156: Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America

In Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900-1960, Gail Cooper examines the development of air-conditioning technology and the tensions between engineering philosophy and consumer preference that shaped its design.  Working from a variety of sources, including trade literature, popular magazines, newspapers, and corporate records, Cooper argues that air-conditioning developed via a process of contestation, and that the three systems that resulted - custom-built systems, centralized air, and window units - are each an imperfect mix of the interests of engineers, corporations, and various consumer groups, legacies of the times when each group was more dominant than the other two.

Per Cooper, air conditioning development went through three major phases.  From 1900 to WWI, engineers Alfred Wolff, Stuart Cramer and Willis Carrier adapted industrial heating, ventilation, and freezing systems to offices and factories.  Their custom designs attempted to control both heat and humidity, though they focused mainly on humidity until the 1930s.  The first custom systems were installed in stock exchanges, banks, and Southern textile mills.  Because Progressive reformers were obsessive about healthy ventilation for schoolchildren, schools also became testing grounds for the new technology.

109: Tim Cresswell's Place

Tim Cresswell's Place: A Short Introduction is a lovely lit review of cultural geography debates on the concept of place.  While Cresswell is clear and thoughtful about each of the geographers he discusses, his own definition of place is as a "meaningful location," which he likes because it is both subjective and objective, both physical and cultural.  In addition, his research focuses on social difference and place, what it means to transgress a place, and what it means to be out of place - "anachorism."

The three levels of place:

• Descriptive; visual; surfaces
• Social construction; practice; social difference
• Phenomenological; essential; humanist; universal

At one point or another, cultural geography has embraced one or more of these levels.

106: Neil Smith's American Empire

Neil Smith's American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization uses the life and career of Isaiah Bowman, geographer under FDR, to trace the interconnected histories of geography, the American Century, and globalization.  Explicitly critiquing the claim that American Empire, and the global capitalism it is attached to, are placeless or beyond the "end of geography," Smith argues that as the "territoriality of power," geography has been profoundly important to the construction of American Empire.  However, unlike European imperialisms,  American Empire proceeds by global economic expansion rather than in "geopolitical, territorial terms."  Thus, American Empire and geography are evolving together, as global economic expansion makes place ever more important.

American Empire proceeds both temporally and geographically.  Temporally, Smith identifies three nodes or "formative moments" in the US rise to globalism:

• WWI and Wilson's League of Nations; the US gets more ambitious than it had been in 1898, and dreams of continuing its imperial acquisitions; this dream is deferred
• WWII; by the end of the war, Henry Luce's 1941 claim that this was the "American Century" seemed to ring true; from 1945-1970s US capital and culture flourished and spread  
• Smashing the Berlin Wall/ sacking Baghdad in 1989/1991; after economic setbacks in the 1970s and 1980s from strengthening global competition, deregulation, the "withering" of the Japanese challenge in the 1990s, reconstruction of the US economy and the end of official communism all seemed to signify a "new world order," strengthened by a renewed interest in geography in the 1970s and 1980s.