American Geographers Research Articles

Asylum and Mass Detention at the U.S.–Mexico Border during COVID-19

The study (URL1) is the work of two scholars living and researching in the United States. Jeremy Slack is a lecturer of geography at the University of Texas (UTEP) in El Paso. He got his doctoral degree at the University of Arizona, his main research area is crimes in connection with state border (human and drug trafficking, violation of rights of other persons) and the problems in connection with procedures of the state power (deportation, brake of family contacts). Josiah Heyman is professor of anthropology at UTEP. The main direction ofhis work is the examination of the perpetrator side of illegal border crossing (mainly between the USA and Mexico) and of the acts of the state power handling these actions and further a confrontation of both sides. In his studies is presented the value order of his master, Eric C. Wolf (URL2), who criticised violence connected to authorities. The publication appeared in the „Journal of Latin American Geography”, which has been published by the Latin American Geographic Conference (CLAG) and has been distributed by the University of Texas Press since its founding in 1970 (URL3). H-index: 20. Actuality of the topic is indisputable, as controlled and uncontrolled global migration and the global human pandemic of Covid-19 affect the population of the whole world.

James Monteith: Cartographer, Educator, and Master of the Margins

James Monteith (1831–1890) was a leading figure in American geography education in the late nineteenth century, but his career has been largely forgotten and his contribution to cartography has been underappreciated. Monteith’s maps and geography textbooks were targeted at the general reader, but included innovative ways to highlight comparative spatial relationships. Much of the text in Monteith’s books is typical of that found in other works of the period, but his geography volumes included unique illustrations to help the reader visualize terrain on a continental scale and place individual maps in a global context. Monteith produced fairly pedestrian maps in his books but surrounded them with remarkable symbology and amplifying data that ought perhaps to earn him the title “master of the margins.”

Editorial: Expanding Access to the Journal of Latin American Geography

Editorial: Expanding Access to the Journal of Latin American Geography

Remnants Revisited: Guatemala's Landscapes of Fear

Remnants Revisited:Guatemala's Landscapes of Fear Rebecca Clouser introduction I was first approached in January 2020 about writing a retrospective essay reflecting on my article Remnants of terror: Landscapes of fear in post-conflict Guatemala (Clouser, 2009). It was during a coffee break at the Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) conference in Antigua, Guatemala. At the time, I began to ponder the shifts that had (and had not) occurred since 2009 in post-conflict Guatemala. These included the historic genocide trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt, the 2015 anti-corruption protests—which led to the resignation and subsequent jailing of then-president Otto Perez Molina—and the more recent disheartening closure of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) in 2019. Of course, since January 2020, the world has shifted not once, but several times. Not only would the CLAG 2020 conference be the last in-person conference I would attend that year, but the coronavirus pandemic has since gone on to infect over 120 million people, killing nearly 2.7 million of them. And in Guatemala specifically, at the time of this writing, there are more than 184,000 confirmed cases, with 6,619 deaths (WHO, 2021). The pandemic has produced landscapes of fear characterized by the eerily empty streets of lockdowns throughout the world, including in Guatemala. Barren images of normally congested zones, like the infamously busy El Trébol intersection in Guatemala City, circulated online (Hernández, 2020). And, as restrictions decimated livelihoods built on the informal economy, white flags denoting hunger and starvation began to dot the landscape of Guatemala as early as April 2020 (Abbott, 2020a). Then, as I settled in to write this essay in late November of 2020, international news headlines prominently featured Guatemala. Two deadly back-to-back hurricanes and massive national protests (one of which resulted in burning part of the National Congress building) captured the world's attention. It is not [End Page 259] new for Guatemala to be framed in a such a way. Popular media's simplistic narratives form broader geographic imaginaries of the country as endemically prone to disaster, corruption, violence, and general bad luck. Yet, as scholars have long argued, the realities of Guatemala are extremely complex, deeply tied to historical legacies, contemporary injustice, U.S. interventions, and enduring sociopolitical structures that enable and perpetuate marginalization, racism, and violence. Beyond headline-inducing moments of cataclysm, in Guatemala the post-conflict daily reality is rife with continued pain, struggle, and fear for millions. In an effort to highlight this quotidian persistence, in my original article I used landscape theory to examine the multiple ways in which fear and insecurity are interwoven into the country's landscape. Analyzing the examples of model villages, scorched earth blank spaces, clandestine graves and exhumations, and landmarks and memorials, I sought to emphasize how both presence and absence in the landscape can serve to reflect and reinforce a culture of fear throughout the country. In this retrospective essay, I revisit these examples to contemplate how things have evolved in the decade since my original article. a landscape of fear framework In 2009, I argued that using the lens of landscape theory, with an explicit focus on landscapes of fear, was a particularly productive point of entry for examining the profound legacies of Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, as well as the longer-term legacies of colonization and modernization that various actors have imposed upon Indigenous populations in the region now known as Central America for centuries. Drawing on Tuan's (1979) insistence that landscapes of fear are equally psychological as they are tangible, I unpacked layers of meaning in the post-conflict landscape of Guatemala, highlighting the presence of fear. I sketched out the implications of these deeper connotations, which manifest in inhabitants being "ever on the alert in the spaces of everyday life" (Pred, 2007, p. 363). Finally, noting the works of Crump (1999) and Till (1999), I described the importance of attending to absences in the landscape. Because power imbalances, particularly in post-conflict situations, lead to skewed control in forming the landscape, absences can be critical for understanding the threads of fear...

