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American Capitals: A Historical Geography
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
What matters most in remembering these tensions in colonial discourses is not so much any fine-grained distinctions that might enable some colonizers to be ‘let off the hook’ by apologists for Empire, as the ways in which such tensions were exploited by Indigenous peoples themselves. The adoption by Indigenous peoples of some aspects of humanitarian ‘protection’, such as Christianity, literacy and new agricultural practices, in places like the Coranderrk reserve in Victoria, New Norcia in Western Australia, the Grand River Territory in Ontario, and the Kat River settlement in the Eastern Cape could often be a way of resisting genocidal settler policies, and Lawson himself admits that his focus does not encompass such Indigenous agency. Much of the first half of the book offers a rendition of events well-rehearsed in the Australian historiography, most notably the ‘Black War’ of the late 1820se1830s, although Lawson does try to keep one eye at least on the understanding of those events among the British metropolitan reading public, and their direction by the Colonial Office in London, rather than the intricacies of the war itself. The intent is to demonstrate that Britons ‘at home’ knew full well the genocidal implications of policies such as the Black Line, through which settler militia and regular troops attempted to round up the whole island’s surviving Aboriginal population, and Robinson’s ‘final solution’ of ‘conciliation’ and removal to Flinders Island. Ultimate Aboriginal eradication was, Lawson claims, widely understood in Britain as being an inevitable, if regrettable, consequence of the very necessary spread of a superior people and civilization. One of Lawson’s targets here is the narrative deployed by historians such as Niall Ferguson, for whom the genocide in Tasmania was at least isolated rather than continent-wide as in the USA, fundamentally because of the restraining hand of a liberal British government. For Lawson, however, governmental powerlessness to prevent genocide in this instance ‘resulted not from the distances of the early-nineteenth century Empire, but from the refusal of the British government to face the logic of its own policies. The Colonial Office consistently believed that colonial development was the means of saving indigenous peoples, when it was actually the root of their dislocation and destruction’ (p. 203e204). Ferguson’s implication that no continent-wide genocide took place in the British Empire would itself, of course, be challenged by many Australian historians and Aboriginal activists, but Lawson’s focus on Tasmania alone does not allow for such a more expansive critique. It is in the second half of the book that Lawson really ‘gets going’, when he is able move on from a rendition of events largely in Tasmania to develop a focus on Britain. This, to my mind, is the most original part of the book since it challenges the ‘assumed separation of a destructive, indeed genocidal, Empire from its British home’ (p. 127). Lawson begins by suggesting that, as the first empirical example of a supposedly ‘dying race’, Tasmania’s Aboriginal people loomed large in mid- to late-nineteenth-century British discourse about their own inevitable superiority. His analysis moves across various media through which events in Tasmania were interpreted for metropolitan purposes, including newspapers, travel writing, art exhibitions, museum displays, and the scientific appropriation of bodily remains. Consistently, metropolitan audiences learned the lesson from Tasmania that, much as it might be regretted, such was their power that other races would simply fade away before them as they spread their influence around the world. The ‘perception of Britain at the apex of human civilisation’, he argues, thus ‘relied on the memory (and celebration) of genocide’ (p. 162). Lawson is at pains to point out that it is not the case that metropolitan Britons denied genocide; it is rather that they proclaimed it as a feature of their empire and put it to use in various ways. With any individual culpability assigned to ‘rogue’ settler elements ‘out there’, with the
105
metropolitan state seen as a (perhaps naive) restraining hand, and yet with the fundamental inability of certain races to cope with the modern world as its core feature, the story of Aboriginal Tasmania’s ‘disappearance’ became a touchstone of an imperial worldview. Britons were the driving force of modernity and progress, with all its attendant costs for those who resisted it, as well as its preponderant benefits for those capable of appreciating them. Such a worldview has taken its most recent form in British museums’ and universities’ attempts, ended only very recently, to retain the human remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people against the will of their descendant communities. Lawson’s analysis concludes fittingly with an account of these neo-colonial struggles. In this debate, Lawson points out, some who held out against repatriation even used ‘the idea of a successful genocide. to deny the rights of a living community in the present’ by declaring that there were no authentic Aboriginal Tasmanians to whom human remains could legitimately be returned (p. 184). Fortunately, though, the positions which Lawson critiques ultimately lost ground to more moderate and compromised stances, brought about largely by Indigenous activism: the human remains held in Britain have all now been returned. His book, as he puts it, ‘has a live political purpose, which asks that Britain confront the implications of its genocidal past, rather than continuing to wallow in a genocidal past in Europe’ (p. xxi). One can only applaud his attempt to relocate the spatial responsibility for genocide. Alan Lester University of Sussex, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.017
