27 results
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2. Just noticeable: erasing place in municipal water treatment in the U.S. during the interwar period.
- Author
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Spackman, Christy
- Subjects
- *
WASTEWATER treatment , *INTERWAR Period (1918-1939) - Abstract
For centuries noses, eyes, and mouths have assessed the safety of drinking water. Yet by the end of the long nineteenth century, the nascent professional water worker corps in the United States and Europe began to distance themselves from everyday sensory approaches to judging a water's potability. Historians and geographers have explored the rise of urban water infrastructures as well as shifting approaches to water analysis. However, the changing role of sensory analysis in erasing waters' biogeophysical histories, as well as the political ramifications of creating authoritative modes of sensory labor that exclude aesthetic evaluations of quality, remains relatively unexamined. This paper asks how water workers' efforts to standardize and make objective the embodied labor of managing municipal water shifted not only how sensory knowledge is made, but also who has access to sensory knowledge about place. Drawing on technical documents, scientific papers, and production manuals, I examine the emergence of a new standardized system for characterizing and mitigating off odors and flavors found in raw and treated water during the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. This analytical assemblage was built on the precepts of nineteenth-century Fechnerian psychophysics. Grounded in the idea that small increases in stimulation are proportionally accompanied by small increases in sensation, psychophysics offered a way to express and test the relationship between stimulus and experience by identifying the point at which a difference in stimuli was 'just noticeable'. Through attending to the role of tasting, smelling bodies as sites of scientific knowledge production, and as sites where scientific knowledge is called into question, I show that water workers used estimation of the ineffable to break away from or transcend locale. In the process, they made the water treatment laboratory into a space thoroughly embedded in place, even as they in turn set in motion efforts to remove place from the water sent to consumers throughout the provisioning system. • Industrial pollution increased unwanted tastes and odors in the municipal water supply. • Water workers adapted sensory analysis techniques based on thresholds of noticeability. • These techniques sought to mobilize a modernist gustatory rhetoric about potable water. • This rhetoric effaced, rather than highlighted, the shared nature of the watershed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
3. American imperial expansion and area studies without geography.
- Author
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Child, Elliott C. and Barnes, Trevor J.
- Subjects
- *
DECOLONIZATION , *GEOGRAPHY , *INTELLIGENCE service - Abstract
While the immediate post-Second World War years in Europe were about decolonisation, in the United States it was the opposite. Those years were about imperial expansion driven by Cold War imperatives. Led by the military, including US covert intelligence agencies, the social sciences were also enlisted, albeit frequently reconceived as the behavioural or human sciences. Geographical knowledge was incorporated too, but similarly reconfigured. A new disciplinary formation known as area studies was in ascendance. It represented a new way of conceiving the 'international' and provided a national infrastructure of expertise for managing the work of empire. However, it was typically not offered by geography departments, or taught by geographers. Rather, new, independent, regionally specific area departments burgeoned across American university campuses from 1945. Area studies had an especial early grip at Ivy League universities, which was ironic given that during the same period those universities were dismantling their conventional geography departments. Consequently, American geography and geographers for the most part did not contribute to shaping US post-war imperial expansion. This was despite the long historical involvement by geographers in previous imperial ventures, and, specifically, the significant participation of American geographers both within the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War. This paper examines early post-war American imperial expansion and area studies without geography. • Explores how social science supported American imperial expansion during the Cold War. • Identifies post-Second World War area studies as a crucial national infrastructure of knowledge. • Analyses national security funders' efforts to multiply and employ area experts. • Shows that area studies and geography rarely mixed in the 1940s and 1950s. • Argues that geography's absence from early area studies distinguishes American empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
- Full Text
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4. Mapping race and environment: geography's entanglements with Aryanism.