Bodies, Borders, and Resistance: Women Conjuring Geography through Experiences from the Other Side of the Wall

Introduction This text that we present as Geobrujas-Comunidad de Geógrafas2 arose from the invitation that we received in 2019 to participate in the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers. As a result of that initiative, we began generating an internaldialoguetodeterminewhatwewantedto address and how to present it in a workshop form. Above all, however, we questioned the conditions and chances for physically participating in the encounter, which, as mostly Mexican women geographers living in Mexico, meant thinking about the idea andfeasibilityofcrossing(ornot)theborder with the U.S. to be able to attend the event, whether due to migratory or economic reasons. At the beginning of 2020, the uncertainty generated by the increasing number of Covid-19 infections added another layer to our debates, since we did not know whether or not the event would take place. Finally, when the pandemic was declared, our participation was postponed until 2021 and shifted to the virtual mode, which resolved our possible impediments to physically attending the event but did not lead us to abandon our previous reflections. Thus, for our broadcast in 2021, we decided to stick with the issue of borders, adding to it the context of the pandemic. Building on our situated, critical, and collective knowledges, we have elaborated in this text on our participation in that event, which we organized through a combination ofexposition,miniworkshop,andbriefquestionnaire that attendees responded to voluntarily . With these, we sought to generate a space of exchange to reach a joint reflection, thus overcoming the physical and virtual distance. In this way, each of our presentations started by problematizing the issue of borders in our respective “bio-geographies.”3 Each of us responded to the following quesBodies , Borders, and Resistance: Women Conjuring Geography through Experiences from the Other Side of the Wall Geobrujas-Comunidad de Geógrafas1 Translated by Liz Mason-Deese 2021 JLAG Lecture JOURNAL OF LATIN AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY xx(x), 1–11 1 tions: What borders have crossed you? What borders have you embodied or reproduced? What borders have you challenged? As we introduced ourselves, we marked ourbodieswithcolors,symbols,orkeywords as a way of representing how these experiences of crossing form a part of our bodies and stay there as embodied experiences. With this action, we also sought to show ourselves in a self-critical and intimate way, to thus generate the necessary trust to later have an exchange and dialogue with participants . As we cannot abstract ourselves from the context of violence against women in which welive,wedecidedtostartwithapronouncementthatwouldposition us politicallywhile also demonstrating our indignation through public denunciation. Precisely at that time we were shaken by an escalation of femicides .OneofthemhappenedintheMexican state of Quintana Roo, where the murder of Victoria Salazar of El Salvador revealed the abuse of police power, and another across thebordertotheNorthwhereAishaXimena Mireles Nava, a young Mexican woman, was murdered in Los Angeles. We wrote this document based on that presentation. First, we introduce the topic through guiding questions. Second, we discuss the methodology and results of the mini workshop, then dedicate a section to a briefanalysisofthequestionnaire.Finally,we conclude with a few reflections. Whydid we decide to talk about borders? Where are we speaking from? We are all women who live in Mexico but have had very different life experiences, giving rise to different positionalities. If this meeting had been in person, we would have had to cross several political-administrative borders to get there. Due to our diversity , it would have been easy for some of us, but others would not have been able to come. Among the borders we would have had to cross is one of the ten longest borders in the world, one of those along which a wall has been built to contain the migration organized as “legal” and “clandestine,” one of the borders with the most surveillance and violence, where human beings of different nationalities and conditions die in the attempttocross.Facedwiththissituation,we critically position ourselves against the hegemonic organization of people. That is why, to participate in the AAG meeting, we immediately thought of speaking of borders: we chose the topic as a duty, as an urgent personal, political, and collective need. We address it starting from our bodies, through...

