This volume has as its focus the role of the Marshall Plan as both a force in the transformation of European Economic practices and a stimulus to political integration in Europe. This organizing theme is framed in terms of two other issues that are central to contemporary debates in international political economy and geopolitical studies: the origins and development of the Cold War, and the growing globalisation of the world economy. In relating the Marshall Plan to these issues, this book goes beyond the typical diplomatic history approach to place the Plan in the context of both the political economy of late twentieth-century Europe, and the impact of American models of business and government that came with the Plan.

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy, and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers.

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over 25 contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into four sections representing different modes of examining the depth and complexity of human meaning invested in maps, attached to landscapes, and embedded in the spaces and places of modern life. The topics covered range widely and include interpretations of space, place, and landscape in literature and the visual arts, philosophical reflections on geographical knowledge, cultural imagination in scientific exploration and travel accounts, and expanded geographical understanding through digital and participatory methodologies. The clashing and blending of cultures caused by globalization and the new technologies that profoundly alter human environmental experience suggest new geographical narratives and representations that are explored here by a multidisciplinary group of authors.

This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and interested general readers seeking to understand the new synergies and creative interplay emerging from this broad intellectual engagement with meaning and geographic experience.

This volume has as its focus the role of the Marshall Plan as both a force in the transformation of European Economic practices and a stimulus to political integration in Europe. This organizing theme is framed in terms of two other issues that are central to contemporary debates in international political economy and geopolitical studies: the origins and development of the Cold War, and the growing globalisation of the world economy. In relating the Marshall Plan to these issues, this book goes beyond the typical diplomatic history approach to place the Plan in the context of both the political economy of late twentieth-century Europe, and the impact of American models of business and government that came with the Plan.

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy, and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers.

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over 25 contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into four sections representing different modes of examining the depth and complexity of human meaning invested in maps, attached to landscapes, and embedded in the spaces and places of modern life. The topics covered range widely and include interpretations of space, place, and landscape in literature and the visual arts, philosophical reflections on geographical knowledge, cultural imagination in scientific exploration and travel accounts, and expanded geographical understanding through digital and participatory methodologies. The clashing and blending of cultures caused by globalization and the new technologies that profoundly alter human environmental experience suggest new geographical narratives and representations that are explored here by a multidisciplinary group of authors.

This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and interested general readers seeking to understand the new synergies and creative interplay emerging from this broad intellectual engagement with meaning and geographic experience.

What makes New York City different from Moscow? Are small towns looking more and more alike? What criteria should we use to distinguish onw place from another? Today, geographers and other social scientists are debating not only the answers to these sorts of questions but even whether or not to ask them at all. This ongoing controversy about how (or whether) to study place and its meaning in modern life forms the focus of J. Nicholas Entrikin's pioneering work.

Those who point to a decline in the study of place in geography, Entrikin explains, cite three main causes: the apparent homogenization of world culture; the belief that studying particular places is somehow "parochial"; and the tendency of the scientific method to generalize. Entrikin treats each of these in turn, addressing topics that include the Marxist view of a world economy, the moral implications of place (in such notions as community and provincialism), and the empiricist versus neo-Kantian traditions in philosophy.

To geographers arguing the merits of hard, scientific data versus subjective experience, Entrikin offers a compromise. "To understand place," he suggests, "requires that we have access to both an objective and a subjective reality. From the decentered vantage point of the theoretical scientist, place becomes either location or a set of generic relations and loses much of its significance for human action. From the centered viewpoint of the subjective self, place has meaning only in relation to one's own goals and concerns. Place is best viewed from points in-between."