- Author
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Ashutosh, Ishan
- Subjects
- *
HUMAN geography , *RACE discrimination , *ENVIRONMENTAL impact analysis - Abstract
Abstract This article examines how theories of Aryanism influenced geographic theories of race and environmental influence. The argument is made that the entanglements between Aryanism and geographic theories of race provide a new site in assessing the history of geographic thought. It begins by illuminating the rise of Aryanism in colonial India. As it moved across time and space, Aryanism became a foundational element in racial science, and informed a number of disciplines, including geography. The majority of the article is devoted to exposing the influence of Aryanism in American geography from the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The paper finds that the influential geographers Arnold Guyot, Nathaniel Shaler, Friedrich Ratzel, Ellen Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington were all indebted to Aryanism in the production of their theories of race and the environment. Highlights • Uncovers the relationship between the discipline of Geography and Orientalism in colonial India. • Emphasizes the intersection of Aryanism and environmentalism in theories of race. • Reevaluates canonical American geographic scholarship. • Identifies the geography of Aryan ideologies across space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
5. Population control, public health, and development in mid twentieth century Latin America.
- Author
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Carter, Eric D.
- Subjects
- *
PUBLIC health , *BIRTH control , *FAMILY planning - Abstract
Abstract Despite the influence of neo-Malthusian thinking in international development and environmental policy during the mid twentieth century, this story is often told from a US-centered perspective, with population control policies seen to roll out from the world geopolitical centers to the 'Global South' via the influence of large development institutions. Latin American perspectives on the population control question are seldom considered, except to suggest that the Catholic Church provided consistent, organized opposition to the expansion of family planning services. In this paper, using an political-intellectual history approach, I explore how the population question intersected with interrelated development issues in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century: health and nutrition, food and agriculture, rural livelihoods, economic dependency, and women's rights. I focus on the relationship between public health crises and pro-natalist policies; the influences of the eugenics movement in supporting national population growth as a biopolitical strategy; anarcho-feminist thought that stressed the emancipatory potential of fertility control and new social roles for women; the Brazilian Josué de Castro's research on the causes of famine and malnutrition, which took a structuralist approach and explicitly rejected neo-Malthusian and other environmentally determinist approaches to understand the causes of poverty and hunger; and Latin American engagements with the international family planning and population control agenda in the 1960s. With this history in mind, we can trace alternative intellectual roots of political ecology's critique of neo-Malthusianism and other deterministic environment-development theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
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6. ‘The ignorance of the uneducated’: Ford Foundation philanthropy, the IIE, and the geographies of educational exchange.
- Author
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Brooks, Chay
- Subjects
- *
CHARITIES , *EDUCATIONAL exchanges , *COLD War, 1945-1991 , *CHARITIES -- History - Abstract
During the early years of the Cold War, the Ford Foundation became one of the largest philanthropic foundations of the twentieth century, using its vast wealth to engineer a world according to its own ideas and principles. Educational exchange was crucial to the Foundation's plans for global modernisation and progress. As part of this grand vision, the Foundation contracted the Institute of International Education (IIE) to co-ordinate a series of international educational exchanges. The IIE had begun under the stewardship of private philanthropy in the interwar period, and by the end of the Second World War, its largest philanthropic supporter was the Ford Foundation. This paper examines how the Ford Foundation and the IIE used education to induce cultural, economic and social changes at a global scale. Educational exchange provided a productive technology of philanthropic power tying the development of human competencies to the administration of global society. The paper outlines how strategic exchanges were imagined and funded by the Foundation and co-ordinated by the IIE as part of a project of modernisation and exposition of geopolitical and transnational power. The paper considers a brief case study of exchange projects in India which served as a tool of development and social engineering. An exploration of the nature of philanthropic projects during the early years of the Cold War casts a significant light on the exercise of power by non-state, transnational bodies and the geographical vocabularies used to explain and justify international educational projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
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7. Reporting oppression: mapping racial prejudice in Anti-Caste and Fraternity, 1888-1895.
