The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 1: Atlantic America 1492-1800

The Shaping of America #1

by D.W. Meinig

This entirely fresh interpretation of American history by a renowned historical geographer is the first in a projected three-volume series. Meinig here focuses on colonial America, examining how an immense diversity of ethnic and religious groups—Europeans, Africans, American Indians—ultimately created a set of distinct regional societies. Richly illustrated with more then forty specially prepared maps and contemporary illustrations, this volume prompts us to rethink the settling of North America.

“A standard work in its field. . . . For readers seeking a bird’s-eye view of early American geography. . . there is no better guide available.”—William Cronon, New York Times Book Review

“Simply the best book in the English language by a contemporary geographer I have read over the past forty-odd years, and one of the most important. . . . A magisterial achievement, a grand shaking up and reassembling of fact and ideas.”—Wilbur Zelinsky, Journal of Geography

“All historians of the American experience should read and come to terms with this book.”—Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Georgia Historical Quarterly

“This book is a masterpiece in the best and old sense of the word.”—Alfred W. Crosby, Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Genres: History, Geography, Nonfiction, American History

524 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Donald William Meinig was an American geographer who made influential contributions to historical, regional, and cultural geography, and who served for decades as Maxwell Research Professor of Geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Educated at Georgetown University and the University of Washington, he began his academic career at the University of Utah before holding a Fulbright position at the University of Adelaide in 1958, later joining Syracuse University in 1960, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. At Syracuse, he chaired the geography department, trained more than twenty doctoral students, and helped shape the Maxwell School. His scholarship reflected both western American and national themes, producing pioneering studies on the Mormon cultural region, Texas, and the Southwest, while his most ambitious work was the four-volume The Shaping of America, published over nearly two decades, offering a sweeping interpretation of the nation’s geographic development. He also collaborated with his former student John Garver on thematic regional maps for the National Geographic Society, reaching millions of readers. Meinig’s honors included Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, the Charles P. Daly Medal of the American Geographical Society, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. His work combined rigorous scholarship with literary sensibility, leaving a lasting impact on geography.

Reviews

[Matthias]

Some books are hard to summarize because they contain so little; some are hard to summarize because they contain so much. Even for a doorstopper, this volume is packed with a great deal; any themes I pluck out will be somewhat arbitrary.

My lone complaint about this lovely book is very easy to summarize, however: the citations are unconscionably formatted. The text has neither footnotes nor, properly speaking, endnotes, instead at the end we have a list of where quotes came from, and a bibliography for each session. The source of any given claim is a pain in the ass if a direct quote, and a mystery otherwise. Perhaps Dr. Meinig kept his papers in terrible order and perhaps after a long career he simply kept this all in his brain; in either case perhaps it can't be helped (I keep my notes in terrible order too, and that's with any number of electronic aids) but in either case I don't know if it can be excused, either, except by reference to the value of the rest of the book.

Sometimes historians emphasize agency; sometimes they emphasize the causal power of deeper structures. (My earlier review of Collingwood was annoyed not that he emphasized the former, but that he tried to rule out the latter as basically illegitimate on the basis of a series of verbal technicalities.) There's not a lot of agency in Meinig; but while there is a lot of structure, there's not a lot of causal power to structure - instead, what we get is recurrent patterns, structures that change over time in ways that parallel other structures. When you get this structure-without-mechanisms in a totalizing theoretical synthesis of How History Works, the result is something inherently disappointing and even anti-scientific, as in Spengler. In Atlantic America, however, this is the result of the choice of subject: we are looking at early American history through a (jumping to a different part of the nested subtitles) Geographical Perspective, with detours into political, cultural, economic, et cetera history only insofar as they can be understood in terms of spatial relationships. "And can they!," the book says, but the result is that the book does not really weigh in on, per se, most of the causal arguments that dominate the historiography, resting as they do as claims internal to master-servant relationships, theological doctrines, and so on. It becomes hard to trace chains of causality, because chains of causality often pass through nongeographic domains. We see the presidio-pueblo-mission institutions spreading through the Spanish Empire, the administrative and economic "trunk lines" connecting metropolitan and provincial capitals, first-mover advantage in establishing culture, things progressing through identifiable stages, but this is a sort of natural history of description rather than a worked-out causal framework, because to jump to that at this point would be insincere, or at least premature.