Race and Income in U.S. Suburbs: Are Diverse Suburbs Disadvantaged?

Sociological narratives of communities of color often make two assumptions: that people of color are concentrated largely in cities and that communities of color are disadvantaged. However, the recent widespread suburbanization of people of color challenges both assumptions, destabilizing how we link race, place, and class. This visualization uses the 2019 American Community Survey to ask, How is racial diversity in suburbs associated with income? The findings suggest that, by and large, racially diverse suburbs are middle class when comparing their median household income with the national value ($63,000). The most multiracial suburbs host populations with the highest median incomes (mean ~ $85,000). Black and Latinx median household incomes surpass the national value in these diverse suburbs. Moreover, these findings are robust in regressions including metropolitan fixed effects. Given that most people of color live in suburbs, understanding suburban communities of color is critical for understanding the American geography of racial inequality.

Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega

Reviewed by: Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession by Arnisson Andre Ortega Chester Antonino C. Arcilla ARNISSON ANDRE ORTEGA Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018. 361 pages. The Philippines is in a neoliberal urban upheaval, Arnisson Andre Ortega declares in this groundbreaking book, Neoliberalizing Spaces in the Philippines: Suburbanization, Transnational Migration, and Dispossession. He compellingly shows the spatial contradictions in the country's national capital region, Metro Manila, which is increasingly being neoliberalized, i.e., designed and developed for elite accumulation whereby land and housing are commodified to provide real estate profits while marginalized populations are displaced. Ortega accomplishes the difficult task of linking contemporary economic and land-use developments with the country's postcolonial history. Since the late 1980s, the real estate industry has been the Philippine economy's backbone, driven by overseas-based Filipinos' (OFs) desire for safe, exclusive suburban spaces and their transnational remittances. Surrounding Metro Manila are massive constructions of gated subdivisions that are often sold to "productive and successful" OFs. Within the metropolis, high-end condominiums, malls, and services in central business districts drive development to attract foreign investments and remittances. These processes of gentrification and socialized housing projects are mired in violence and dispossessions. The state drives out "unproductive [End Page 145] and unsuccessful" Filipinos—peasants, informal settler families (ISF), and indigenous peoples (IP)—from their homes and livelihoods, often violently, to make way for such projects. Because the law requires the relocation of ISFs before demolition, the socialized housing market in low-value peri-urban areas that sell homes to the evicted provides an additional opportunity for real estate accumulation. The relocatees fend for themselves as they struggle to meet amortization payments in resettlement sites, where livelihood and social services are difficult to access. Due to the general failure of the land reform program and the dominance of elite-influenced urban planning, large landholdings—often formerly export-oriented, colonial-era haciendas—are usually the ones converted for gentrification and socialized housing. The author is a geographer teaching at Syracuse University in New York and a former faculty member of the University of the Philippines Population Institute. In the book's introduction, Ortega shares his personal history as a son of peasant migrants to the city and among the first in his family to obtain a university education. As an engaged scholar committed to social justice, he admits his work is necessarily incomplete and explicitly political. His earlier researches on critical geography, migration, and spatial dispossessions have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Geography, Cities, and Geoforum, among others. In chapter 1 Ortega draws from a comprehensive review of Marxist, postcolonial, and critical urbanism scholarship to analyze urban space in the Global South as containers where global economic, political, and ideological flows are territorially embedded within the postcolonial state. These spatial configurations in turn reconstitute local social relations. Focusing on the period after the 1986 EDSA People Power, which restored liberal democracy and deregulated markets in the Philippines, chapter 2 tackles neoliberal restructuring, land commodification, and the reframing of the Filipino values of sipag (industry) at tiyaga (persistence) toward the ideal of the entrepreneurial, productive Filipino typified by successful OFs. Chapter 3 documents the rise of the real estate industry, identifies the major players, and discusses industry practices that supply OFs their suburban dream homes. In chapter 4 Ortega maps out the neoliberal spatialization in Metro Manila's peri-urban fringe, focusing on the transformation of the Canlubang Sugar Estates in Laguna. He notes how places of consumption have replaced the colonial población (town center) as a critical urban space, reflecting the [End Page 146] shift from agriculture and manufacturing to the service economy. As typified by the case of Canlubang, exclusive subdivisions would cluster around the mall, the archetypal site of consumption in Philippine cities. Chapter 5 studies the idealized "global" and "suburban" (168) lifestyles of returning OFs and traces the expansion of master-planned exclusive communities in the south of Metro Manila. The subsequent chapter descends to the everyday life inside these gated neighborhoods and finds economic anxieties and loneliness...

