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Illuminating Exclusion: Constructions Of National Identity In The Washington National Cathedral's Stained Glass Windows, Maggie T. Gleason

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. offers itself as a national monument and spiritual center for the American people. Thousands of tourists and worshipers visit the Cathedral every year to admire its Neo-Gothic style architecture, stained glass windows, hand-carved sculpture and the general splendor of the massive medieval-inspired structure. I argue that the imagery and iconography of this ornamentation presents American national identity as white and Christian, an ideal that is cultivated through the exclusion and domination of minority racial groups and alternative belief systems in the Cathedral’s decorative program, through the stained glass windows.

In order to shed …