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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Susan Schulten. The Geographical Imagination in America, 18801950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. x, 319. $40.00.
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Geography and history, wrote Peter Heylyn in 1621, "seen together crown our happiness, but parted asunder menace a shipwreck of our content" (p. 11). Today, Heylyn's prose seems fulsome and his argument strained. Few historians pay explicit attention to geography, and few geographers give more than a token nod to history. Yet some of us would stubbornly concur with Heylyn that historical processes can only be understood as they take place geographically, and that geographical patterns can only be explained through historical analysis. Several aspects of the intertwining of the two fields are meticulously illustrated in Susan Schulten's book. Schulten shows that the American public's understanding of global historical processes was guided by specific geographical constructs, and that both popular and academic geography can only be comprehended in their historical context. |
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Schulten is ultimately concerned with "how geography has mediated the world for us, and how it has concretized the abstract" (p. 241). She focuses on four separate but linked domains of inquiry and exposition: the international atlas, the National Geographical Society, geographical pedagogy, and academic geography. In each arena she highlights the most significant issues, deftly embedding then within the intellectual, political, and technological currents of the day. |
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