Enduring Themes of Historical Geography

From the text - North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent

Acquisition of Geographical Knowledge:

1)   "New World" had to be discovered and eventually uncovered through exploration, description, mapping and subsequent place-naming; e.g., coasting by Europeans to determine outlines of the land; then penetrations inland - accumulation of geographic knowledge had important effects on later settlement - used by European nations to justify territorial expansion.
2)   Interesting to look at old maps, and recognize that they were often used to accomplish goals other than just information - cartographic record is full of exaggeration, misconception, and geographical fantasies. Misinformation played a significant role in the geographic evolution of this country. A good example is the "Great American Desert" - appeared in one of the military surveys of the West in the 1830s, and early settlers (probably during an era of drought) reported the High Plains as a barren area, unsuitable for farming - such a portrayal in Eastern newspapers and government reports probably delayed settlement until the latter decades of the 19th century. Not until after the Civil War, after 1860, that the great railroad and scientific surveys of the West began to gather systematic observations of the continent as a whole.

Cultural Transformation and Acculturation:

1)   No other continent, other than maybe Australia, has undergone such a dramatic cultural replacement and transformation in such a short time as did North America. Originally a continent inhabited by indigenous peoples of a great diversity of cultural types, the process of "Europeanization" occurred in the latter part of the 16th and in the 17th centuries. This was a rapid process, although highly selective, with only a few European countries involved. These were mostly first generation settlers, who transplanted much of their home culture to the New World.
2)   The process of "Americanization" set in during the 18th century as colonial born generations, second and third-generation settlers with weaker ties to their countries of origin. This new culture was based more on the concepts of individualism, capitalism, and geographical expansion: the ever-present lure of new territory. The rupture with Great Britain after the War of Independence left the continent with a robust new nation, with Anglo-American institutions and the presence of slavery; bordered by a Canadian colony in which both French and English settlers remained under direct British control.
3)   By the time of a new wave of European immigration starting in the 1830s, the millions of new immigrants over subsequent decades came to a country that was very much an American nation, and they were absorbed into it ("melting pot"). We continue to be a nation of immigrants integrated into an American nation, rather than a nation of transplanted cultures from other nations.

Frontier Expansion:

1)   Public Domain - acquisition and disposal after 1790.
2)  Railroads - phenomenal growth after about 1850 that reoriented both the direction and the pace of frontier expansion.
3)   Pacific Coast - difference, in that settlement proceeded eastward from the coast - also from isolated interior nuclei, such as Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, etc.
4)   1890 - Director of the U.S. Census declared that the American frontier was officially "closed" - no new agricultural lands remained to be occupied; the filling in of the continent was complete. Frederick Jackson Turner proposed an interesting thesis in which he described this "closing" of the frontier, and pontificated on the symbolic significance of an interior moving frontier on the continent. In the United States there was a constantly moving frontier across a vast, mid-latitude territory that encountered no significant geographic obstacles until the Great Plains was reached in the middle of the 19th century. According to Turner, the lack of a frontier took away the dynamism in American life that would have to be found in urban and industrial opportunities (hmmmm?)

Spatial Organization of Society:

1)   We mentioned the process of "Americanization" that occurred in the colonies as the second and third-generation settlers came of age; society changed from the European model - less hierarchical and less egalitarian; no hereditary aristocracy and no imposed state church. Options of creating a new life were greater than in Europe, although this was often at the expense of the Native Americans, and certainly was not true for the imported Africans.
2)   In the new nation, two forms of society emerged: a largely free-labor, mixed farming system in the north and a more stratified, slave-labor system in the south with less variety in crops - rice, cotton and tobacco. Reduction in differences between was not resolved until the Civil War, and the social distinctiveness of the South and its economic dependency on the North remained well into the next century.
3)   Egalitarian society driven in part by the land disposal policies of the United States - cheap land policies and spatial patterns defined by rectangular survey system initiated in the 1790s.

Resource Exploitation:

1)    North American economic development was founded on European concepts about natural resource exploitation played out in a vast area that initially seemed to have no limits. The initial searches were for gold, silver, and quick riches; then it settled down into a gradual extraction of renewable and non-renewable resources - wildlife, agricultural, forest, mineral wealth, etc. - with very little concern for the rate and magnitude of extraction and depletion.
2)    Regional differences; for example….
       a. Early America was a land of plenty; gradual depletion of forest cover and of agricultural fertility,            especially in areas of intense tobacco agriculture;
       b. Great Plains - near extinction of the buffalo; competition for grasslands;
       c. Pacific Northwest - timber resources and salmon
3)    By the end of the 19th century, the United States had surpassed Great Britain and German as the world's most productive industrial nation.
4)    But - legacy has been staggering: probably between one-quarter and one-third of the wheat, coal, iron ore, and petroleum extraction from the earth's surface has occurred in North America in the last 200 years.
5)    At the same time, this immense growth fostered an increasing sensitivity toward the conservation of resources which was epitomized in the early years by the National Park movement, which started after the Civil War, and the wise use policies of the National Forest lands promoted by Gifford Pinchot in the Teddy Roosevelt administration early in the century - led to the subsequent environmental movement in the 1960s/1970s.

Regional and National Integration:

1)    One of the most remarkable characteristics of North America is that it came to be divided not into a series of little countries as is Europe, but into only two national-political units of approximately equal size.
2)    New Nation - added all of Trans Appalachian West.
3)    Louisiana Purchase - added a vast territory, doubled the size of the nation.
4)    Subsequent territorial expansion - conquest and acquisition
5)    Threats to unity of the nation might have come from settlement of the West, where factors of distance and isolation, sparsely settled populations and discrete, remote urban nuclei might have caused fragmentation (like in Utah) - until development of railroads and telegraph which served to bind it all together.
6)    Greatest threat, of course, was the Civil War which, had it turned out differently, might have led to an American experience more like that of South Africa.

Landscape Change:

1)    Landscape is a continuous theme in the North American past - both the effects of the landscape on human geography, and the impact of human activity on the land. The examples are too numerous to mention, but will be obvious throughout the course of this academic term