Truth-spots lend credibility to beliefs and claims about natural and social reality, about the past and future, about identity and the mystical. Such ideas or accounts inevitably have a place of provenance, a geographic location where they were found or made, a spot built up with material stuff and endowed with cultural meaning and value. For Greeks long ago, temples and statues clustered on the side of Mount Parnassus affirmed their belief that predictions from the oracle at Delphi were accurate. Today, selectively reconstructed and expertly annotated ruins convince tourists at Delphi that Ar ... More

Truth-spots lend credibility to beliefs and claims about natural and social reality, about the past and future, about identity and the mystical. Such ideas or accounts inevitably have a place of provenance, a geographic location where they were found or made, a spot built up with material stuff and endowed with cultural meaning and value. For Greeks long ago, temples and statues clustered on the side of Mount Parnassus affirmed their belief that predictions from the oracle at Delphi were accurate. Today, selectively reconstructed and expertly annotated ruins convince tourists at Delphi that Archaic Greeks really did, in fact, believe in oracular truth. The trust we have in Thoreau's wisdom depends on how skillfully he made Walden Pond into a perfect place for discerning transcendent truth about the universe. Courthouses and laboratories are designed and built to exacting specifications so that the architectural conditions of rendering justice and discovering natural facts are perceived as legitimate. On-site commemoration of birthplaces where struggles for civil rights began--Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall--reminds people of slow but significant political progress and of unfinished business. These kinds of places--and also botanical gardens, naturalists' field-sites, Henry Ford's open-air historical museum, sacred buildings along the pilgrimage way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain--would seem at first to have little in common. But each is a truth-spot, a place that makes people believe. Truth may well be the daughter of time, but it is also the son of place.