Around the turn of the 20th century, when the American university was in its most creative period of growth, geography was an important discipline in the new studies of man. It combined natural science, the generalizing propensities of the social sciences, and history. Offering a synthetic account of human development that located cultures in the physical order, geography had some notable practitioners and institutional strongholds. But by World War II it was in decline, and has now virtually disappeared as an autonomous area of study in the United States. Its nearest equivalent is sociology. If this is so, we are all the poorer for it, as Donald Meinig's enormous history shows.

Meinig is emeritus professor of geography at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (a geographical holdout). These volumes are not really Meinig's life project, for he did not take them up until well into middle-age, and he has several other outstanding publications. Nonetheless, the book is surely his magnum opus. In the twenty years since reviewers started to shower the first installment with praise, the author has kept at it, and the four parts announced in 1986 are now completed. There are few encomia to add, and in this review I intend, not so much to criticize The Shaping of America as to introduce interested readers to what they will find in this very impressive effort.

Meinig first tips his hat to the some of the great textbooks in U.S. history that students are asked to read in introductory courses. These texts are extraordinary productions, synthesizing all the professional literature in an easily available format, and Meinig has rightly used them to outline his own version of the American story. The first volume treats the age of exploration and of Revolution; the second scouts the context of the Civil War; the third deals with continental expansion and the first chapter of empire in the Caribbean and the Far East; the last volume is about capitalist industrial life and global responsibility.

"Responsibility" is not a good word here. As Meinig sees the purview of geography, it is a genre of history that puts a narrative of human striving into its physical surroundings. At the center of geography as a discipline is the dilemma of freedom versus determinism in human affairs. It is not surprising, nor to his discredit, that Meinig waffles on this issue. He often talks in terms of how nature molds the conditions of experience, of how geographic variables are necessary to understanding, but there is not much that is more concrete on this subject. Yet the sleight of hand in assessing the relative causal importance of ideas and decision-making as against natural necessity or constraint is no more or less than in other large historical theories, or in the monographs that engage professional attention every day. Moreover, when applied to the United States the message is simple. Geographical variables—a largely temperate climate, arable lands, weak and dispersed neighbors—have propelled into existence a civilization that is expansive at its core; often democratic, but always imperial in its triumphal movement.

"Responsibility" is a word from the textbooks that communicates the lingering sentimental patriotism conveyed to underclassmen. Meinig is a more hard-headed patriot. For him the study of geography has made excruciatingly clear the way in which the land has promoted American assertion if not aggression.

In his presentation there is a difference in historical tempo from that of the textbooks. I did a rough check of the weight given to various issues in the textbooks that Meinig cites and in some other prominent ones. Take the period from 1500 to 1800, which is roughly from "contact" to the establishment of the Republic. In the standard texts this period occupies roughly 19 percent of the whole; for Meinig, 25 percent of the whole. A geographical approach demands more attention to a survey of the initial conditions. Within this early period, in the texts, the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras (which make up 13 percent of the span to be covered) take up 21 percent of the writing; for Meinig these periods take up only 14 percent of the space. Political developments are less fundamental to him than for writers of the textbooks. Meinig expends more effort on epochs that other authors ignore, comparatively speaking, and within these epochs expends his effort on different subjects, comparatively speaking.

Take an example with a somewhat different resonance. In volume 2, which covers 1800 to 1867, less than one-fifth of the writing concerns the sectional crisis and the Civil War itself. This must be one of the few overviews about the war that does not even refer to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin; there is no commentary on the role of abolitionists and anti-slavery propaganda. Lincoln gets mentioned several times, but his leadership is not a variable for consideration, nor are his political ideas. As Meinig says in his courtly style, "We shall pay little attention to … the larger human dimensions of this conflict … in order to help us see more clearly certain basic features rather more clearly than when these things are enmeshed in richer panoramic narratives."

About the war itself there is a skilled if expected analysis of the comparative economic strength of the North and South, of their manufacturing capabilities, railroad connections, and highway development. More interesting are maps of the core and periphery of both the North and South, and the way geography determined the shape and nature of the alliances among the two contesting groups of states.

What is absolutely stunning about the explorations connected to the war is Meinig's elaboration of the territorial question in American history—a recurring theme. The issue is not so striking in the age of exploration leading up to the victory of the English colonists on the seaboard, because close attention to Euro-American imperialism in the New World has become conventional in writing about the period from 1500 to 1700. Meinig gets his running start in working over these conventions, but hits his stride when he gets to the 18th century and a treatment that is oriented around the Northwest Ordinances. The author carries on with the transformation of territories into states through the 19th century, and then into the period of expansion into Central America and the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. He finishes up with discussions of various areas under American sovereignty during the Cold War.

This extended narrative seems to me to be the spine of Meinig's volumes and, thus, as I read him, the author's central contribution to what he believes is a more fruitful way to look at the evolution of the American state. I agree with him.

The history of the United States is one of a continuous drive for either territory or control—and sometimes both. Americans had a blind self-righteous streak about their bulging republic, which they believed embodied transcendent goodness, and were oblivious to the unfortunate consequences to others of their forceful expansionism. They hardly noticed that they applied their ideals sporadically, if at all, to those who were weaker or alien. Meinig is not much concerned with the ideology, but he is exceptionally perceptive about the way in which politicians over time altered their notions of incorporation to suit various constituencies or political exigencies. The one constant was the ability to absorb new turf, one way or another.

The best aspect of this thematic unity governing the book is the author's use of what I would call "counterfactual" charts or maps. More conventional historians regularly debate the merits or lack thereof of what-if history. Meinig instead offers graphic depictions of alternative structures of sovereignty in what is now the continental United States, or in the South Atlantic or the Pacific. My favorites are the maps in volume 2 (p. 215) of two "might have been" constellations of republics in North America that would have existed had the United States in fact enlarged itself differently than it did. These illustrations, taken as a whole, vivify the sort of relentless extension that has taken place.1

Geography as a discipline in the United States was to an extent allied with the social sciences. I would say more critically that there is more than a hint in Meinig's prose of generalizations about human affairs meant to lift us from the particularity of historical understanding. As often as not, I found these as obfuscating as illuminating. "Federalism is a geopolitical device for dealing with basic differences among a set of states associated under a common government." When we look at technologies, we are to look at "the formation of this elaborating national infrastructure." "A large national society requires a multitude of … élites to coordinate the activities of its many national systems."

Meinig himself is not perfect, although as an utter amateur in these matters I serve up examples only to show that I have done my homework. There is no discussion of the Mason-Dixon Line, or of its English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, their adventures of the 1760s, and the role of the Line in the Missouri Compromise. The Line comes into the text when the author talks about the formal boundary between free and slave states, but we learn nothing about its genesis, which I had long wanted to understand (and which I learned about from a website).

The line of reasoning Meinig takes about the Cold War is less interesting than it might have been. The geopolitical dimension of the conflict strikes me as overwhelming, but the author—uncharacteristically, it seems to me—emphasizes more than he needs to the ideological struggle. But my appraisal may be due to the fact that this is a historical problem I know something about, concerning which I am less willing to take instruction.

In volume 4, Meinig discusses the moves of major league baseball franchises in the 1950s to suggest how important was the geographical core of the United States. He points to the earliest moves of 1954 as indicative of the strength of the core, since they took place within it. But he omits from the discussion the move of the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City. Because this move was outside the core, it contradicts his thesis.

Such quibbles aside, Meinig leaves the reader with a fresh angle on American history and a sense of what has been lost with the decline of geography as a discipline.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 (Oxford Univ. Press).

1. Yale University Press has spent a pretty penny on the many maps and charts (not to mention photographs) that enrich this text. But should the press do further printings, it would be well advised to re-do the indices. They are only just passable, comprised of some moderately useful analytic references but mainly proper names of one sort or another followed by long lists of page numbers—a real let-down in a book like this.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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