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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.
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