- Author
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Bressey, Caroline
- Subjects
- *
PERIODICALS & society , *PERIODICAL publishing , *OPPRESSION , *PREJUDICES , *SEGREGATION , *IMPERIALISM ,RACE relations in Great Britain ,RACE relations in the United States ,BRITISH colonies - Abstract
This paper presents a close reading of the reports of racial oppression that appeared in issues of two periodicals, Anti-Caste and its successor Fraternity, between 1888 and 1895. Edited in Street, Somerset, these periodicals created an extensive political geographical imagination by mapping international cases of racial prejudice. Although critical of the British empire, neither Anti-Caste nor Fraternity demanded the destruction of the British empire. In a tactic similar to that used by early Pan-Africanists, the papers' narratives desired an end to the expansion of the British empire and an increase in the respect for and conditions of those who were ruled 'under the British Flag'. However, Anti-Caste's focus upon racial inequality across the United States as well as the British empire enabled it to create a distinctive critique of racial prejudice across the English-speaking world. Its criticism of the imperial project combined with support for human brotherhood allowed the paper to develop a framework for debates on racial prejudice that drew together criticisms of labour laws in India, the removal of people from their lands in Southern Africa, the racial segregation of public transport in the United States and the restriction of Chinese labour in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
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8. John Shary, Charles Pease, and contested irrigation landscapes in early-twentieth-century South Texas.
- Author
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Brannstrom, Christian
- Subjects
- *
IRRIGATION , *IRRIGATION water , *WATER pumps - Abstract
The paper contributes to notions of 'hybrid' historical geographies of irrigation by focusing on contested visions for irrigation in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Adding to geographical work using biography, notions of performance, and racialized landscapes, the paper analyzes debates between John Shary and Charles Pease. Shary and Pease were protagonists, respectively, of pumping water from the Rio Grande and a gravity scheme reliant on action by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The pumping system survived; the gravity system was never constructed. However, the debate between Shary and Pease illustrates tensions within the Anglo elite. The analysis focuses on three early-twentieth-century moments. The first is a 1918 crisis in Shary's irrigation company, followed by a 1927 debate between Shary and Pease over the flaws of the pumping system and benefits of gravity irrigation. Finally, the paper focuses on Shary and Pease's constructions of racialized landscapes that subordinated Hispanics as voters to be utilized for Shary's accumulation strategy, or as 'non-water users' that should be excluded from water politics. The paper argues that Shary and Pease projected similarly exclusionary social visions onto the irrigated landscape in spite of their differences on irrigation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
9. The Allison Commission and the national map: towards a Republic of Knowledge in late nineteenth-century America
- Author
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Kirsch, Scott
- Subjects
- *
UNITED States history , *GEOLOGICAL surveys , *TOPOGRAPHIC maps , *HISTORICAL geography , *TERRITORIAL jurisdiction , *HUMAN territoriality ,1865-1898 - Abstract
Abstract: From 1884 to 1886, the U.S. Congressional Allison Commission convened to address the administrative organization and escalating costs of the major federal scientific agencies, and to establish new modes of accountability to ensure their proper conduct. Much of the commission''s attention turned to the Geological Survey''s plans for the production of a geodetically accurate, national topographic map (in 2600 sheets), and the national geologic map that would follow the topographic work. While critics saw the national mapping program as an immense and inefficient scientific boondoggle, its advocates, notably its author, Survey Director John Wesley Powell, saw instead a tangible reflection of science''s republican virtue – a vision of the body politic founded on both the production and the democratic and geographical distribution of useful scientific information. This paper explores the scientific nature of territoriality in late nineteenth-century America by revisiting a moment when both the technical requirements and fiscal expenses of America''s new national mapping program were called into question. Through a close reading of the conflicts between Powell and the Alabama Representative, commission member, and future US Secretary of the Navy Hilary Abner Herbert, the paper examines the hearings as a complex hybrid of public sphere and formal legislative arena. The outcomes of these debates would have profound implications for the politics of scientific expertise amidst the rising American Leviathan, and for the changing dimensions of modern state territoriality and sovereignty. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
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10. The IGY and the ice sheet: surveying Antarctica
- Author
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Naylor, Simon, Dean, Katrina, and Siegert, Martin
- Subjects
- *
INTERNATIONAL Geophysical Year, 1957-1958 , *TRAVERSES (Surveying) , *COLD War, 1945-1991 , *GEOPOLITICS , *ICE sheets ,ANTARCTIC exploration - Abstract