Christian Montès, American Capitals: A Historical Geography. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014, 394 pages, US$65 hardcover. French geographer Christian Montès has written a truly comprehensive account of America’s state capitals. He focuses on how capitals were selected (chapters 3e5) and how they evolved (chapters 6e9). His research is so thorough that this book will surely become the definitive study on the subject. To determine how state capitals were selected, Montès analyzed 163 (p. 85) temporary and permanent capitals e each of the 50 states had an average of 3.84 capitals (p. 63) since colonial times. He identified 255 stated causes (p. 85) at play in their selections. We can simplify here the wealth of detail Montès presents by noting only his findings on the selection of the 50 permanent capitals (Table 5.3). Montès identified the seven major reasons behind the selection of the USA’s 50 current capitals. The three leading reasons and their percentages were centrality/accessibility (34.8), politics (30.3), and the economy (23.6), trailed by defense (4.5), entry point (establishment of a first presence, 2.25), religion (2.25), and antilarge city sentiment (2.25). Montès asks the interesting question, what did these reasons mean geographically? For his answer, he sorted the 50 capitals into five spatial categories shown graphically: ‘stability’ accounted for 8 capitals, like Boston, that had not moved; ‘westward centrality’ explained 20 capitals like Albany; ‘rotating’ stood for 5 capitals like Providence; ‘readjustments’ explained 7 capitals including Annapolis; and ‘apparently erratic’ characterized 10 capitals that included Sacramento. Gleaned largely from a wealth of secondary literature were also the author’s findings on the evolution of state capitals. Montès
106
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
reported (p. 7) that 39 of the 50 state capitals were selected during the nineteenth century, 35 of them before 1861. Montès found (chapter 6) that before 1950 being selected a permanent state capital brought social importance to the capital community but not necessarily demographic and economic growth. Before 1950 state capitals grew less quickly relative to other centers in the American urban hierarchy. But after the 1950s (chapter 7), as federal and state budgets expanded, state capitals tended to catch up economically and demographically. Capitals were better positioned to take the ‘postindustrial train’ (p. 222) that led to expansion in air transportation, financial control, and the high technology sector. Notable examples are Atlanta, Austin, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Denver, and MinneapoliseSt Paul. Since the 1950s ‘urban quality’, notes Montès (p. 251), has overtaken size as a measure of success for America’s capitals. This book presents so much detail about so many temporary and permanent capitals that I began to wonder how reliable the index might be for a reader interested in the capitals of just one state. I used my adopted state of Oklahoma e the only state to have had its capital move in the twentieth century (p. 79) e and its two capitals, Guthrie and Oklahoma City, as a test. As I read each page, I looked for some substantive mention of Guthrie and Oklahoma City, which occurred 19 times. I then turned to the index to see whether page numbers were given under Guthrie or Oklahoma City for those 19 citings. The index omitted reference to these two communities only six times (pp. 79, 134, 144, 154, 221e22, 230). This one example suggests, then, that the index, while not perfect, is reasonably good. American Capitals is well written by a very well-informed author. The analysis is presented in dozens of informative tables, many innovative graphics, one complex summary model (p. 157), and three maps: the 50 state capitals (p. 2); the patterns of their migrations (p. 64); and their trade areas as well as those of other urban areas in 1905 after Meinig (p. 192). My one criticism is that Montès did not include more maps. For example, how did the layout of Indianapolis reflect that of Washington, DC (p. 29)? What did all the detail about New Castle, Delaware (pp. 296e297), or any number of other case studies, look like spatially? And what were the locations of those 113 communities that lost out in the selection of capitals? Richard L. Nostrand University of Oklahoma, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.030
Stanley W. Trimble, Historical Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the Upper Mississippi Valley Hill Country. Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2013, xlviii þ 242 pages, US$93.95 hardcover. For thirty-nine years, the geographer Stanley Trimble has been busy photographing, mapping, and otherwise studying what seems like every last square inch of ground in the Upper Mississippi Hill Country. Sometimes called Coulee Country or Bluff Country, this region is a section of hills surrounding the Mississippi River extending through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and ending in Illinois. Today its sylvan hills and vales tend to obscure a deeper, more tragic history of soil erosion and landscape degradation that unfolded early in the twentieth century. Trimble’s book is a historical geography of this land that traces its fall and ultimate recovery and transformation into the ‘God’s Country’ that the local people sometimes call it today.
The story Trimble tells goes something like this. In the early nineteenth century European settlement of the region began as lead miners staked claims in the area of Galena, Illinois, and then moved north. Lead mining contributed to changes in the landscape, but it was the development of agriculture that had the most impact in terms of soil erosion and sedimentation. Wheat was the first major cash crop. It reached a peak in production in the 1880s and was followed by corn and soybeans, row crops that opened more soil to the impact of rainfall and thus set the stage for more erosion. Compounding the erosion problem was the US rectangular survey. The imposition of rectilinear logic on the land at times encouraged farmers to plow up and down the terrain’s slopes, creating channels that sent more soil cascading off the land. Adding to the land’s woes was the fact that the settlers, who hailed from Western Europe, were literally out of their element in that they had no experience dealing with the amount and intensity of rainfall that characterized this landscape. Trimble points out that a magnitude one-in-a-hundred-year storm in Britain (that is, a storm with a 1 percent chance of occurring in a given year) was ‘about equal in magnitude to 1-year storms of the Hill Country’ (p. 10). Meanwhile, the crop rotation being practiced proved inadequate and the addition of cattle and other grazing animals only complicated matters. For all these reasons, by the early twentieth century the land deteriorated as flooding and erosion proliferated, devastating, in some cases, entire towns such as Fairwater, Minnesota. But then a period of reform set in. During the 1930s, soil conservation measures were implemented. Agricultural reform led to the replacement of rectangular patterns with contour ones and rates of soil erosion tumbled downward by the 1970s. The advent of no-till farming the following decade also helped to lessen soil compaction. The degradation of the land was brought to a halt and, miraculously, productivity actually increased at the same time. Indeed, Trimble points out that the ‘the higher the productivity, the lower the erosion rates’ (p. 51). This book is an important and incredibly well documented study written by a scholar with a deep devotion to this Midwestern environment. The volume is lavishly illustrated and many of the images are not just arresting but drive home the book’s point about the spectacular physical changes that have occurred over the course of the last hundred years. Trimble concludes, not surprisingly for someone trained in geography, that the extreme climate and slope of the land structured the way history unfolded, though he is careful not to argue for any simple determinism in this regard. He notes that mechanization was not the culprit behind the land’s decline, but rather more rudimentary instruments of farming powered with animals. And he, of course, champions the fact that ‘while humans were responsible for the environmental degradation of the Hill Country, they were also responsible for the almost miraculous recovery of the region’ (p. 208). Trimble shows that a well-crafted set of government policies for relating to the land can help to manage it in a way that both improves productivity and stems soil erosion. As historical geography, the book is a resounding and unqualified success. From the historian’s perspective, however, it suffers from a flaw that is worth spelling out, not to be petty, but because there is an element of prescription implicit in this volume. Which is to say that before people begin to cite Trimble’s work as an argument that higher productivity is not simply good economics but good ecology, we need to pause and consider some historical matters. I should say, first, that the historian will find Trimble’s periodization of landscape change not just plausible, but indeed convincing. But it is on the issue of historical contextualization that the book falters somewhat. Though Trimble is clear that better land management practices were put into place beginning in the 1930s, he never actually offers an explanation for why it was during the
What matters most in remembering these tensions in colonial discourses is not so much any fine-grained distinctions that might enable some colonizers to be ‘let off the hook’ by apologists for Empire, as the ways in which such tensions were exploited by Indigenous peoples themselves. The adoption by Indigenous peoples of some aspects of humanitarian ‘protection’, such as Christianity, literacy and new agricultural practices, in places like the Coranderrk reserve in Victoria, New Norcia in Western Australia, the Grand River Territory in Ontario, and the Kat River settlement in the Eastern Cape could often be a way of resisting genocidal settler policies, and Lawson himself admits that his focus does not encompass such Indigenous agency. Much of the first half of the book offers a rendition of events well-rehearsed in the Australian historiography, most notably the ‘Black War’ of the late 1820se1830s, although Lawson does try to keep one eye at least on the understanding of those events among the