The geography of contemporary U.S. political economy-the relocation of firms toward the sunbelt and abroad; the decline of manufacturing in the rust belt; and the rise of footloose producer services, NAFTA-inspired trade flows-has roots that run deep into our past. This innovative history by one of our most distinguished historical geographers traces their growth back to the seventeenth-century origins of liberalism, republicanism, and the regular financial crises by then endemic in capitalist societies. The problem the English and then the Americans faced was overcoming these crises while avoiding the political extremes of royal absolutism and later of socialism, communism, and fascism. The English way alternated between the doctrinaire ideologies and geographies of republicanism and liberalism. In 1776, by mixing elements of both, Americans created entirely new ideological alloys. Henceforth, policy regimes alternated between Democrats and Republicans and their distinctive fusions of liberal and republican ideology. Democrats combined publicanism's tenets of equality, diversified and volatile regions, and consumer revolution with liberalism's tenets of free trade, geographical consolidation, and dispersion (New Deal "liberalism"). Republicans mixed liberalism's biases toward elites, regional specialization and stability, and producer revolution with republicanism's tilt toward nationalism, expansionism, and demographic concentration (Reagan's America). Muddying liberal and republican ideologies and geographies in ways that tempered their extremes, Americans would add one more twist. Thrice, upon the birth of the first, second, and third republics, they enlarged the geographical jurisdictions of the federal government, extended the domains of U.S. power, and redefined the nature of the state. Carville Earle defines these enlargements as the distributive and partisan "sectional state" of the 1790s, the regulatory and redistributive "national state" of the 1880s, and the neoliberal "transnational sta

This classic text retains the superb scholarship of the first edition in a thoroughly revised and accessibly written new edition. With both new and updated essays by distinguished American and Canadian authors, the book provides a comprehensive historical overview of the formation and growth of North American regions from European exploration and colonization to the second half of the twentieth century. Collectively the contributors explore the key themes of acquisition of geographical knowledge, cultural transfer and acculturation, frontier expansion, spatial organization of society, resource exploitation, regional and national integration, and landscape change. With six new chapters, redrawn maps, a new introduction that explores scholarly trends in historical geography since publication of the first edition, and a new final chapter guiding students to the basic sources for historical geographic enquiry, North America will be an indispensable text in historical geography courses.

The twelve essays in this volume reexamine a handful of perennial problems in American history from a geographical point of view. From this perspective there emerges a series of reinterpretations of the central processes that defined the American experience, whether of colonization, of regional development and sectionalism, of slavery and freedom, of urbanization and industrialization, or of working-class history. The essays encompass the first three centuries of American history, beginning with the nightmarish world of disease and death that was early Virginia and ending with the melancholy demise of socialism early in this century. Geography's mission is to comprehend changes on the earth's surface, and toward that end, geographers ponder the interactive effects of nature and culture within specific locations and times. This entails connecting human actions (historical events) with their immediate environs (ecological inquiry) and specific coordinates of place and region (locational inquiry). Most of the essays in this volume employ the variant of ecological inquiry the author calls the staple approach, focusing on primary production (agriculture, forestry, fishing) and its societal ramifications. Locational inquiry queries the spatial distribution of historical events: Why was mortality in early Virginia highest in a small zone along the James River? Why did cities flourish in early Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Carolina and not elsewhere along the Atlantic seaboard? Why was Boston the vanguard of the American Revolution? The book's first four essays, on the colonial period, reinterpret American colonization and regional development. The second four essays unravel the causes ofsectional differences in the north and south during the early national and antebellum periods. The next three essays shift to the American urban scene, tracing the influence of agrarian society on the geography of labor and labor politics between the Civil War and World War I. The book then concludes with a long and ambitious overview of the periodic structure of the entire American past. This final essay offers at once a synthesis of the various historiographic case studies and a compelling interpretation of the rhythms of American macrohistory and their geographical component. The book is illustrated with 12 halftones.