Abstract: This paper considers the significance of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the development of new knowledge of the shape of the Antarctic bed surface and the ice sheet that covers it. It also situates the Antarctic geophysical work done during the IGY within a longer history that begins in the immediate post-WWII period and extends up to the 1970s. The paper pays particular attention to the US IGY seismic traverses, which were the centrepiece of US IGY activities in Antarctica. We argue that these traverses should be understood as part of a broader set of geopolitical, military and governmental strategies that the USA pursued through the IGY and afterwards. In this sense we agree with other students of Cold War science who suggest that the IGY was far from being the beginning of the end for geopolitics in Antarctica. Instead we demonstrate that US scientific activities in Antarctica during the IGY and after were a form of geopolitics in themselves. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2008
- Full Text
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11. A place to remember: scaling the walls of Angel Island immigration station
- Author
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Hoskins, Gareth
- Subjects
- *
LANDSCAPE architecture , *CONSTRUCTION contracts , *EMIGRATION & immigration - Abstract
Abstract: This paper considers the restoration and presentation of Angel Island Immigration Station, a federal facility in the San Francisco Bay that between 1910 and 1940 worked to prevent the arrival of Chinese laborers to the United States in accordance with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The production of Angel Island Immigration Station as a national historic landmark is delineated through the social construction of scale. I discuss efforts to achieve a leap in the scale of the site''s significance and how this brings forth new management regimes that change the format of the interpretation there. In particular, narrative construction, landscape design, and revised tours, insert a standardized story of Chinese exclusion into the national memory. This paper shows how the imperative to increase the scope of recognition—to petition nationally for status and funds—requires a repackaging of stories to affirm popular American ideals of freedom over those that challenge the nation''s persecution of Chinese immigrants. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2004
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12. Cartography and capitalism: George Clason and the mapping of western American development, 1903–1931.
- Author
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Wyckoff, William
- Subjects
- *
HISTORY of cartography , *CAPITALISM , *ECONOMIC development , *MAP design , *TWENTIETH century , *UNITED States history - Abstract
George Clason's self-help essays on achieving financial independence became accepted household wisdom to millions of Americans between 1925 and 1950. Less well known is Clason's legacy in building the largest commercial map company west of Chicago between 1903 and 1931. In his earlier life as a Denver-based map publisher and booster of western economic development, Clason produced millions of road maps, state maps, city maps, promotional circulars and maps for mining companies, land companies, and state and local governments. This paper explores how Clason's earlier career as a cartographer and map publisher reflected the same economic principles he made nationally famous in his later essays about saving money and building capital. I suggest that Clason's maps successfully blended multiple and distinctive genres of commercial mapping, forming a powerful cartographic narrative focused on promoting development in the West that reflected his own ideology oriented around a belief in progress, high modernism, and the merits of individual effort within a largely capitalistic economic system. I examine the strategic partnerships and business relationships Clason forged with private companies and state institutions and how textual and visual material within Clason's maps communicated enduring ideas about the West's economic potential and regional character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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13. Walking and talking through Walks and Talks: traveling in the English landscape with Frederick Law Olmsted, 1850 and 2011.
- Author
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Nelson, Garrett Dash
- Subjects
- *
LANDSCAPE architecture , *INTELLECTUAL development , *SOCIAL reformers , *HISTORY , *NINETEENTH century - Abstract
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is one of the most important figures in the history of American landscape architecture, conservation, and planning. Before he stumbled accidentally onto a career in park design, however, Olmsted was a dilettante gentleman farmer, social critic, and reformist man of letters. This paper considers the intellectual development of the early Olmsted by following his 1850 trip to England. It draws on two reservoirs of evidence: the documentary material in Olmsted's first book, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England ; and an experiment in historical geographical fieldwork undertaken by duplicating Olmsted's trip in May 2011. The essay argues that situating the ‘early Olmsted’ firmly within the intellectual history of antebellum social reform necessitates an interpretation of Olmsted's bourgeois republican radicalism which has been deemphasized in canonical histories of landscape architecture. It furthermore explores the category of mobility as an analytic and methodological tool, engaging with Olmsted's field practices in order to interrogate landscape as a experiential site of social and historical interpretation. Finally, it argues for the intellectual productivity of a fundamental tension between corporeality and transcendence intrinsic to the experience of landscape, a tension metaphorized within the very title ‘Walks and Talks.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
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14. History and heritage of two Midwestern towns: a toponymic-material approach.
- Author
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Fuchs, Stephan
- Subjects
- *
GEOGRAPHIC names , *MATERIAL culture , *HISTORICAL geography ,MINNESOTA state history ,KANSAS state history - Abstract
Scholarly interest in toponyms and material culture has been revived over the past decades through critical analyses of symbolic meanings and politics of spatial inscription. Place names and physical objects such as public sites, monuments, and buildings provide access to intricate aspects of history, memory, and place; yet toponymic and material studies often lack coherent integration. This paper shows how a combined toponymic-material approach can provide a more comprehensive analysis of commemorative processes and heritage construction at two German-founded towns in the American Midwest: New Ulm, Minnesota, and Eudora, Kansas. Based on qualitative interviews and additional background information, I discuss how various actors foster, assert, and challenge specific narratives of history and heritage through time. Patterns of (re)designing and (re)naming local commemorative features, such as streets, parks, and monuments, overlap and reinforce each other in continuous efforts of identifying an ‘authentic’ sense of the past and place through time. This includes associated commemorative practices and performances as well as broader discourses of (inter)national history and heritage. Integrating the analysis of physical and symbolic space, the toponymic-material approach provides a valuable perspective on the past and present of place on the local level and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015
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15. Property as a pillar of oil-based capitalism: the case of the Southern Pacific Company in Southern California, 1865–1926.
- Author
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Cooke, Jason
- Subjects
- *
PETROLEUM industry , *CAPITALISM , *TWENTIETH century , *UNITED States history ,PETROLEUM industry & economics - Abstract
Focusing on the energy history of Southern Pacific Company in Southern California between 1865 and 1926, this paper emphasizes the resilience of private property as a pillar of oil-based capitalism in the United States. As the western segment of the first transcontinental railroad, and as a consequence of land grants provided by the federal government, the Southern Pacific emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as the largest private owner of proven oil territory in California. Based on this ownership, the Southern Pacific became a major producer, consumer and transporter of oil-based energy in Southern California. Even when the federal government threatened this ownership as part of a strategy to conserve fossil fuels in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the rights of private property remained firm and continued to reinforce the dominance of the Southern Pacific as a major regional developer of oil-based energy. This article contributes to existing literature on the political economy of fossil fuels by emphasizing how the durability of private property has culminated in a strong inertia that sustains the dominance of oil-based capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
- Full Text
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16. Miss Semple meets the historians: the failed AHA 1907 conference on geography and history and what happened afterwards.
- Author
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Koelsch, William A.
- Subjects
- *
GEOGRAPHERS , *HISTORIANS , *INTERDISCIPLINARY approach to knowledge , *CONFERENCES & conventions , *ATTITUDE (Psychology) - Abstract
The year 2013 marked the sesquicentennial of the birth of Ellen Churchill Semple, at one time a towering figure in American geography. Like almost all of her geographer contemporaries in the first decade of the twentieth century, she was a stout defender of 'geographic influences' in history. This article examines a failed attempt by professional historians to give geographers a hearing at the American Historical Association in a critical 'Conference' on the relevance of geography to history, in 1907. Organized by Frederick Jackson Turner, it was the first time professional historians in America had given Miss Semple a public opportunity in which to defend her views. How and why it turned out to be an intellectual disaster, and how its major participants changed their views later, is the subject of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
- Full Text
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17. Malaria control in the Tennessee Valley Authority: health, ecology, and metanarratives of development.
- Author
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Carter, Eric D.
- Subjects
- *
MALARIA prevention , *MOSQUITO control , *PUBLIC health , *RURAL development , *REGIONAL planning , *ECOLOGY , *NEW Deal, 1933-1939 , *HISTORY , *TWENTIETH century , *HISTORY of public health - Abstract
Starting in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) created a globally influential model of regional development through centralized planning of massive public works to re-engineer social and natural systems in impoverished areas. TVA invested heavily in malaria control, since its own reservoirs created perfect breeding grounds for malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes. Eventually, both the TVA and malaria control would become key elements in an influential metanarrative in which an American ideology of 'technological modernism' dominated international development in the post-World War II era, until modern environmentalism and other social movements undermined the assumptions and goals of this ideology. This paper argues that a more subtle understanding of the history of ecological thought in regional development and malaria control challenges the dominant metanarrative. TVA malaria control actually reflected a tension between two important and competing ideological threads of TVA's master ethos of integrated regional development: socio-ecological holism and techno-scientific reductionism. Socio-ecological holism provided the grand vision for a transformation of nature and society, conceived as a unitary whole. But it was techno-scientific reductionism, which accommodated intimate, ecologically grounded knowledge of the habitats and behaviors of anopheles mosquitoes, that made malaria control possible. In this way, the TVA experience reflected theory and practice in malaria control internationally, before the advent of DDT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
- Full Text
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18. American capitalist experiments in revolutionary-era Russia.
- Author
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Domosh, Mona
- Subjects
- *
CAPITAL , *HEGEMONY , *INTERNATIONAL business enterprises , *RUSSIAN Revolution, 1917-1921 ,RUSSIAN Empire, 1613-1917 - Abstract
In this paper I document one particular moment in the making of the United States' hegemony by tracking the lives of two American businessmen in revolutionary-era Russia. Drawing on a diverse array of archival sources (letters, diaries, photo albums, memoirs), and focusing on the training, practices, encounters, degrees of embeddedness and personal situations of two men (Walter Dixon and Boies Hart), I suggest that revolutionary-era Russia served in some ways as a proving ground for testing the effectiveness of American corporate structure, geoeconomic imaginations, and commercial practices. Although these two businessmen were minor figures in the much larger story of the making of American hegemony, their experiences in revolutionary Russia - experiences that were mediated through geoeconomic imaginations, local knowledge of place, degrees of emheddedness, personal encounters with people, places and networks, early twentieth-century ideals of manliness, and feelings of trust, anxiety, and fear -- bring to life the uneven, chaotic, risky, and at times unsuccessful and violent ways that American capital began to move through difference in space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2013
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
19. A cartographic fade to black: mapping the destruction of urban Japan during World War II.
- Author
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Fedman, David and Karacas, Cary
- Subjects
- *
WORLD War II , *CARTOGRAPHY , *AERIAL bombing , *MILITARY maps , *CARTOGRAPHERS , *MILITARY planning , *AIR warfare , *HISTORY - Abstract
In this paper we examine the history, production, and use -- practical and rhetorical -- of maps created by the United States government during World War II as related to the development and execution of aerial bombing policies against Japan. Drawing from a range of maps and primary documents culled from libraries and archives in the United States, we argue that maps provide an important, and hitherto neglected, means through which to trace the exploration and eventual embrace of the incendiary bombing of Japan's cities. In particular, our aim is to show how maps, along with the men who made and used them, played a central role in the planning and prosecution of air raids on urban Japan. We also address the mobilization of American geographers into the war effort, the re-configuration of America's spatial intelligence community during World War II, and the ways in which maps were constructed in the context of total war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
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20. Cinema's milieux: governing the picture show in the United States during the Progressive era.
- Author
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Olund, Eric
- Subjects
- *
MOTION pictures , *MOTION picture censorship , *MOTION pictures & ethics , *PROGRESSIVISM (United States politics) , *SOCIAL movements , *HUMAN sexuality in motion pictures , *RACE in motion pictures , *MOTION picture history - Abstract
The regulation of American cinema during the Progressive era was an exercise in governmentality with multiple spatial rationalities operating through networks at multiple scales. Although produced and distributed nationally, moving pictures were consumed locally. The National Board of Censorship governed movie content from New York, where most major film producers were headquartered at that time, yet it was dependent upon the activities of social reformers and officials in cities across the country in monitoring manufacturers' compliance with its decisions. But as those correspondents often regarded the image on the screen as intimately associated with other aspects of the movie-going experience, local efforts to regulate film often went further, depending upon local concerns about spectators. This paper explores how cinema was problematized in Atlanta and Minneapolis, two regional centers with different sexual and racial politics. It does so by building on recent discussions of spatial rationalities of moral reform efforts, and in this case, how tensions between generative and vitalist spatial rationalities conspired to produce a variable geography of cinema regulation that was networked and multi-scalar, and how these experiments in regulating a new medium of visual communication began to articulate a distinctive perceptual rationality of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