British metropolitan reading public, and their direction by the Colonial Office in London, rather than the intricacies of the war itself. The intent is to demonstrate that Britons ‘at home’ knew full well the genocidal implications of policies such as the Black Line, through which settler militia and regular troops attempted to round up the whole island’s surviving Aboriginal population, and Robinson’s ‘final solution’ of ‘conciliation’ and removal to Flinders Island. Ultimate Aboriginal eradication was, Lawson claims, widely understood in Britain as being an inevitable, if regrettable, consequence of the very necessary spread of a superior people and civilization. One of Lawson’s targets here is the narrative deployed by historians such as Niall Ferguson, for whom the genocide in Tasmania was at least isolated rather than continent-wide as in the USA, fundamentally because of the restraining hand of a liberal British government. For Lawson, however, governmental powerlessness to prevent genocide in this instance ‘resulted not from the distances of the early-nineteenth century Empire, but from the refusal of the British government to face the logic of its own policies. The Colonial Office consistently believed that colonial development was the means of saving indigenous peoples, when it was actually the root of their dislocation and destruction’ (p. 203e204). Ferguson’s implication that no continent-wide genocide took place in the British Empire would itself, of course, be challenged by many Australian historians and Aboriginal activists, but Lawson’s focus on Tasmania alone does not allow for such a more expansive critique. It is in the second half of the book that Lawson really ‘gets going’, when he is able move on from a rendition of events largely in Tasmania to develop a focus on Britain. This, to my mind, is the most original part of the book since it challenges the ‘assumed separation of a destructive, indeed genocidal, Empire from its British home’ (p. 127). Lawson begins by suggesting that, as the first empirical example of a supposedly ‘dying race’, Tasmania’s Aboriginal people loomed large in mid- to late-nineteenth-century British discourse about their own inevitable superiority. His analysis moves across various media through which events in Tasmania were interpreted for metropolitan purposes, including newspapers, travel writing, art exhibitions, museum displays, and the scientific appropriation of bodily remains. Consistently, metropolitan audiences learned the lesson from Tasmania that, much as it might be regretted, such was their power that other races would simply fade away before them as they spread their influence around the world. The ‘perception of Britain at the apex of human civilisation’, he argues, thus ‘relied on the memory (and celebration) of genocide’ (p. 162). Lawson is at pains to point out that it is not the case that metropolitan Britons denied genocide; it is rather that they proclaimed it as a feature of their empire and put it to use in various ways. With any individual culpability assigned to ‘rogue’ settler elements ‘out there’, with the
105
metropolitan state seen as a (perhaps naive) restraining hand, and yet with the fundamental inability of certain races to cope with the modern world as its core feature, the story of Aboriginal Tasmania’s ‘disappearance’ became a touchstone of an imperial worldview. Britons were the driving force of modernity and progress, with all its attendant costs for those who resisted it, as well as its preponderant benefits for those capable of appreciating them. Such a worldview has taken its most recent form in British museums’ and universities’ attempts, ended only very recently, to retain the human remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people against the will of their descendant communities. Lawson’s analysis concludes fittingly with an account of these neo-colonial struggles. In this debate, Lawson points out, some who held out against repatriation even used ‘the idea of a successful genocide. to deny the rights of a living community in the present’ by declaring that there were no authentic Aboriginal Tasmanians to whom human remains could legitimately be returned (p. 184). Fortunately, though, the positions which Lawson critiques ultimately lost ground to more moderate and compromised stances, brought about largely by Indigenous activism: the human remains held in Britain have all now been returned. His book, as he puts it, ‘has a live political purpose, which asks that Britain confront the implications of its genocidal past, rather than continuing to wallow in a genocidal past in Europe’ (p. xxi). One can only applaud his attempt to relocate the spatial responsibility for genocide. Alan Lester University of Sussex, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.017
