| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950. By Susan Schulten. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. x, 319 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-226-74055-2.)

Americans' understanding of the world and their place in it is shaped by geographical representations such as maps, photographs, and narratives. Susan Schulten cogently surveys a wide range of these representations and the institutions that produced them from the period of America's rise to superpower. In an effort to reconstruct and explain the world view of ordinary Americans, Schulten examines school geography, the National Geographic Society, and mass-market cartographers. Running through this material she discovers a subtle but persistent endorsement of American economic expansion and political intervention. 1

Prior to 1880, popular geographic representations nurtured in Americans a strong sense of their exceptional character and unique identity. Insulated by two great oceans, America stood technically superior to the savage and semicivilized peoples of Africa and Asia and morally superior to the decadent imperialists of Europe. Those beliefs justified the war with Spain, which, so far as Americans were concerned, chastened Europe's most corrupt empire and brought the benefits of American know-how to backward peoples. But those beliefs were transformed by the war into arguments for American engagement in international trade, development, and geopolitics. . . .

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