American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003)
By Neil Smith

Synopsis: Smith's book is an attempt to demonstrate how historical change and geographical knowledge are linked by focusing on the "American Century" as beginning in 1898 "where the government, corporate institutions, and ruling class sought a twentieth-century globalism best conceived as an American Empire" (xvii). The goal of the book is to challenge the belief that the "American Century" was/is beyond geography, and does this by following the development of U.S. globalism through the twentieth century. This book is massive and dense and divided into five parts: I: From Exploration to Enterprise: Geography on the Cusp of Empire; II: The Rise of Foreign Policy Liberalism: The Great War and the New World; III: The Empire at Homes: Science and Politics; IV: The American Lebensraum; V. The Bitter End. The basic argument is "power always expresses spatiality" (xix), and we are thus not "beyond geography." Henry Luce had exclaimed in 1941 that geography was dead. The book also argues that there have been three formative moments in America's rise to globalism: 1) 1898 and the colonial wars (kind of up to WWI); 2) WWII; 3) 1989-1999 - "Capitalist revolution" or "globalization." U.S. expansion/imperialism too an increasinly market-based form as opposed to territorial/straight-up colonial form. The book spends a lot of time on Isaiah Bowman - a geographer, university president, and presidential advisor who impacted geographical policy in the U.S. Geopolitics emerges as a modern mix of power via political control of territory. It's now all about international connections of power and the market.

Interacts With:

Foreign policy,
Hmm, there seems to be a common sort of "insecurity" among geographers, that they often feel the need to defend themselves and prove that they are still relevant. This makes sense - especially with the recent decline in geography programs - but sometimes it can come off as a little tedious. I mean, ok, yes, geography and place are important - do we really need to keep arguing that place is important? Let's just justify this by talking about it/working on this instead of constantly pointing this out. Just do it!
This book is tricky and I don't have much to say about it.

Orientalism

Orientalism - Intro Only (2003 [1978])
By Edward Said

Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.

Interesting Specifics:

Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).

Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).

Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.

Interacts With:

In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People

Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990)
By Jon Butler

Synopsis: Butler argues that we should focus less on the importance of Purtinanism in shaping American religion, and more on religious eclecticism. Argues that Europe failed to transfer a coherent religious structure to the U.S., and while the U.S. Anglican movement sought to sacrilize the landscape, it didn't really have any authority. The slave trade caused a holocaust of African religious systems, and put a new spin on Christianity, ultimately making it more dichotomous. It was the massive expansion of denominations and the increase of pluralism that allowed religion to really keep going in the U.S., and not the Puritan homogeneity that others have argued. "In the post-1680 Anglican renaissance, the renewal of Christian denominational authority, the effects of the African spiritual holocaust, the shifting of the old colonial church-state relationship, and the further development of highly volatile antebellum mixtures of popular supernatural views, the American religious tradition was born and reborn" (290). The push to make the U.S. seem Christian since day one actually came later, when people were seeking a sense of authority.

Interesting Specifics:

Interacts With:
Provides somewhat of a counternarrative to books on Puritans - esp. Perry Miller (Errand into the Wilderness), and most Sacvan Berkovitch stuff. Those books put Puritanism at their center, and viewed this as the trope that would always continue through American character, whereas this book says, uh, this place has always been religiously eclectic and pluralistic.

The Making of the American Landscape

The Making of the American Landscape (1990)
Edited by Michael P. Conzen

Synopsis: Tis book is a compilation of essays which survey the American landscape via some major historical forces that have shaped it. It focuses on "themes about clusters of related landscape processes set in a broadly historical and regional framework"(6). Moves chronologically to some degree, but is more thematic. It includes essays on climate and natural features, immigrant and colonist legacies (especially the vast Spanish imprint and the way it has been downplayed), plantations, planning and the grid pattern, forest-clearing, industrialization and urbanization, cars, weather, and vernacular houses (especially the ways in which buildings reflect adaptations to lands and climate, as well as cultural beliefs). The overall argument holding these essays together is loose, but is basically that culture leaves its imprint on the landscape, and thus meaning and a layered cultural history lie all around us.

Interesting Specifics:
[Lots of Steve's Intro to AMS material seems to derive from this].
Chapter 17 on landscapes of the wealthy is interesting.

Interacts With:
Building Suburbia, The Modern Urban Landscape,