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 only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent 's physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent's physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

Published to coincide with an exhibition at Chicago's Newberry Library, "Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West" charts the historic role maps have played in imagining, understanding, promoting, and exploiting the Western frontier of North America. Featuring more than sixty full-color maps and views from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, this fascinating book documents how maps encouraged Euro-Americans to see the West as a land of promise. Maps helped visualize a nation destined to expand across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.
Curators Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon present an interpretively rich, carefully researched selection of items drawing on the Newberry's superb collections of historic maps and Western Americana. They have organized the book into four sections: maps for empire, maps for building a new nation, maps for enlightenment, and maps for business. Chicago emerges first as a dot on one of these maps, but it subsequently becomes a bustling metropolis and a major center of cartographic production.