„Човникова дипломатія” Г. Кіссинджера як активне впровадження концепції С. Коена

Foreign policy of the USA is one of the topical areas in contemporary historical and geopolitical research. The interest of scientists in this topic is due to the fact that the United States is the leader of the world community at the present stage, both in economic and geopolitical aspects. The state continues to actively develop economically and technologically, increases its military potential, actively spreads its culture all over the world, that determines its global role. The phenomenon of the world leadership of the USA, as well as the historical factors that have determined this status, are the subject of research of scientists in the historical, geopolitical, politological, sociological, cultural, and other scientific fields. A particularly topical issue in the history of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century is the concept and specificity of American „shuttle diplomacy” and its effectiveness in the foreign policy of the state. The purpose of the study is to analyze the concept of the American geographer S. Cohen, as well as the peculiarities of its implementation in the political activities of R. Nixon and H. Kissinger. It has been proved that S. Cohen's geostrategic concept played an important role in the foreign policy of the United States in the 1970s. Its principles were implemented in the policy of H. Kissinger and R. Nixon, the important results of which were the establishment of United States-China relations and the softening of relations with the Soviet Union.

CARLOTTA JOAQUINA MAURY: UMA VIDA DEDICADA À CIÊNCIA

This article is a remote teaching activity within de PET-Geology Group (UFPA) and presents a summary of Carlotta Joaquina Maury’s academic professional career and their scientific contribution to the pioneering studies of the Pirabas Formation. Carlotta Joaquina Maury (1874-1938), who was recognized as the first woman to work with paleontology in Brazil. Despite all adversities she was a consulting paleontologist and stratigrapher to Royal Dutch Shell’s Venezuela Division and one of the official paleontologists the Geological and Mineralogical Service of Brazil. In 1925, she published “Tertiary Fossils from Brazil with Description News Cretacean Forms” where she described numerous species of mollusks from the northeastern coast of Brazil, performing the stratigraphic correlation of these faunas with similar faunas of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Carlotta Joaquina Maury was fellow of the Geological Society of America, American Geographical Society and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. An admirable woman ahead of her time. Keywords: Paleontologist, Scientific women, Pirabas Formation.