Insofar as Meinig does prioritize mechanisms, selection and learning effects clearly play a big role. Again and again, imperial attempts to overcome some particular bottleneck break down until somebody figures out how to do it, almost by accident, and that is replicated. Empires, in turn, seem to expand until their internal communication mechanisms no longer efficiently cover their area. America buds off, and we see it ready to do its own expanding, one that will involve a new era of improved communications technology - though that's for the next volume.

The best praise I can give this is one shared with only a few aggressively dumb fantasy novels - that I look forward to reading the thousand-plus pages of the rest of the series. No doubt the series is somewhat dated, not in ethos - Meinig's sympathies are plainly anti-imperialist, and foreshadows decades where geographic thought will grow more entwined with left thinking - but in data: we know more about the Native political and economic world than we used to, more demography than we used to, and so on. So maybe this project will eventually have a spiritual sequel, but until it does, I'll be getting around to the rest of Shaping.

[Joshua Loong]

Another book I will have to come back to complete. Part of my ongoing hobby history project, I got this from a stack retrieval from the Toronto Reference Library. Read the first few chapters of part 1, and was blown away by Meining’s insights. There’s layers and layers to unpack here, but was intrigued by Meining’s position that the true start of American colonization was not the arrival of Columbus in 1492, but at the arrival of Cortes in 1519. This is because in the years preceeding the landing of Europeans in Mexico, the colonization of the Carribean islands and their people, could be considered more of an extension of other existing Atlantic island exploration (i.e. Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores, Cape Verde, Sao Tome etc.). It was only until the arrival of Cortes that Europeans: a) made a significant foray into the central landmass of the Americas b) encounter the significantly unique and complex plurality of civilizations in the American world.

In any case, will 100% read this cover to cover eventually, but wanted to document my thoughts before losing it in my brain. Will update the review when I do. Literally found a copy online to buy since reading this over subsequent stack retrievals will literally be the biggest pain.

[Peter Goggins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long, comprehensive, plodding. The author delves into the human geography of North America and the Caribbean in fair detail, describing the process of “peopling” these lands with Europeans and the extirpation of the natives. He describes individual colonies and regions in regards to their human origins and those settlements in relation to the lands that they began to inhabit. He pays special emphasis to the impact of millions of slaves being imported, dozens of religious and ethnic minorities founding colonies (someone desperately needed to introduce him to the term “founder effect” to summarize his arguments here).

There are dozens of excellent blurbs of information in this book, and it’s enormously informative regarding the cultural differences in the Atlantic part of America even today, describing how these regional cultures came into being. There is no overarching theory or mechanism presented, just a description of history. This book does suffer from some of the vices of academic writing.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: Skitch, how did we get here?

One of the great movie lines from an often overlooked minor classic (That Thing You Do), my review title captures Meining's unique perspective on how geography shaped the European "discovery", exploration, and colonization of the Americas. He describes a simple set of activities ("seafaring, conquering, and planting", p. 7) set in a complex context of European sources, cross-ocean routes, commercial, national, or personal purposes, intended destinations, and encountered cultures, geographies and climates. The 500-page result takes the reader up to 1800 as the new American nation (a federated republic of regional societies surrounded by disparate and not always friendly geographies and peoples) stands on the threshold of continental expansion (covered in Volume 2) that spans coast to coast (Volume 3). He moves from the particular to the general, from history to theory, and back again multiple times throughout his account so that we understand what happened and can say something about why.

