I read this recently in The Passionate Fact” by Strauss. She’s a world-class story-teller.

“One of the hidden assets of ‘true stories’ such as anecdotes, histories and natural histories is that they are a very subtle form of public relations. When a landscape becomes peopled by a story, human beings begin to develop a sense of reverence for it. Stories give humans a sense of place or a sense of homeland. The hills and fields of Gettysburg would be just hills and fields were it not for the story that lives there. The same effect can be created by telling a landscape’s geological story. Native peoples create this effect with histories and myths.” (p. 17)