Collaborative Creative Processes That Challenge Us as "Anomaly", and Affirm Our Indigeneity and Enact Our Sovereignty

Collaborative Creative Processes That Challenge Us as "Anomaly", and Affirm Our Indigeneity and Enact Our Sovereignty

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History

Geografía de la educación para el siglo XXI

La finalidad de este artículo es analizar los campos de estudio de la geografía de la educación, y educación comparada, sus puntos en común y diferencias. Se revisan los antecedentes y los avances en la geografía de la educación, principalmente en los países europeos, donde tiene un mayor desarrollo, de acuerdo con la obra existente; asimismo se examinan los conceptos básicos de su campo de estudio, sus herramientas y los temas que aborda, mencionando los principales geógrafos dedicados a este campo de la geografía. Se profundiza sobre la importancia de la geografía de la educación y cómo se nutre de la educación comparada y de diversos campos, tanto de la geografía humana, como de las ciencias sociales en general, de manera que se manifiesta su naturaleza multidisciplinaria e interdisciplinaria. Con base en las revisiones de la obra de geógrafos europeos y latinoamericanos el artículo concluye señalando la importancia de realizar nuevos estudios de geografía de la educación en otras regiones del mundo para contribuir en la solución de los numerosos problemas educativos, ya que los trabajos de investigación llevados a cabo por educadores, por lo general carecen de la dimensión espacial que aporta la geografía.

Diálogos entre Geografia e Ciências Sociais: Região, Regionalidade e América Latina e Caribe

O presente artigo propõe desenvolver uma reflexão crítica a partir da Geografia e das Ciências Sociais Latino-Americanas, acerca da relação entre dinâmicas regionais e as categorias de análise geográfica e regional América Latina e Caribe. O objetivo é analisar a possível insuficiência do universalismo europeu sobre as nomenclaturas América Latina e Caribe frente a particularidades culturais, territoriais e processos sociais contra-hegemônicos. O método qualitativo norteará a metodologia baseada na interpretação de materiais bibliográficos clássicos e contemporâneos para analisar outras alternativas de regionalização deslocadas do essencialismo econômico, colonial e imperialista da cartografia tradicional. Acreditamos em outras linguagens possíveis de distintas cartografias conforme diferentes regionalizações do continente, baseados em aspectos históricos, críticas teóricas, fluxos migratórios, populações étnico-raciais, distribuição sócioespacial de grupos econômicos e aspectos político-ideológicos.
 Palavras-chave: Geografia, Ciências Sociais, Região, América Latina.

David Lowenthal, 1923-2018, renowned academic and public intellectual

ABSTRACT Belonging to a family of lawyers and professors, polymath David Lowenthal hated disciplinary divisions. American by birth but British by inclination, he learned the practice of geography through wartime service in Western Europe. During a long and highly productive career, spent mainly at the American Geographical Society and then at University College London, he made important contributions to Caribbean studies, environmental history, landscape interpretation, and cultural and historical geography. His later work on heritage informs management agencies across the globe. The ideas of pioneer environmentalist George Perkins March formed an essential touchstone for many aspects of his writing. In addition to scholarly articles and books (notably The Past is a Foreign Country), Lowenthal produced controversial essays aimed at a wider audience. His impact in the public realm was arguably as great as that among academics.

The Indigenous Peoples of Mesoamerica and Central America: Their Societies, Cultures, and Histories