So, as the seafarers from two major European "hearths" plowed new furrows across the Atlantic they began the process of making a new world:

Generalizing more broadly once again, we can see that the two great thrusts out of the two creative source regions [the Spanish-Mediterranean "cultural hearth" and the British-Dutch Northwestern Europe "cultural hearth"] carried two distinct versions of European civilization across the ocean, initiating a Catholic imperial America in the south and a Protestant commercial America in the north. But these direct extensions were increasingly caught up into larger Atlantic circuits binding together four continents, three races, and several cultural systems, complicating and blurring the processes of extension and transfer. . . . . By 1630 Europe held dominion over every seaboard sector and huge portions of the interior. America had become incorporated into the routine concerns of European nations, but this was not simply an enlargement into a Greater Europe. It is better seen as a new Atlantic world. The ocean had become the “inland sea of Western Civilization,” a “new Mediterranean” on a global scale, with old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion to the west, and a long and integral African shore. (p. 64-65)

One of the hearths and routes that Meinig includes is the "Middle Passage" of captured Africans from the west coast of that continent to the Caribbean Islands and then the eastern mainland shores from Brazil north through to the Chesapeake Bay where they were sold into slavery and became a key cultural and economic component of the geographic history. While writing decades before the creation of the 1619 Project--which places the fact of black slavery at the core if the American experience--and the controversy surrounding it, Meining has this to say: "We can at least insist that in place of the long-standing tendency to regard 'the Afro-American community created by the [slave] trade as an alien body on the periphery of national life' we must see it, quite the contrary, as an ancient, integral, and central component of American development." (p. 84)

As Meinig works his way south along the eastern coast of North America from Nova Scotia, he summarizes the major geography and settlement patterns of New England and Pennsylvania:

But there was also a difference so fundamental as to become the great characterizing contrast in the cultural geography of the two regions: the difference between Puritan corporate self-righteousness and Quaker individual tolerance; between the active discouragement of settlers of different ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs and the active recruitment of a wide variety of peoples; between a remarkably uniform New England and a strikingly heterogeneous Pennsylvania. Each was a distinctive American creation. (p. 144)

In Virginia, the geographic and settlement pattern resulted in a very different "special kind of 'English Nation.' It was a hierarchical, Anglican, rural commercial society" (p. 149), based on the roots of the colony in the commercial search for wealth from gold, silver, and finally tobacco, the swampy and malarial southern riverside environment, and the near presence of a strong and at times hostile native population.

Creating a broad theoretical framework to summarize all of these new demographic patterns, Meinig uses the terms

--"encounter and change" (encounter in its definition both as chance meeting and meeting in battle) between Europeans and native Americans,
--"migration and change" as Europeans encountered new climates, geographies, plants, and minerals, and
--"enslavement and change" as Africans were captured and sold into slavery, subjugated to European masters, and forced into new environments and cultures.

All sides in these interactions were changed, challenged, threatened by aggressors, and acted as aggressors, as they variously tried to survive, establish dominance, assimilate or reject new influences, and reestablish stability (a "new normal") in a world irreversibly changed. Native Americans were addressed by "conquest and enclosure" in isolated communities in the older colonial coastal regions, by "articulation and interdependence" in those areas behind the coasts where the native tribes remained viable and the European and native communities interacted through agriculture and trapping and trading, and "participation and reverberation" where encounters often attempted to enforce domination or destruction by either party. While all this interdependent interaction sounds like a feel-good story of practical cooperation, Meinig reminds us that in these cultural meetings between Europeans, native Americans, and Africans that the Europeans never recognized the others' "rights of sovereignty, property, or corporate identity except in temporary, manipulative fashion, and could not envision a genuinely plural society that would encompass tribal, non-Christian peoples." (p. 212)

By 1750, the eastern seaboard from Canada down to Georgia was essentially a contiguous European settlement, albeit with wide variations of population and density, and limited penetration into the continent in most places due to economic constraints, conflicts with displaced natives, and lack of access to navigable rivers. Regional societies--Canada, New England, Hudson Valley (New York and eastern New Jersey), greater Pennsylvania (including western New Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland), greater Virginia (including tidewater Maryland and parts of North Carolina), and greater South Carolina (with parts of North Carolina and Georgia)--were more important to the daily flow of economic and cultural life than the nominal political boundaries that defined them, "now so firmly rooted in place that they could absorb . . . whatever geopolitical changes might be imposed upon them from afar as pawns in the vast worldwide game of European politics." (p. 250). Those shocks, first the British victory over France in their European war waged with native allies on the interior frontiers of those societies and then the confederation of the American colonies and their military and political separation from the British empire, were just beyond the horizon in 1750 and would represent the next great influence on the shape of the American geography.

