In this body of work, I examine how the American landscape has been deliberately—and often violently—shaped to reflect and reinforce national mythologies. I document the ongoing processes of construction and deconstruction that continuously reshape the American built environment, contributing to the project of maintaining an empire. These processes, in addition to having profound ecological consequences, naturalize and perpetuate highly racialized, exclusionary, and often downright fictitious forms of American heritage, which become deeply embedded in our culture’s most fundamental assumptions about American geography. I also investigate how various exhibitionary sites and tourist destinations—museums, theme parks, department stores, and shopping centers—actively choreograph the production of these exclusionary heritage ideologies through careful landscaping, architectural decisions, and the strategic staging of space. I am particularly interested in how this reconfiguration of the American landscape is simultaneously guided by fetishistic notions of American history and our cultural obsession with novelty and progress. America has long wrestled with these ostensibly contradictory but ultimately collaborative commitments to tradition and progress, and I am especially intrigued by spaces that blend the two, presenting the old in the shiny wrapper of the new, the cheap, or the makeshift, or—conversely—offering the new within the quaint trappings of the old and comfortingly familiar.