Description
Book SynopsisThe twelve essays in this volume re-examine a handful of perennial problems in American history from a geographical point of view. From this perspective there emerges a series of reinterpretations of the central processes that defined the American experience.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: the practice of geographical history; 1. The ecological causes of the Virginia mortality crisis, 1607-1624; 2. Why the Puritans settled in New England: the problematic nature of English colonization in North America, 1580-1700; 3. Why tobacco stunted the growth of towns and wheat built them into small cities: urbanization south of the Mason-Dixon line, 1650-1790; 4. Boston, vanguard of the American Revolution; 5. The industrial Revolution as a response to cheap labor and agricultural seasonality, 1790-1860: a reexamination of the Habakkuk thesis; 6. To enslave or not to enslave: crop seasonality, labor choice, and the urgency of the Civil War; 7. The myth of the southern soil miner|: macrohistory, agricultural innovation, and environmental change; 8. A tale of two cities: the ecological basis of the threefold population differential in the Chicago and mobile urban systems, circa 1860; 9. The split geographical personality of Americna labor: labor power and modernization in the Gilded Age; 10. The last great chance for an American working class: spatial lessons of the general strike and the Haymarket riot of early May 1886; 11. Spoiling the 'roast beef and apple pie' version of American exceptionalism: the agricultural-geographic origins of working-class division and the failure of American socialism; 12. The periodic structure of the American past: rhythms, phases, and geograph conditions; Index.