Meinig describes the far reaching impacts of the great imperial wars (waged locally with native allies as the French and Indian War) and then the American Revolution on the geography and demographics of the emerging united colonies, including the inflows and outflows of population and the intercolonial movement of groups. While focusing on the core British colonies, he also documents the changes involving Spain and France at their southern and southwestern borders in Florida, Louisiana, and the Mississippi River, and France and England at their northern border in Canada (the Revolution resulting in not just one new country but two, p. 332, a Canada changed but loyal to the British). The geographical elements of the political, economic, and cultural tradeoffs that enabled the establishment of first the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution was "an immense and remarkable political experiment and its success as a federation and a nation would be determined in no small part by how well it might cope with problems deeply embedded in its historical human geography." (p. 348) Slavery, of course, the deepest problem, would work its damage on the political and geographic landscape for the next century, and the latent racism it caused and effected all the way to today.

But the settlement of a governing political structure, including the establishment of a process for admitting new territories to the union as equal member states, opened the gates to allow a newly and properly named "American" population eager to burst beyond the coastal confines to flood west and south across the mountains and the Mississippi and push out and over the remaining native peoples and settlements. Regardless of whether history would find the outcome imperialist, genocidal, ordained by God, or manifest destiny, the result was to become a solid coast-to-coast political entity within the geographical bounds of the North American continent. Volume 1 stops in 1800 as the population clusters at the western colonial boundaries at the start of the Great westward migration; Volumes 2 and 3 take the story through the closure of the frontier in the 20th century. As he wraps up this opening volume at 1800, Meinig draws a general theory of the disintegration of empires (p. 370-375), and then applies it to both the original "British empire" of the United Kingdom (with its imperial capital at London, core of England, incorporated provincial colonies of Scotland, Wales and Ulster, and outlying protectorate of the Gaelic Highlands of Scotland and the west coast of Ireland) and then the North American British empire (p. 375-381). He points out the critical differences between the two applications: the greater distance between the imperial center and the colonies, the much larger size of the colonies and protectorates, and the perhaps surprisingly and ironically more British culture implanted in the American colonies than that encountered in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ("There were no keener students of English political history and philosophy than these New England rebels" who initiated the Boston tea rebellion, p. 382). While extracting a general theory from the specific events of the geographic and historical population of the American colonies, Meinig makes the point that the events and outcomes of the process (native displacement or genocide, implantation of black slavery, and defeat of the British by a united colonial militia) were not inevitable outcomes of the theory or the process (p. 381).

Instead, America grew by its own inexorable logic applied to the vast lands between its distant coasts:

By leaps of logic peculiar to American thinking, nationalism and “natural rights” were extended to include territorial rights to the North American continent: a nation conceived in liberty had a right to a homeland; in order to enjoy that liberty the people must feel secure; in order to feel secure and to enjoy the freedom to develop their territory in accordance with the “immense designs of the Deity” they must have control of all areas strategic to their homeland. . . . It was clear that most American leaders and spokesmen simply recognized no unalterable barriers to expansion. Thomas Hutchins, official "Geographer to the United States," estimated the habitable area of North America to be three and a half million square miles and stated forthrightly: "If we want it, I warrant it will soon be ours." (p. 416-417)

And it would be but not yet. Meinig's map of the United States in North America in 1800 on p. 423 is a reminder that "In 1800 America was a vigorous but rude, provincial outlier of Western civilization." (p. 421)

And it was, and is. A republic, a federated republic of regional societies surrounded by disparate and not always friendly geographies and peoples, if we can keep it.

