Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

PART I The Axis of Power
Reflections: On Pennsylvania Avenue
from the Capitol to the White House
I Capital and Capitol: City at the Center of the World
2 A Balancing Act: Pennsylvania Avenue and Power
3 A "National Church" and Its Holy Scriptures

PART II The Axis of Enlightenment
Reflections: From the White House to the jefferson Memorial
4 The White House and Presidential Religion
5 The Washington Monument: Enigma Variations
6 The Jefferson Memorial: Image of Enlightenment Faith

PART III The Axis of Memory
Reflections: From Arlington Cemetery to the Capitol
7 Memento Mori: The Lincoln Memorial and the Honored Dead
8 The Changing Meaning of the National Mall
9 Back to the Capitol: Artists' Voices

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

About the Author

Jeffrey F. Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of The Dragons of Tiananmen: Beijing as a Sacred City (1991).

Reviews

"Meyer is a seasoned guide leading the reader through the swamps, thickets, and political sticky wickets of the history of this capital city on the banks of the Potomac. All the while, he regales the reader with tales of the motley cast, the noble and the not-so-noble, the visionaries and the near-sighted, who helped to create the capital as we know it today. No other work captures the ongoing nature of the multiple retellings of this myth-in-stone as well as Meyer's has." -Gary Ebersole, author of Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity "Jeffrey Meyer takes his readers on a very different 'tour' of Washington, D.C. He excavates the ways in which core convictions of a nation are embodied in space and expressed in art and architecture. Myths in Stone is a rich evocation of the dynamic life of America's sacred center." -Edward T. Linenthal, author of Preserving Memory The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum"