The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Volume 3: Transcontinental America, 1850-1915

The Shaping of America #3

by D.W. Meinig

This volume on America's development from the mid-19th century to 1915 begins with the struggle over where to build the Pacific railway. Meinig portrays the settlement of the American West, examines the South as an imperial province, and considers America's pressures upon Canada and Mexico.

Genres: History, Geography, American History, Nonfiction

4 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2000

About the author

Donald William Meinig was an American geographer who made influential contributions to historical, regional, and cultural geography, and who served for decades as Maxwell Research Professor of Geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Educated at Georgetown University and the University of Washington, he began his academic career at the University of Utah before holding a Fulbright position at the University of Adelaide in 1958, later joining Syracuse University in 1960, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. At Syracuse, he chaired the geography department, trained more than twenty doctoral students, and helped shape the Maxwell School. His scholarship reflected both western American and national themes, producing pioneering studies on the Mormon cultural region, Texas, and the Southwest, while his most ambitious work was the four-volume The Shaping of America, published over nearly two decades, offering a sweeping interpretation of the nation’s geographic development. He also collaborated with his former student John Garver on thematic regional maps for the National Geographic Society, reaching millions of readers. Meinig’s honors included Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, the Charles P. Daly Medal of the American Geographical Society, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. His work combined rigorous scholarship with literary sensibility, leaving a lasting impact on geography.

Reviews

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review title: Filling in the middle

In the title of volume 3 of his monumental geographic history of the United States, D. W. Meinig nearly repeats the subtitle of his Volume 2: Continental America, 1800-1867. But while the second volume ended in mid 19th century with American territory on both coasts, "what had been no more than a vast imperial sphere of potential attraction and development in 1850 had become an integral domain of a vigorously developing nation in 1900." (p. 177). By the 1915 close date of this volume, the United States was

a national economic system, centered on and managed by the largest cities in the pattern confirmed by the selection of 12 Federal Reserve districts,

a federal political system administered by a growing but subordinate national government and dominated and ruled by state governments,

and a regional system of cultures knit by religion, ethnicity, and geography and intersected by railroads (250,000 miles representing half the world's total) and telegraph lines.

If at its founding the defining geographic significance of the United States was its "location on the Atlantic opposite Europe", by 1915 its global imperative was its "location on the Pacific opposite Asia", in the words of a 1903 history (p. 389). We were, at last, truly a Transcontinental America.

Meinig begins this third volume of his masterwork with the United States at a critical juncture in its history. The need to reunite a badly broken union north and south after the violent and prolonged civil war, the effort to bind it east and west with a transcontinental railroad, the continued war against the Native Americans in the vast western lands, and the goal of filling in the geopolitical middle with white settlers and states were the major drivers of contemporary events and influences on the subsequent history of the country. Meinig devotes most of this account to those themes, beginning with the story of California and making his way eastward in documenting the social, economic, and physical conditions that shaped the territories into states and cultural reasons. California earns pride of place because of the uniqueness of its Hispanic heritage, explosive growth of (largely male fortune seeking) population in its northern gold-mine region, and its distinct climate conditions which gave rise to new experimental kinds of agriculture--and, in the south, new kinds of marketing of that dry temperate climate as a "winter sojourn, retirement, or migration" spot (p. 64). This was indeed a new pattern of migration in our history--people moving in comfort (on the new transcontinental railroads) for comfort (to invest and live in new solidly middle-class businesses and communities).

While Meinig paints with a broad brush in creating his account, he also fills in details that make his history most usable and important. As he moves east and details each migratory center, he uses finer brush strokes to point out their similar patterns but specific characteristics that make each unique. New Mexico (the territory much larger than the eventual state) had been the long-time center of Hispanic North America (Santa Fe its oldest capitol), and with a large and settled native population of Navajo and Pueblo and no known exploitable resources in its wide open semi-desert landscape, it attracted few white American migrants and was the last continental territory to be granted statehood (1912). Colorado, meanwhile, with its location astride many of the cross-prairie tracks and trails and the discovery of gold and silver in the steep and seemingly impassable Rockies behind the new terminus of Denver, quickly became the "least isolated, least provincial, least resistant to rapid integration" (p. 145) of the western regions. The state of Utah was explicitly the Mormon Zion, with a homogeneous religious theocracy that, even as it was leavened with non-Mormon "Gentiles", had a huge formative impact on this aspiring nation. Mormon believers came to stay, not to settle, farm, mine, and move on, a cultural difference with a geopolitical impact. Behind and through every regional story is the persistent, consistent, and unrelenting genocide of Native Americans and the containment of the surviving few on reservations of the most marginal lands not wanted by white miners, farmers, or lumberers.

