110: David Delaney's Race, Place and the Law

In Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948, David Delaney shows how race, place, and the law are both socially constructed and mutually constitutive.  Working primarily from the legal history of racialized landscapes in the United States, he argues that law was critical to the shaping of these landscapes because it considered itself abstract but was intimately involved in constructing geographies of power.  Lawyers and judges ratified property lines and interpreted and upheld boundaries.  Thankfully, as he shows, the same supposed abstraction that gave the law authority to create racialized landscapes also gave it the power to destroy them.  Delaney thus complicates the role of the US legal system in the construction of racialized landscapes of power that affected (and still affect) all Americans.

Delaney argues that racism from 1836-1948 was spatialized, or enacted on and through the landscape, and supported by the legal system.  Spatialized racism changed dramatically over time, however.  Before the Civil War, it generally took the form of white territoriality versus black mobility - as evinced, for instance, in cases where 

108: Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

In All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Marshall Berman cautions against jumping on the PoMo bandwagon to make sense of the world.  Against Postmodernism, which he sees as a dead-end way of interpreting the world that only leads to the I, death, and fragmented searches for authenticity in depthless space, he argues that Modernism, and the larger Enlightenment project of which it is a part, have room for human agency, collectivity, and social change.  Further, instead of being the way out of global capitalism, Postmodernism is just a phase in the modernist dialectic, one of those moments when Marxism and modernism collide.

Berman accepts that Modernism in the mid-20th century became the top-down, monolithic grand narrative that Postmodern theorists reject, but for his definition of Modernism he points instead to the 19th century, when Modernism was a way of making sense of a chaotic new "modern" world and asserting human agency in the face of totalizing industrial development.  Modernism is a dialectic between top-down and bottom-up culture, and the Enlightenment project of Progress proceeds not in a

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.

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

84: Lizabeth Cohen's Town Center to Shopping Center

In "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," Lizabeth Cohen shows that the shift in consumer spaces from downtown shopping districts to suburban shopping centers and malls threatens the public sphere on which democracy depends.

The new landscapes of postwar mass consumption had three major effects on American community life:

• by commercializing public space, they brought market segmentation, including divisions by race and class, to community life
• by privatizing public space, they privileged the rights of property owners over citizens' rights to free speech
• by feminizing public space, they gave women more of a claim to the suburban landscape, but they circumscribed their power by constructing them as consumers only

If mass consumption was supposed to bring standardization in merchandise and consumption patterns, the way it structured (and continues to structure) space actually did the opposite.  Further, the dependence on private spaces for public activity and the increasing privatization of public space threatens democracy: if people no longer have a space to speak our minds or critique larger systems of power, how are we a democracy at all?

80: Nan Boyd's Wide Open Town

In Wide Open Town, Nan Boyd argues that San Francisco’s bar-based queer culture was just as important to the development of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement there as were the city’s more mainstream activist groups.  The book relies primarily on some 40 oral histories with San Francisco bargoers, owners, and LGBT rights activists, as well as tourist guides, periodicals, clippings, photographs, and public records to construct (in often meticulous detail) a narrative of how the development of San Francisco’s gay scene swelled into a fight for civil rights.  Although the writing style is a bit heavy-handed at times, Boyd’s innovative research and methodology create a narrative that is anything but closed or canonical.  Rather, by limiting her scope to San Francisco before 1965 and structuring the book in terms of community formation rather than strict chronology, Boyd is able to open up the development of San Francisco’s gay civil rights movement and analyze (or characterize) it in terms of a variety of local contextual factors.  As she moves through topics as diverse as the gay male community, tourism, and female impersonation; the lesbian community, prostitution, and the female body; policing and the construction of homosexuality as behavior- versus desire-based; homophile activism and class-based differences over separatism and assimilation; and coalition-building, she explores the relationships between economics, use of space, police and media oppression, and the development of a community into a class-for-itself.  The result is a narrative that characterizes San Francisco’s gay civil rights movement as a multi-class, space- and place-dependent grassroots movement.  Boyd’s work thus argues that, for this movement in this place and time, “the politics of everyday life were every bit as important as the politics of organized social movement activism.” (242)

79: Beth Bailey's Front Porch to Back Seat

Beth Bailey's From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America reads 20th century culture through the lens of dating and courtship.  She draws on prescriptive literature - advice books, newspaper columns, magazines for teens, college newspapers, and "scholarly" works by proponents of marriage ed - to reconstruct two major changes in courtship in America from 1920 to 1965.