Christian Montès, American Capitals: A Historical Geography. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014, 394 pages, US$65 hardcover. French geographer Christian Montès has written a truly comprehensive account of America’s state capitals. He focuses on how capitals were selected (chapters 3e5) and how they evolved (chapters 6e9). His research is so thorough that this book will surely become the definitive study on the subject. To determine how state capitals were selected, Montès analyzed 163 (p. 85) temporary and permanent capitals e each of the 50 states had an average of 3.84 capitals (p. 63) since colonial times. He identified 255 stated causes (p. 85) at play in their selections. We can simplify here the wealth of detail Montès presents by noting only his findings on the selection of the 50 permanent capitals (Table 5.3). Montès identified the seven major reasons behind the selection of the USA’s 50 current capitals. The three leading reasons and their percentages were centrality/accessibility (34.8), politics (30.3), and the economy (23.6), trailed by defense (4.5), entry point (establishment of a first presence, 2.25), religion (2.25), and antilarge city sentiment (2.25). Montès asks the interesting question, what did these reasons mean geographically? For his answer, he sorted the 50 capitals into five spatial categories shown graphically: ‘stability’ accounted for 8 capitals, like Boston, that had not moved; ‘westward centrality’ explained 20 capitals like Albany; ‘rotating’ stood for 5 capitals like Providence; ‘readjustments’ explained 7 capitals including Annapolis; and ‘apparently erratic’ characterized 10 capitals that included Sacramento. Gleaned largely from a wealth of secondary literature were also the author’s findings on the evolution of state capitals. Montès
106
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 47 (2015) 94e120
reported (p. 7) that 39 of the 50 state capitals were selected during the nineteenth century, 35 of them before 1861. Montès found (chapter 6) that before 1950 being selected a permanent state capital brought social importance to the capital community but not necessarily demographic and economic growth. Before 1950 state capitals grew less quickly relative to other centers in the American urban hierarchy. But after the 1950s (chapter 7), as federal and state budgets expanded, state capitals tended to catch up economically and demographically. Capitals were better positioned to take the ‘postindustrial train’ (p. 222) that led to expansion in air transportation, financial control, and the high technology sector. Notable examples are Atlanta, Austin, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Denver, and MinneapoliseSt Paul. Since the 1950s ‘urban quality’, notes Montès (p. 251), has overtaken size as a measure of success for America’s capitals. This book presents so much detail about so many temporary and permanent capitals that I began to wonder how reliable the index might be for a reader interested in the capitals of just one state. I used my adopted state of Oklahoma e the only state to have had its capital move in the twentieth century (p. 79) e and its two capitals, Guthrie and Oklahoma City, as a test. As I read each page, I looked for some substantive mention of Guthrie and Oklahoma City, which occurred 19 times. I then turned to the index to see whether page numbers were given under Guthrie or Oklahoma City for those 19 citings. The index omitted reference to these two communities only six times (pp. 79, 134, 144, 154, 221e22, 230). This one example suggests, then, that the index, while not perfect, is reasonably good. American Capitals is well written by a very well-informed author. The analysis is presented in dozens of informative tables, many innovative graphics, one complex summary model (p. 157), and three maps: the 50 state capitals (p. 2); the patterns of their migrations (p. 64); and their trade areas as well as those of other urban areas in 1905 after Meinig (p. 192). My one criticism is that Montès did not include more maps. For example, how did the layout of Indianapolis reflect that of Washington, DC (p. 29)? What did all the detail about New Castle, Delaware (pp. 296e297), or any number of other case studies, look like spatially? And what were the locations of those 113 communities that lost out in the selection of capitals? Richard L. Nostrand University of Oklahoma, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.030
Stanley W. Trimble, Historical Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the Upper Mississippi Valley Hill Country. Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2013, xlviii þ 242 pages, US$93.95 hardcover. For thirty-nine years, the geographer Stanley Trimble has been busy photographing, mapping, and otherwise studying what seems like every last square inch of ground in the Upper Mississippi Hill Country. Sometimes called Coulee Country or Bluff Country, this region is a section of hills surrounding the Mississippi River extending through the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and ending in Illinois. Today its sylvan hills and vales tend to obscure a deeper, more tragic history of soil erosion and landscape degradation that unfolded early in the twentieth century. Trimble’s book is a historical geography of this land that traces its fall and ultimate recovery and transformation into the ‘God’s Country’ that the local people sometimes call it today.
