| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Place and Belonging in America. By David Jacobson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xii, 234 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6779-7.)

At first glance, David Jacobson's study addresses what seem to be straightforward questions: how do communities understand themselves as tied to certain geographies, and how in turn does a bounded sense of territory help define a people? As he deftly argues, the nuances of place and identity often elude us, largely because "the idea of the nation-state has so blended the geographic, communal, and political dimensions of belonging as to make them indistinguishable" (p. 3). Beginning with the Puritans, Jacobson traces how Euro-Americans regarded citizenship as tied to a bounded geography. He then examines how the linkage became complicated, as such understandings of citizenship started to unravel in an age of globalization and fluid national boundaries.

As Jacobson argues, the Puritans' sacralization of the land served as a justificatory narrative that enabled them to claim territory by morally associating a people with a space (p. 22). In the absence of kinship principles, the notion of a bounded territory helped create an identity that united geography with Christianity, an idea that informed the Puritans' treatment of Indians. Believing that groups who have no fixed spaces over which they assert control are unable to make a moral claim to the land, the Puritans established a link that served a larger politics of dispossession.

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