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Around the turn of the 20th century, when the American university was in its most creative period of growth, geography was an important discipline in the new studies of man. It combined natural science, the generalizing propensities of the social sciences, and history. Offering a synthetic account of human development that located cultures in the physical order, geography had some notable practitioners and institutional strongholds. But by World War II it was in decline, and has now virtually disappeared as an autonomous area of study in the United States. Its nearest equivalent is sociology. If this is so, we are all the poorer for it, as Donald Meinig's enormous history shows.
The Shaping of America: |
Meinig is emeritus professor of geography at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (a geographical holdout). These volumes are not really Meinig's life project, for he did not take them up until well into middle-age, and he has several other outstanding publications. Nonetheless, the book is surely his magnum opus. In the twenty years since reviewers started to shower the first installment with praise, the author has kept at it, and the four parts announced in 1986 are now completed. There are few encomia to add, and in this review I intend, not so much to criticize The Shaping of America as to introduce interested readers to what they will find in this very impressive effort.
Meinig first tips his hat to the some of the great textbooks in U.S. history that students are asked to read in introductory courses. These texts are extraordinary productions, synthesizing all the professional literature in an easily available format, and Meinig has rightly used them to outline his own version of the American story. The first volume treats the age of exploration and of Revolution; the second scouts the context of the Civil War; the third deals with continental expansion and the first chapter of empire in the Caribbean and the Far East; the last volume is about capitalist industrial life and global responsibility.
"Responsibility" is not a good word here. As Meinig sees the purview of geography, it is a genre of history that puts a narrative of human striving into its physical surroundings. At the center of geography as a discipline is the dilemma of freedom versus determinism in human affairs. It is not surprising, nor to his discredit, that Meinig waffles on this issue. He often talks in terms of how nature molds the conditions of experience, of how geographic variables are necessary to understanding, but there is not much that is more concrete on this subject. Yet the sleight of hand in assessing the relative causal importance of ideas and decision-making as against natural necessity or constraint is no more or less than in other large historical theories, or in the monographs that engage professional attention every day. Moreover, when applied to the United States the message is simple. Geographical variables—a largely temperate climate, arable lands, weak and dispersed neighbors—have propelled into existence a civilization that is expansive at its core; often democratic, but always imperial in its triumphal movement.
"Responsibility" is a word from the textbooks that communicates the lingering sentimental patriotism conveyed to underclassmen. Meinig is a more hard-headed patriot. For him the study of geography has made excruciatingly clear the way in which the land has promoted American assertion if not aggression.
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