21. The other cold war: the United States and Greenland's ice sheet environment, 1948-1966.
- Author
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Martin-Nielsen, Janet
- Subjects
- *
MILITARY bases & the environment , *COLD War, 1945-1991 , *MILITARY research , *GLACIOLOGY , *COLD weather conditions , *LOW temperature (Weather) , *ICE sheets , *MILITARY history , *MILITARY geography ,20TH century United States armed forces - Abstract
During the early Cold War, no part of the Arctic was as important to the United States' strategic interests as Greenland: situated on the shortest straight-line route between the industrial centers of the two superpowers, Greenland was integral to North American continental security. The US desire to control Greenland, however, was complicated by the island's isolated geography, harsh climate and barren landscape. Between 1948 and 1966, US forces in Greenland were entrenched in the 'other cold war': the struggle with the ice sheet environment which threatened to impede American capabilities in the region. This paper explores the 'other cold war' through two case studies: US scientific efforts to understand and cope with polar whiteouts and the plastic deformation of ice. These case studies illuminate a struggle between two philosophical approaches to nature: a brash, aggressive approach which aimed to conquer the Greenland environment, and a more nuanced approach which aimed to collaborate with that environment. I show that the second approach won out as Greenland's exceptional geography and environment forced the US military to reassess its relationship with nature: rather than striving for control over the island space, US military personnel ultimately chose strategic cooperation with that space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
22. Place-based corporate hegemony: General Electric in Tell City, Indiana, 1943–1947
- Author
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Lewis, Robert
- Subjects
- *
SALE of business enterprises , *PRIVATIZATION , *GOVERNMENT ownership , *FACTORIES , *SOCIOLOGY of corporations , *HISTORY , *FINANCE ,SOCIAL aspects ,UNITED States politics & government, 1945-1953 - Abstract
This paper examines the dynamics behind the selling of a federally owned World War II factory in Tell City, Indiana in 1946 and 1947. The federal agency charged with disposing of wartime plant, the War Assets Administration, reversed its decision to sell the factory to a small innovative company, Electra-Voice, selling it instead to the giant electrical equipment manufacturer, General Electric. What would make federal administrators who were part of a powerful liberal state apparatus committed to economic competition and anti-monopoly change their mind? The answer lies in what I call place-based corporate hegemony. Probing the material consequences of everyday action, place-based corporate hegemony revolves around the formation of alliances based on axiomatic values, the continued appeal of these values, the redistribution of symbolic and material resources, and the incorporation of threatening elements. Deploying a range of archival materials I show how the concerted efforts of the community, business organizations, politicians and unions as well as General Electric to question the initial decision forced the state to rethink and change its decision. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
23. Flies, manure, and window screens: medical entomology and environmental reform in early-twentieth-century US cities
- Author
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Biehler, Dawn Day
- Subjects
- *
HISTORICAL geography , *INSECTS as carriers of disease , *FLIES as carriers of disease , *ENTOMOLOGY , *POPULATION biology , *PUBLIC health , *HEALTH policy , *MANURES , *ENVIRONMENTAL policy , *GOVERNMENT policy - Abstract
Abstract: This paper traces responses to house flies in US cities as health departments attempted to control pollution and disease in the early twentieth century. It speaks to other historical geographies about the state, citizens, and the urban environment by showing how medical entomology prescribed contradictory changes to civic and domestic space, and how urban people and nature resisted these changes. With the advent of medical entomology, health reformers came to see house flies as agents that wove the entire city together as an interconnected ecology, carrying diseases from neighborhood to neighborhood and across the threshold of the home. But different reformers argued for quite distinct exercises of power in the urban landscape and ecological processes. Some physicians and entomologists argued that the state must modernize networks of fly-breeding organic matter, most notably horse manure and human waste. Such interventions were intended to be preventive and holistic, and aimed to protect all city dwellers. Other reformers, however, doubted the capacity of the state to tame material flows of waste, and instead sought changes to domestic space that would require householders – especially women – to shore up the boundaries of the house against flies. When city governments adopted these distinct interventions they encountered quite distinct sorts of resistance because of the house fly''s tight links with urban nature and domestic practices. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
24. Public health, cooperatives, local regulation, and the development of modern milk policy: the Chicago milkshed, 1900–1940
- Author
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Block, Daniel R.