This is fascinating history and theory, well-populated with simple maps and diagrams showing complex spatial theories as they worked on land and water across time, contemporary paintings and sketches of the environment as seen by the participants, and a bibliography for following further. I will definitely follow Meining through the remaining volumes to find out the answer to the question:

"Skitch, how did we get here?"
"I have led you here, for I am Spartacus."

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. America as a Continuation

Our theme is the creation of a vast Atlantic circuit, a new human network of point and passages binding together four continents, three races, and a great diversity of regional parts. (p. 3)

It was in thanksgiving for the fall of Granada that Queen Isabella of Spain equipped Christopher Columbus' expedition. In the broad view casts the "first Spanish and Portuguese, French and English explorers, conquerors, and settlers as the vanguard of a common movement, the cutting edge of a powerful Romano-Germanic Christian culture that had burst upon the World Ocean and would eventually bring the coastlines of every continent under siege." (p. 4) Taking the entire North Atlantic littoral as a point of focus, Meinig points to an Atlantic Fishery in the North stretching from Iceland to the Grand Banks. Without strong resistance, Europeans could set up a a trading post or an exploration base along this littoral, but much greater effort would be required for colonization. Meinig poses three levels of European involvement - seafaring, conquering and planting. Each requiring greater resources and efforts on the part of Europeans.

2. Iberian Initiatives

Columbus represents the seafaring stage of development, as he never actually laid the grounds for conquest. The Iberians had, however, successfully combined seafaring, conquering and planting in the Canary Islands, which served as a model for further expansion. Arriving in 1502 with 2,500 men, Nicholas de Ovando became the principal architect of the encomienda system which moved Hispaniola quickly from conquest to planting. Belatedly, the Portuguese developed Brazil in the latter half of the 16th C, as more fruitful enterprises in Africa delayed a focus on that new land.

3. The Creation of New Spain

Hernando Cortez's discovery of the Aztecs in 1519 was the real discovery of America. It was at this point that the real conquest of the New World began and proceeded very much along the lines of the Romans subduing the diverse Greeks. In a manner which Alfred Crosby has called swarming, the Iberians migrated to the New Spain and transformed the agricultural landscape with European wheat and barley, but also with the importation of European cattle, sheep, swine, horses, burrows and mules. But the planting of New Spain was more than this, it was also and exercise in governmental engineering:

... New Spain, that great Mexican portion of Spanish America, was much more than a superimposition of Spaniards upon a decapitated Aztec empire. It was a new creation resulting from the forceful application of a sharply honed and simplified imperial system to the programmatic reshaping of a highly developed civilization. (p. 16)

The Spanish were forging unity out of diversity in New Spain.

9. Generalizations: Sectors and Circuits of the Atlantic World

Meinig points to the creation of two Axes of Exploration, one a fisheries axis in the north and another a southern tropical axis. The importance of the former has largely been under appreciated. Harvesting the wealth of the Grand Fishery was a massive undertaking involving Europeans in the Atlantic World long before the Puritans reached Plymouth Colony.

Thus, when we begin to assess the creation of America in its proper Atlantic context, we see not only Newfoundland and New France but New England and New Netherlands, all the many beginnings from Hudson Bay to the Delaware, as integral parts of a North America, which in some degree an emanation from the old annual harvest of the northern seas. (p. 58)

The Southern circuit, based largely on the pattern of trade winds, brought European manufacutres to the Iberian colonies and treasures from the colonies back to Iberia. The ships traveling along this southern axis proved to be temptations to piracy for the English, French and Dutch. The Dutch arose as the major contenders with the Iberians for control of the commerce of the Atlantic trade. Modeling their network upon Mediterranean models, the Dutch proved very efficient.

