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Reviews
The Shaping of America
A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 4, Global America, 1915–2000
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By D.W. Meinig
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(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 467. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $45.00.)
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| The publication of Global America brings to completion D. W. Meinig's four-volume, twenty-year writing project, "The Shaping of America." The series commenced with Atlantic America 1492–1800 (1986), which described the colonial and early-national era as part of a broader Atlantic history. Meinig's second volume, Continental America, 1800–1867 (1993), described the expansion of the nation westward to the Pacific Ocean, but with the greater West still detached from the eastern domain. That national domain was split over the slavery controversy, a tale that Meinig vividly portrayed in cultural geographic terms. Volume Three, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (1999) traced the creation of western culture regions and their binding to the national domain in the railroad era; the book covered, as well, the geography of immigration and manufacturing during what Lewis Mumford once dubbed the Paleotechnic era: the nation's first industrial age. |
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Global America completes the task of telling our national history by describing the geography of mobilization in the automobile, electrical, and air age—the Neotechnic era, in Mumford's terms. The geography of a national system of federal highways, enhanced with the introduction of the interstate system in the 1950s and 1960s, and the consequent migration of Americans to create new regions or improve older ones form major topics of discussion. Meinig considers the geography of airways to illustrate further the dynamism of twentieth-century America. |
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