Further east, by far the central subject of the Middle of the century was how to reunite the broken Union. While Reconstruction is a huge historical and political topic, Meinig focuses in on the geographic component and how it affected American life, politics, and culture then and down the decades to today. He first briefly looks at the topic through the lens of the defeated Southern states as a conquered imperial holding, transitioning through periods of military rule (via military districts run by Northern officers), imperial agents attempting social and political reform, extraction of wealth by northern businesses, and resettlement and investment--although it may be the final stage of "exploration and description" of this seemingly new and exotic region in the midst of a new united America that is the most telling (see p. 189-193). Here we find that the South, now defined and delimited by its defeat and restoration, is

more a folk culture than a nation—“a great family”—a regionally rooted, interrelated, dispersed population united into political action when its basic social system was challenged by external forces. Defeated in mortal combat, forced to accept the end of slavery, that same broad body of people dug in, resisted, and with even greater unanimity eventually overturned further programs of social reform and reestablished firm control over its own sociopolitical affairs. All of that was accomplished by an upwelling of action in every locality, without central direction, and the resultant redefined racial caste system continued to be enforced by the people as a whole—that is, by the ruling people as a whole: White Southerners in every city, town, and countryside. Such folk solidarity was an expression of insecurity as well as conviction, for this new mode of social control, based on a suppression of civil rights and protected by a political armistice at the highest national level, was ever vulnerable to some renewal of attack from external forces—and from an upwelling of revolt from those suppressed. (p. 226)

When Reconstruction was rolled back by a federal government no longer energized in opposition to the separation of states, " 'the American people made the decision to have the white South substantially control its own destinies. . . . Local control of government and negro inequality had long been values' not only of Southern life but 'of American life nationally.' " (p. 209)

As the century turned to the 20th, ethnicity apart from color (in addition to blacks and native Americans, immigrants from China and Japan also faced violence and legal opposition) became a major geopolitical factor in America as immigrants poured into New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco. And joining the older primary sources (England, Ireland, Germany) came millions from southern and Eastern Europe seeking economic opportunities and affordable land in the sparsely populated regions of the country--even though many never moved beyond the growing port cities and settled in family and ethnic conclaves that replicated a small piece of their homeland in language, religion, occupation, and education. These "hyphenated Americans"--yes the term originates from this time period--spurred a reactionary nativism which attempted to limit immigration or force assimilation. The 1910 census reported that 35% of Americans were foreign born or first generation descendants of a foreign-born parent, and the distribution of that population shown on a map (p. 293) shows a startling near-universal dispersion of these newest Americans across the continent--except the near-total absence of immigrants in the former Confederate states. This blank space on the map is a silent reminder that while the assimilative powers of the clichéd "melting pot" contributed to America's greatness and growth as an integrated, heterogeneous, global power, it still held centers of nativism and racism close to its core.

As with the other volumes in Meinig's masterwork, I feel that even this lengthy review has given it short shrift; see for example, his section on Canada's own transcontinental journey that mirrored the United States from east to west even though both countries encountered geographic barriers that might have made north to south alignment more feasible (p. 327-347). He illustrates his data and arguments with many well-drawn maps, both contemporary and modern, includes a substantial bibliography by chapter, and footnotes specific quotations. While this is surely required textbook material for many university-level classes, it is also highly recommended for the general reader who is a deep student of the history of the United States who is seeking a view of the geographic influence on that history. I look forward to the final volume where Meinig continues his analysis up to the beginning of the 21st century.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with the other volumes, this is a fresh and interesting perspective on history of the United States (and areas impacted by its expansion). This volume contains an interesting discussion on the politics and economics of railroad development as well as an insightful discussion of the differences between regions that are sometimes lumped together as a singular “American West”. There is also a good description of the ambiguities of expansion across the Pacific and into the Caribbean. There are perhaps slightly more areas that are drier than in the previous volumes. Overall, a worthy contribution to this series.