The middle area, between the Northern and Southern Atlantic circuits remained untapped at 1630. It was not until Europeans sought social mobility by migrating to that area that the area came under the Neo-European sway. Below and above this area, there was a focus on quick profits (and indeed this is how the Virginia Company initially approached Jamestown as well). Imperial competition, however, proceeded apace in the Northern and Southern circuits. In the North, competition over fisheries drove conflict between Fr and English. In the Southern circuit, Dutch, French and English all made colonizing the Caribbean Island a greater or lesser priority as they moved to found their own versions of tropical planter societies. Much like the Mediterranean Sea was to civilization in the past, the Atlantic Ocean had become a new Mediterranean for Europe by 1630.

10. Generalizations: Geographic Models of Interaction

Describes thickening strands that connected Old and New Worlds, ultimately leading to a growing network of increasing capacity. In developing these networks Meinig attempts to create models for various stages of the process. Talks about slave trading networks in this context as well. The end result of this networking was the development of a World System, with the colonies at the periphery producing raw materials to be shipped back to the metropolitan center in Northeastern Europe. Finished goods were then shipped back to colonial markets on the periphery from the metropolitan center.

15. Encounter and Exchange: Europeans and Indians

Leaning on Francis Jennings's account of the "Invasion of America," Meinig sketches the macroencounter moving from initial contact, through depopulation and later stabilization, and finally ending with stable large societies in which the indigenes are reduced to marginalized subcultures.

Viewed broadly, the most obvious variations were more longitudinal than latitudinal: gradations inland reflecting the relative impact of this great encounter. Thus we can readily recognize a coastal zone of conquest and encapsulation, a second zone (partially costal, mostly inland) of articulation and interdependence, and a third zone deeper in the interior beyond sustained massive contact but markedly affected by it. Each of these zones had its special kind of geography, history and portent in European-Indian relations. (p. 208)

In this second zone of articulation and interdependence, the interchange was more equal than in the first. Centered around Montreal, Albany, Charles Town and Mobile, the complex cultural and economic interactions were distinctive in that they afforded greater power to the native populations because of the need for Europeans on the periphery to enter into reciprocal relationships and win the support of native peoples. In the American south, this lead to a wide range of frontier regions where "a complex mixing of Indians, Africans and Europeans was widely evident ... Thus by 1750 a considerable if never definable portion of the population of subtropical America was racially mixed ..." (p. 210) As Ira Berlin has pointed out, this zone afforded greater freedom to persons of mixed race in assuming roles as leaders and as intermediaries.

In the third zone, we find the domain of European traders who opened up trading operations with Indians by moving deep into the interior. The impact on Indian tribes caused by the greater demand for furs to trade with the Europeans included increased mobility for tribes, more work for the female Indians in the preparing of hides, shifting inter-tribal power alignments, etc. as each vied with the other for European trade.

Was progression from zone three, through two and on to one historically determined? Perhaps, but the progression from zone to zone - as well as the activity within those zones - was far more complicated than a "march of civilization" approach would allow. Indeed, the Europeans and Indians entered into symbiotic relationships throughout. Quoting Jennings again, he concludes by noting that Neo-European civilization in North America owes its very existence to this symbiotic relationship. Amerindians continue to deal with this reality even today.

[Rudyard L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest American history I’ve ever read.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the literal size of a phonebook and the encyclopedic details will overwhelm, but Meinig makes some incisive claims about the Atlantic World, contrasting the Spanish conquest-based empire with the Northern European commercial empires, and proposing an eight-stage process for the development of historic Atlantic colonies. By page 370, you want to wave a white flag in surrender.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Offers different perspectives on the exploration, colonization, and development of the American world. The perspectives are fresh and unique. For years, I read sections of it randomly, or looked up specific incidents. It is a good book for that, but it is equally good reading from start to finish. There are passages in which the author is a little too academic, but they are few and do not mar the narrative.

[George Siehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of four volumes tracing the history of the United States from a geographer's perspective. The book makes clear that history is more than names and dates, and that geography is more than place names and landscape. Here they are tied together in great detail (sometimes too much?) but the added perspective gives the history a new flavor. This book covers the period of North American colonization through the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the founding of the new American nation and its first presidency. Throughout Meinig explores the theme of empire, important in that America originated by separating itself from the British Empire and was confronted with the French and Spanish Empires that also occupied the North American continent at the time. And, that the nation's formation and growth constituted an empire building as well.

