In Truth-Spots, Gieryn gives readers an elegant, rigorous rendering of the provenance of ideas, uncovering the geographic location where they are found or made, a spot built up with material stuff and endowed with cultural meaning and value. These kinds of places--including botanical gardens, naturalists' field-sites, Henry Ford's open-air historical museum, and churches and chapels 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, Gieryn argues, but it is also the son of place.