The story Trimble tells goes something like this. In the early nineteenth century European settlement of the region began as lead miners staked claims in the area of Galena, Illinois, and then moved north. Lead mining contributed to changes in the landscape, but it was the development of agriculture that had the most impact in terms of soil erosion and sedimentation. Wheat was the first major cash crop. It reached a peak in production in the 1880s and was followed by corn and soybeans, row crops that opened more soil to the impact of rainfall and thus set the stage for more erosion. Compounding the erosion problem was the US rectangular survey. The imposition of rectilinear logic on the land at times encouraged farmers to plow up and down the terrain’s slopes, creating channels that sent more soil cascading off the land. Adding to the land’s woes was the fact that the settlers, who hailed from Western Europe, were literally out of their element in that they had no experience dealing with the amount and intensity of rainfall that characterized this landscape. Trimble points out that a magnitude one-in-a-hundred-year storm in Britain (that is, a storm with a 1 percent chance of occurring in a given year) was ‘about equal in magnitude to 1-year storms of the Hill Country’ (p. 10). Meanwhile, the crop rotation being practiced proved inadequate and the addition of cattle and other grazing animals only complicated matters. For all these reasons, by the early twentieth century the land deteriorated as flooding and erosion proliferated, devastating, in some cases, entire towns such as Fairwater, Minnesota. But then a period of reform set in. During the 1930s, soil conservation measures were implemented. Agricultural reform led to the replacement of rectangular patterns with contour ones and rates of soil erosion tumbled downward by the 1970s. The advent of no-till farming the following decade also helped to lessen soil compaction. The degradation of the land was brought to a halt and, miraculously, productivity actually increased at the same time. Indeed, Trimble points out that the ‘the higher the productivity, the lower the erosion rates’ (p. 51). This book is an important and incredibly well documented study written by a scholar with a deep devotion to this Midwestern environment. The volume is lavishly illustrated and many of the images are not just arresting but drive home the book’s point about the spectacular physical changes that have occurred over the course of the last hundred years. Trimble concludes, not surprisingly for someone trained in geography, that the extreme climate and slope of the land structured the way history unfolded, though he is careful not to argue for any simple determinism in this regard. He notes that mechanization was not the culprit behind the land’s decline, but rather more rudimentary instruments of farming powered with animals. And he, of course, champions the fact that ‘while humans were responsible for the environmental degradation of the Hill Country, they were also responsible for the almost miraculous recovery of the region’ (p. 208). Trimble shows that a well-crafted set of government policies for relating to the land can help to manage it in a way that both improves productivity and stems soil erosion. As historical geography, the book is a resounding and unqualified success. From the historian’s perspective, however, it suffers from a flaw that is worth spelling out, not to be petty, but because there is an element of prescription implicit in this volume. Which is to say that before people begin to cite Trimble’s work as an argument that higher productivity is not simply good economics but good ecology, we need to pause and consider some historical matters. I should say, first, that the historian will find Trimble’s periodization of landscape change not just plausible, but indeed convincing. But it is on the issue of historical contextualization that the book falters somewhat. Though Trimble is clear that better land management practices were put into place beginning in the 1930s, he never actually offers an explanation for why it was during the