Meinig sets out three requirements for European nations seeking to build an empire: seafaring, conquest, and planting (of colonists). In this country, seafaring proved useful in warfare against Britain and the other North American empire builders, but both conquest and planting were essential as colonists and later the new Americans pushed their national boundary to the Pacific.

The book's organization includes a brief introduction to each of the three sections, presentation of the history and geography relevant to the time and place, then a thoughtful, often philosophical, review and analysis of what has just been covered. It is a major work of scholarship with an extensive bibliography pointing to even more detailed information. Maps prepared for this book provide clarity on the spatial relationship of places discussed while others diagram models for concepts being discussed. With history and geography there can never be too many maps.

Of personal interest was his handling of points of military geography in his section on The Disintegration of Empires, particularly the discussion on The process of Disintegration. It provides a perspective that is relevant in looking at international conflict in our own time.

Readers interested in political science, politics, and international relations will find much in this book that explores these topics.

[Hunter McCleary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admittedly, I cherry-picked portions of the book relevant to family history. But it offered some insights not encountered before such what motivated German's to immigrate from 18th century Western Europe why Germans were slower to integrate into American society.

Notes:

p 133 Interesting discussion about Quakers from the lower Rhineland. Settled in area north of Philadelphia. Formed a community of linen makers, artisans, merchants, and farmers.. with their own local laws.

p 134 Discussion about the breakdown of rural fabric in Western Europe. The fundamental force leading to dispersion was the rise of individualism over peasant values in Western Europe. By the late 17th century the agricultural village was becoming a social anachronism in Europe.

p 139 The general regional regional pattern of German was therefore broadly ethnic rather than one of tight religious clusters. It was the result of large numbers who arrived about the same time in an English colony amidst a variety of peoples and, although they may have come from many different European areas-- the Palatine, Alsace, Hesse, Baden, Bavaria, Switzerland,-- they quickly gained a new awareness of how much they shared in language and general culture and sought to settle amongst their own kind.

p 139 Discussion about why the Scots-Irish felt welcome in Pennsylvania. Good land at a reasonable price. Many disembarked at New Castle and headed directly toward lower Susquehanna lands. Whereas after 1725 all German immigrants had to enter at Philadelphia and take a loyalty oath.

p 140 The sheer numbers and "clannishness" of the Germans seemed a threat to many of the British settlers. "Palatine boor" became a common epithet, and "the German problem," that is how to disperse, educate, and anglicize such people, was widely discussed and as widely resented and resisted by the Germans.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps this book's goal was just too grandiose. Covering over 300 years of "geographic history" in 500 pages means much of the book has to been spent covering the regular history that's available in any college textbook. A nice review, but still.

Also, the extended tangents on the geographical "theories" seem to involve nothing more than converting regular maps with squiggly lines into weird maps with straight lines, and changing the name of countries from "Great Britain" to "Metropole" or some such. I assume the continued existence of Geography as an academic discipline requires that they come up with some bankable theories, but from this work it doesn't look like they can explain much more than the patently obvious.

Despite this I did learn about the settlement patterns of the early United States, the surprising diversity in almost every state (Quakers, Presbyterian Scots, Reformed Westphalians, Anglicans, Cape Verdeans), and the rough trading of whole continents by Europeans at a whim, often at the same time they spent eons negotiating over the ownership of tiny fishing islands in the St. Lawrence estuary. Even in the 1760s, they had a very different conception of the promise of America.

I'm going to give the next volume, focusing just on the next fifty years, a chance.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

More emphasis on the geographical perspective rather than the historical perspective. You will learn the first colonies and how they expanded, etc. It touches on many historical events but some just in passing like the King Phillips War. I think he gave a couple of paragraphs and the number of casulaities was way down from everything I have ever read on the war. This kind of turned me off in the trust factor.