecture PhD Colloquium Series.