One of the inaugural recipients of our Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, anthropologist Robert M. Carmack continues to enrich the field of Mesoamerican studies, the book under review one of several publications to appear since his retirement, a prodigiously fruitful one, after more than three decades of distinguished service at SUNY Albany. Compact yet wide ranging, The Indigenous Peoples of Mesoamerica and Central America is a synthesis of sorts, distilling the findings of Carmack’s sustained, assiduous labors since he filed his doctoral dissertation over half a century ago (Carmack 1965). That he draws still on data first unearthed in the archives or generated in the field when he was a graduate student at UCLA under the supervision of the inimitable H. B. Nicholson (1925—2007) says much about research forays undertaken not only to acquire a PhD but also to ensure outcomes that endure and continue to be relevant, a source of knowledge for generations to come.In an introduction that spells out what lies ahead for the reader—these days not always the case in many such endeavors—Carmack states succinctly that his goal is to “elaborate on the overarching history of the Central American native peoples, with references also to Mesoamerican influence on them through time.” He opts to “describe these little-known native peoples in highly humanistic terms,” doing so by placing “considerable emphasis on the nature of their indigenous societies, cultures, and countless internal and external struggles over many centuries” (ix).Carmack begins his honed narration with a discussion of the advanced, sophisticated character of the peoples under study. His first three chapters steer us, in turn, through (1) Spanish exploratory voyages and Central American geography, delineating the region’s teeming resources; (2) the state of cultural development in the three broad units that constitute his spatial embrace, which he identifies as northern (including the Yucatán peninsula and highland Guatemala), central (western Honduras, El Salvador, and the Pacific coast of Nicaragua), and southern (Costa Rica and Panama); and (3) contact scenarios between invading Spanish forces and the indigenous groups to which their imperial ventures exposed them. Chapter 4 relays how Mesoamerican influences emanating from Mexico shaped Central American mores. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 offer case studies over the longue durée from the three units identified as northern, central, and southern, set (respectively) among the K’iche’ Maya of Guatemala; the Chorotegas of Masaya, in Nicaragua; and the Chibchans of Buenos Aires, Costa Rica. Carmack concludes proceedings adroitly in chapter 8, viewing the experiences of the native groups examined “as the result of both external and internal sociocultural forces that prevailed in the Central American regions during their pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern historical time periods” (xi). His exposition, beginning to end, is effectively a summing up of his life’s work.Carmack levels with readers at the outset, stating plainly that he has “drawn freely from a previous book in Spanish which deals exclusively with the Central American region” (xi), a volume that he edited and to which he contributed two substantive chapters (Carmack 1994). This is important to note, because a good number of the sources cited in The Indigenous Peoples of Mesoamerica and Central America do not appear in its bibliography but in that of the volume Carmack edited a quarter-century ago. The decision not to include them is a pity, indeed a curious editorial choice given Carmack’s acumen, prowess, and precision in that regard in other undertakings, best exemplified by Quichean Civilization, his magnum opus (Carmack 1973). Perhaps this might be borne in mind when a future edition of the book is contemplated. So, too, might other infelicities be attended to, among them locating Tikal in “Yucatan, Mexico” (34) (it is in Guatemala’s Petén region); denoting encomiendas as “royal land grants” (117) (they were awards of Indian tribute, not territory); and misspelling Colombia on figure 1.1 (2) as “Columbia.” These are minor snafus easily fixed, and they in no way detract from a stellar offering from, as Allen Christenson conveys on his back-cover endorsement, “one of the great scholars of our time.”Carmack closes with some trenchant thoughts on indigenous legacy. “The fact that descendants of former Central American native peoples have remained almost equal in numbers (around 5 million) to the total aboriginal population encountered in the region at the time of Spanish contact,” he observes, “is truly an extraordinary human survival achievement.” This is emphatically the case “in the context of the continued repression to which they have been subjected through the centuries” (119), nowhere more tragically so than in Guatemala in the early 1980s and the past two years in Nicaragua. Despite the iniquities inflicted on them, the indigenous peoples of Central America endure.

Review: John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by Mardges Bacon, and Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years, 1951–1986, by Thomas S. Hines

Review: <i>John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York</i>, by Mardges Bacon, and <i>Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years</i>, 1951–1986, by Thomas S. Hines

Going Global or How Best to Recognize the Internationalization of the AAG; Plus – an Addendum to my Previous Column

AAG - Going Global or How Best to Recognize the Internationalization of the AAG; Plus – an Addendum to my Previous Column - We have always been the “AAG” but five years ago the membership overwhelmingly decided to change the full title from the Association of American Geographers to the American Association of Geographers. I remember being part of the Council when this change was discussed.

Contextualizing Map and Geography Library Collections as FAIR Research Data: A Case Study of Historical Landscape Photographs

Collection management techniques used in map and geography libraries to describe and provide access to materials ensure researchers can engage with collections as viable sources of research data. Many practitioners create frameworks to market these collections as potential sources of data, whether used alone or alongside other research data. These frameworks bear similarities to the FAIR data movement, where data producers are encouraged to make their data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. I frame the historical landscape photograph collections of the American Geographical Society Library and the United States Geological Survey Library as FAIR research data, offering the potential to engage with trends, concerns, or concepts being explored by geographers. When highlighting the FAIRness of these collections, we have an opportunity to better understand how they may be used as standalone sources of data, as well as alongside other FAIR data sources in scientific research. As another FAIR data source, I use the DataONE Data Catalog to contextualize these photographs alongside present-day datasets from fieldwork in similar landscapes. I encourage map and geography libraries to understand how the FAIRness of their collections enable unique research opportunities, leveraging the momentum surrounding FAIR research data in open science/open research communities.

The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People by Judith Ridner, and: Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 by Patrick Spero, and: Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 by Peter E. Gilmore

Reviewed by: The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People by Judith Ridner, and: Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 by Patrick Spero, and: Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 by Peter E. Gilmore Richard K. MacMaster The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People. By Judith Ridner. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. 140 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $19.95.) Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776. By Patrick Spero. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2018. 268 pp. Notes, index. $27.95.) Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830. By Peter E. Gilmore. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 248 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95.) George Chambers, grandson of the founder of Chambersburg, published A Tribute to the Principles, Virtues, Habits and Public Usefulness of the Irish and Scotch Early Settlers of Pennsylvania in 1855 to defend “the Irish and Scotch early settlers of this great State and their descendants against reproach, as well as aspersion, cast upon them in some modern compilations having pretensions to Historical accuracy.” Earlier writers, he said, either dismissed them as “a pertinacious and pugnacious race” who settled on unpurchased land and caused Indian wars, or they ignored them altogether. That is no longer the case. Numerous academic and popular titles interpret their history, but these three new books are a most welcome addition. Immigrants from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, began coming to North America in significant numbers early in the eighteenth century, where by mid-century they were known as Scotch-Irish.1 Edmund Burke had no doubt about the use of Scotch-Irish. He wrote in 1757 about the population increase in the southern backcountry due to “the migration of the Irish” from Pennsylvania. “These are chiefly Presbyterians from the northern part of Ireland, who in America are generally called Scotch-Irish.” Irish or Scotch-Irish? In the last years of the century, Jedidiah Morse, a New Englander, summed it up succinctly in his treatment of Pennsylvania in The American Geography: “The Irish are mostly Presbyterians. Their ancestors came from the north of Ireland, which was originally settled from Scotland: hence they have sometimes been called Scotch-Irish, to denote their double descent. But they are commonly and more properly called Irish, or the descendants of people from the north of Ireland.”2 Peter Gilmore [End Page 231] prefers to call them simply “Irish Presbyterians,” since “In Ulster ‘Presbyterian’ effectively served as a synonym for ‘Scotch’ ” (4) and “arguably, their most obvious and distinctive ‘Irish’ characteristic may well have been their Presbyterianism” (113). But these “Irish Presbyterians were significantly numerous and cohesive enough to subsume Presbyterians of various ethnicities.” Mainly Presbyterians and mostly of Scottish descent, the Scotch Irish did not always fit ethnic or religious definition; they were a varied people, backcountry settlers and traders, Philadelphia merchants and ship owners, and later mill workers and Pittsburgh industrialists. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, Judith Ridner has told their story from the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century through the Philadelphia riots in 1844. The Scottish colonization of Ulster began in 1603 with Sir James Hamilton’s and Sir Hugh Montgomery’s settlers in County Down and the Plantation of Ulster six years later. Migration from southwestern Scotland continued through the century and into the next, with at least one hundred thousand arriving between 1650 and 1700, half of that number in the 1690s. By 1715, on the eve of large-scale immigration to America, Scots and their children were a third of the total population of Ulster (13). As Sir Tom Devine noted, for these emigrants from Ulster, “an integral factor in their distinctive subculture was their Scottish roots.”3 In clear, readable prose, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania leads the reader through the ebb and flow of immigration. Many arrived in family groups, while others, mainly young men, came as indentured servants, as fluctuations in the linen industry and the flaxseed trade influenced its volume and composition. The author narrates the entry of...

