147: Terry Smith's Making the Modern

Terry Smith is an art historian, and Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America is a study of the relationship between the visual imagery of the 1920s and 1930s and the era's cultural, economic, and industrial configurations.  Far from focusing on high modern art and design, Smith studies modern architecture, painting, photography, design, advertising as gleaned from sources as varied as Ford Motor Company photos of plants and work processes, architectural plans for office buildings, and documentation of the 1939 World's Fair in New York.  Methodologically, Smith deconstructs each work or artifact via a rigorous investigation of its historical setting for signs that the work documents conflict or social change.  Working across disciplinary boundaries, the book draws together a "visual regime" or "ensemble of processes of visualization and representation" of modernity, where visual representation and sociocultural processes work together to create a uniquely modern worldview called the "iconology of modernity."

136: Richard Schein's Landscape and Race

With the edited collection Landscape and Race in the United States, Richard Schein aims to get the reader thinking about the relationship between race and the cultural landscape of everyday places; following Toni Morrison, he argues that "all American landscapes can be seen through a lens of race, all American landscapes are racialized.  For Schein and his contributors, cultural landscape is material, visual, and epistemological, and landscape itself is a process: we shape it to reflect our cultural values, and then the cultural "framings" it contains come back to shape culture, so that whether material or symbolic, "cultural landscapes are constitutive of the processes that created them in the first place."  Further, following Cornel West, Schein argues that race is an anti-essential, social, and political construct that "matters" as if it were ontological.  Examining race in the landscape allows us to understand, in Omi & Winant's worlds, "the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed."  In other words, studying racialized landscapes can help us understand the process of racialization.

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.

98: Adams, Hoelscher & Till's Textures of Place

Adams, Hoelscher, and Till's Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies originated in a 1998 special session celebrating Tuan's retirement and critiquing and updating his work; the essays include students of Tuan's, later geographers, and people who aren't geographers at all but who appreciate his work.  In their intro, the editors revise and add to humanist geography's subjective conception of place by

• setting up a dialectic between physical places and human experience of/ apprehension of/ construction of places
• rejecting the search for universal understandings of place (a la Tuan) in favor of multiple meanings shaped by both individual subjectivities and social differences, including race, class, gender, and sexuality
• putting places in social, geographical, and historical context

85: Neil Foley's The White Scourge

Neil Foley's The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture uses whiteness studies as a model for investigating intraethnic divisions and the interactions between race, class, and gender in central Texas cotton culture between 1820 and the early 1940s, when the industry moved from small family farms run by white tenant families and white, Mexican, and black sharecroppers, to agribusiness dominated by nonwhite workers.  Foley pulls his title from a book that characterized poor white cotton farmers as the scourge of the south, but he argues that "the scourge of the South and the nation was not cotton or poor whites but whiteness itself - whiteness not simply as the pinnacle of ethnoracial status but as the complex social and economic matrix wherein racial power and privilege were shared, not always equally, by those who were able to construct identities as Anglo-Saxons, Nordics, Caucasians, or simply whites."

75: Kathy Peiss' Cheap Amusements

In Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Kathy Peiss looks at the new spaces of leisure in New York - public halls, picnic grounds, nickelodeons, "pleasure clubs," and street corners to see how gender relations "played out."  In particular, she is interested in the process by which ideas about sexuality, courtship, male power, female dependency, and autonomy got legitimated by and for women.  Working from a wide variety of primary and archival sources, Peiss argues that working-class gender constructs were directly related to changing organizations and meanings of leisure in the new industrial capitalism, which rationalized and controlled labor even as it commercialized and commodified leisure time.  In other words, leisure both reflects and shapes working-class gender constructs.

Peiss focuses on the agency white working women had in constructing gender from 1880-1920.  While married women's leisure time generally occurred within the home and fit into the rhythms of daily life, single working women often led two lives: dutiful daughter on female work rhythms at home, wage-earner on regimented male rhythms at work.  Stuck between male and female worlds, young working women did not seek out the traditional domains of male leisure (saloons); instead, they flocked to the new commercial dance halls, amusement parks, and movie theatres.  Young men soon followed, and the connections between leisure, mutual aid, and manhood loosened as a result.  Instead, leisure became associated with pleasure, mixed-sex company, and individual consumption, and women were more than welcome to come spend their money.

48: Richard White's The Middle Ground

In The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, Richard White argues that the French and Native Americans negotiated a middle ground in the Great Lakes region; unlike in other parts of the country, colonization here created a region characterized by negotiation among groups with relatively equal power.

For White, "middle ground" has two distinct meanings:

• A productive "process of mutual and creative misunderstanding;" this includes both sides' willingness to justify their own actions in terms of their partners' perceived cultural expectations; folks who sought out similarities between their culture and their partners' culture; and the understanding that even the most tenuous cross-cultural similarity can be used in negotiations if both sides accept it.
• A "quite particular historical space that was the outcome of this process:" the Great Lakes region, aka the pays d'en haut.

Because the middle ground is a spatial metaphor, it's possible to conflate the process of creative misunderstanding and the physical space, so that the Great Lakes region becomes the product of two cultures that have roughly equivalent power, a historically-specific place where creative miscommunication between Europeans and Native Americans created new, hybrid cultural forms.

White is careful to characterize this middle ground as a place constituted not by violence and bloodshed but by adaptation, compromise, and mutual respect.  He is also careful to link it specifically to the Great Lakes region, because he derived it empirically there via oral and written histories and archival sources.  However, he does allow that the process of the middle ground might be transferable to other regions, as long as these other regions include a rough balance of power, a mutual need or desire for what the other possesses, and an inability for either side to force the other to change because neither side is bigger or more powerful than the other.  The space of the middle ground might be transferable as well, so long as it includes an infrastructure that can support and expand the process.

With this study, White makes a number of important interventions.  He turns culture into a spatialized process; he considers the possibility of a frontier as a space of mutual understanding and negotiation, where hybrid cultures are created; he recognizes the agency of Native Americans in shaping the middle ground, and uses oral histories with the descendants of these tribes to understand the memory of this process; and he shifts the development of American culture from New England to the Great Lakes region.  And rather than assume rational, perfectly informed actors, he acknowledges and even appreciates that "biased and incomplete information and creative misunderstanding may be the most common basis of human actions" ever.