First, courtship made a spatial shift from the female-dominated private sphere (calling) to the male-dominated public sphere (dating).  This shift began in the 1890s, when urban working classes went out on dates due to lack of space and privacy at home.  It was picked up by the upper classes and then "imploded" into the middle class in the 1920s.  The shift created a tension within the courtship, because while women were still urged to remain passive and protect their sexual virtue, the date now happened in the context of the marketplace, and men, with their superior purchasing power, now controlled the date.  This shift from private home to public marketplace also changed the meaning of courtship, from a thoughtful step toward matrimony to a "public commodity" that could be used to achieve social standing in a new consumer-oriented youth culture.  This shift was reflected in the new language about dating: advice books talk about price tags, supply, and scarcity, and describe virtue as a commodity, merchandise, or line of goods.

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.

66: George Chauncey's Gay New York

George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 uses archival and oral sources to debunk three myths about gay male culture in turn-of-the-century New York: the myth of isolation, the myth of invisibility, and the myth of internalization.  In doing so, he shows that a well-developed gay culture existed in New York long before Stonewall.  Further, by reconstructing the spaces, symbols, events and people that made up gay male culture from the turn of the century to WWII, he both establishes the social construction of a gay male identity and argues against any cultural analysis that posits linear progress or a liberation politics as a key component of this identity.

Chauncey studies the development of gay culture in four New York neighborhoods: the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square, and tries to pinpoint the moments when a gay presence became visible in each.  He bases his argument on a huge quantity of primary materials, including police and trial records, diaries, documents from the District Attorney's office and the city magistrate, records of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Committee of Fourteen, and anti-prostitution organizations, and old gossip sheets like the Broadway Brevities.  And the worlds that he meticulously reconstructs from this mountain of empirical data reveal several unique cultural patterns: gay rituals and institutions that foster a collective identity, gay migration patterns that parallel ethnic migration patterns, a kind of semiotic ingenuity that allowed many men to lead double lives, and a consistent definition of homosexuality as the passive acceptance of penetration rather than as a desire for someone of the same sex.  This behavior-based definition allowed working-class and middle-class men in modernizing New York to treat "fairies" in the same way that they would female prostitutes, while the myriad spaces of New York's permissive sexual underworld (including the rooms at the YMCA) allowed for a flowering of gay sexualities and sexual expression, especially during Prohibition.  By the 1930s, pansy culture provided opportunities for voyeuristic escape from middle-class life, even as gay culture was increasingly seen as a threat to the post-Prohibition moral order.

 Throughout, Gay New York builds an interpretation of culture from empirical evidence about particular spaces, performances, people, and objects in New York.  Chauncey thus locates gay male culture in both a particular time and place and a particular social, economic, and cultural milieu: a modern New York grappling with the social upheaval of industrial capitalism.

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.

36: Virginia Anderson's Creatures of Empire

In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Virginia Anderson argues that in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and New England, domestic animals put English settlers and Native Americans into close contact and thus actively shaped the history of early America and settler/ native relations.  By putting livestock at the center of early American history, Anderson contributes to a growing body of literature in animal studies, which, like environmental history, decenters human historical agency by elevating the broader environmental context.  Because colonists and Indians related to animals very differently and because these relationships had a huge impact on the landscape, focusing on animals also allows Anderson to investigate the imposition of one worldview over another in a holistic way.

Anderson divides her book into three sections: a discussion of the many ways Algonquians and English settlers thought about different kinds of animals at the beginning of the 17th century; a history of the introduction of livestock into the Chesapeake colonies and New England and the development of regional husbandry practices; and a comparison of two near-simultaneous conflicts in the 1670s, Bacon's rebellion and King Philip's War, with an emphasis on the relationship between disputes over livestock and the outbreak of violence in both regions.  Building on Bill Cronon's Changes in the Land, she argues that the English settlers sought to turn the New World into England, which included imposing their view of animals as property on the landscape and on Native Americans.  There were regional differences: Chesapeake farmers, with tobacco as their cash crop, let pigs and other animal run free and go semi-feral; New England farmers, who had to deal with colder climates and rocky soils, ran family farms rather than large plantations, and kept a closer eye on their herds.  However, in both regions, Native American responses to new animals and practices ranged from cautious acceptance of pigs (which seemed like deer or dogs) to outright rejection of environmental destruction by animals.

In some ways, this book is a continuation of the spatial turn in American Studies: English attitudes toward animals were closely linked to their attitudes about property, and Algonquian attitudes toward animals were linked to their more holistic view of humans, animals, and the environment, so disputes over animals spatialize and materialize conflicting worldviews.  By broadening the concept of agency to include environmental and non-human actors, it also presents a more contextual (and thus possibly more complete and less biased, or at least differently biased) history of early America.