A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman

Reviewed by: A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History by Michael Hoberman Benjamin Schreier (bio) A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History By Michael Hoberman. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xii + 183 pp. In one sense Michael Hoberman's short, smart, and pithy new book addresses a fairly straightforward topic: "The subject of this book is the historical relationship between the Jewish American literary imagination and the sense of place" (2). Accordingly, it sets itself a fairly straightforward task: namely, as he writes toward the book's close, "The essays in the book represent my best attempt to explore the role that the geography of North America has played in shaping the Jewish American literary imagination" (155), or, as he describes that attempt toward the book's opening, to explore "the ways in which Jewish subjects have engaged the long-standing American tendency to contemplate and experience geography as a crucible for the formation of cultural identity" (2). And yet, as we see in this last formulation, there's something more at work in Hoberman's work: critical energies more profound than merely parochially straightforward. The book's great strength—and its offering to the field—is to provide a way to de-exceptionalize Jewish American literary study; for once we recognize the role of geography in Jewish American writing, once we appreciate its "territoriality," we recognize that it shares its ground with other American writing and literatures. To understand "geography as a basis for literary and cultural continuity" is to understand Jews in America as neither "oppressed outsiders" nor "excessively complacent recipients of American privilege" (4), but rather as Americans actively engaged in experiencing and writing like other Americans. [End Page 299] This represents a critically significant—and salutary—departure from the way the field has heretofore conceptualized itself (though "taken itself for granted" is probably more accurate, at least if you ask me). One of the historicist side effects of multiculturalist pluralism in the humanities is that it's frequently easy to think of ethnicity- or identity-based literatures as more or less discrete entities—with African American literature indexed to something more or less knowable as African American experience, Queer literature indexed to something more or less knowable as Queer experience, and so forth—and it's easy as well to eschew theorizing how those various siloed experiences and symptomatic literary formations interact with, overlap, or interdetermine each other (other than, maybe, some gestures toward a minoritarian idea of oppression). In Jewish American literary study this thought-formation is often intimately bound up with, and indeed inextricable from, a foundational sense that immigration is the only real theory the field needs—that is, that Jewish American literature essentially tracks the chronologically progressive history of Jewish immigration to the United States (thus do scholars preoccupy themselves with talk of literary generations, for example, or with how temporal distance from the scene of immigration determines the contours of the literary imagination of identity). But with its focus on geography rather than immigration, A Hundred Acres of America explicitly challenges this often-unacknowledged immigration theory of Jewish American literature. As Hoberman succinctly claims in the Introduction, "This book argues that a rich and complex relationship with American geography itself, and not merely the immigrant experience, constitutes a central reference point and touchstone for the development, over the course of several centuries, of a Jewish literary consciousness in the United States" (4). In chapters on frontier writing by Jews in early America, on late nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-twentieth-century intellectuals who emphasized the Jewish presence in colonial American cities (and who therefore substantiated claims both to the "cosmopolitan and pluralistic origins of America's oldest cities" [46] and "Jewish participation in early American history" [53]), on early- to mid-twentieth-century middlebrow and middle-American Jewish writers (in which writers [End Page 300] like Edna Ferber challenge our preconceived romantic notions of regionalism by representing small towns as continuous with "other American environments" [78]), on late-twentieth-century Jewish writers' contestations of the pastoral mode, on turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury literary returns to the shtetl...