- Subjects
- *
AGRICULTURAL policy , *DAIRY industry , *DAIRY laws , *PUBLIC health , *RURAL geography , *HISTORY ,CHICAGO (Ill.). Dept. of Health - Abstract
Agricultural policy in the United States is often structured around conflicts and relationships within particular production regions. These regional solutions may evolve into national policies. This paper explores a historical example of this, the development of fluid milk policy and the fluid milk economy in the Chicago milkshed between 1900 and the New Deal. This example is particularly interesting because it was part of the rise of the post-World War II modern food system. Both urban and rural groups were important in this development. Urban groups took a particular interest in milk production and regulation due to its importance as a nutritious but highly perishable staple. Rural groups responded to urban attempts to control production practices by organizing cooperatives. Negotiations and strikes resulted in an agreement in 1929 that was positive for farmers, the Chicago Department of Health, and other major entities in the milkshed. It attempted to place regulatory barriers around the milkshed. However, it soon failed due to improvements in transportation technology and new distribution systems that allowed for cheaper retail prices. The group then proposed a marketing plan to the USDA, which became the ancestor of the federal milk marketing order program. This story sheds light on the manner in which local interest groups and internal politics within the U.S. Department of Agriculture combined to shape New Deal agricultural legislation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2009
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
25. From Siam to New York: Jacques May and the ‘foundation’ of medical geography
- Author
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Brown, Tim and Moon, Graham
- Subjects
- *
GEOGRAPHY , *WORLD health - Abstract
Abstract: The history of medical geography is marked by a search for ancestors. The story usually begins in the writing of Hippocrates before re-emerging in the works of 18th and 19th century practitioners. In recent years, historical geographers have called for the destabilising of such assertions of lineage and descent. This paper offers a reconsideration of the history of medical geography through an exploration of the often hidden connections and intersections that have helped to frame the future trajectory of the sub-discipline. More specifically, we focus on the important contribution made by Dr Jacques Meyer May and offer a complex and multi-layered account that examines the close interweaving of his work as a colonial surgeon and specialist in tropical medicine and his role as a medical geographer in the United States. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
- Published
- 2004
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
26. Landscape, ideology, and religion: a geography of Ocean Grove, New Jersey.
- Author
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Schmelzkopf, Karen
- Subjects
- *
RELIGIOUS communities , *METHODIST Church - Abstract
In this paper, I examine Ocean Grove, New Jersey, a religious community established in 1869 by the Methodist Church as a camp meeting site. The founders selected a location and designed the physical and cultural landscapes according to an ideology of perfectionism, autonomy, exclusion, and homogeneity. Even though the community has experienced dramatic changes in the last fifty years, I argue that the physical, cultural, and political geography of Ocean Grove has served to perpetuate this ideology. However, I also argue that even though it is such a singular place, in accordance with Harvey's claim that all places must accommodate to capital accumulation, Ocean Grove's history shows examples of some quite familiar responses to a larger system of political, social, cultural, and economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2002
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
27. Conference report: Eastern Historical Geography Association, Breckenridge, Colorado, 27‐30 September 2001.
- Author
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Bowen, Dawn S.
- Subjects
- *
CONFERENCES & conventions , *ASSOCIATIONS, institutions, etc. , *HISTORY of geography - Abstract
Highlights the Eastern Historical Geography Association conference in Breckenridge, Colorado. Theme of the conference; Focus of the paper sessions and the conference field trips; Exploration of the connections that exist between the east and west in North America.
- Published
- 2002
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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