238MATHEWSON Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape John B. Rehder. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999. xiv and 355 pp., biblio., figures , gloss., index, maps, notes, photos. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8018-6131-4). Kent Mathewson Delta Sugar is yet another first-rate study in traditional cultural and historical geography published within the excellent "Creating the North American Landscape " series. In writing this requiem to departed peoples, places, and production practices, Rehder draws on three-plus decades of intimate and expert witness to the changes that have increasingly decontextualized and simplified Louisiana's sugar landscapes. At the same time, Rehder reconstructs histories and landscapes of this distinctive region from their beginnings. The result is a work that both recalls and recalibrates earlier ways of doing cultural geography, along with providing some explanatory insights into the economic and political conditions driving the current landscape change. Rehder began his study of Louisiana's sugar landscapes at LSU in the 1960s. His initial reconnaissance and research took him over some ten thousand miles of back roads and bayous, through multiple fields, factories, mansions, country stores and tenant quarters, and into various written and cartographic accounts of sugar's implantations and persistence in south Louisiana. In 1969 he recorded over 200 sugar plantations and 40-some sugar factories. Twenty-five years later these numbers had been halved. Rehder notes similar erosion in most of the artifactual and affective traits that once characterized this area's distinctive cultural landscapes. In this sense, and the one Rehder is most concerned to convey, it is a study in culturalregional declension. Yet, as he also discusses, it is a region that has been largely transformed in the past two decades. Familiar morphological features and settlement patterns that had marked these landscapes for almost two centuries were obliterated within much of the region. But Louisiana cane sugar production has not declined. Thoroughly modernized, it has even expanded westward in recent years. The book's material is organized in eleven chapters. The first four present and discuss the cultural and historical processes and the resulting patterns that made and then contributed to the unmaking of these landscapes. Case studies of individual plantations comprise the following six chapters. A short summary chapter reviews "agents of change" responsible for the region's remaking. The overall text is not unlike the landscape described—fields of empirical observations and discrete facts, Dr. Mathewson is Associate Professor ofGeography, Louisiana State University , Baton Rouge, LA 70803. Internet: kentm@lsu.edu. REVIEWS239 often fascinating, dominate. At select sites portions of the reportage are brought together, combined (though rarely "crunched"), refined (but not to levels of "certainty "), and offered up as possible-to-probable explanations for the many questions the narrative raises. Chapter 1 provides background. It introduces the plantation concept, the physical geographic elements, and the historical geography of sugar culture antecedent to, and within, Louisiana. Rehder has boiled down a large literature and mix oftopics into an effective synthesis. Chapter 2, "Culture and Form," focuses on the material culture traits that characterize the region. Mansion types and settlement patterns are the prime indicators, along with other dwellings. Differences between the Anglo and French architectural styles and settlement arrangements are the key elements in discerning regional distinctiveness. Louisiana's sugar region contains textbook examples of both French Creole (with Caribbean roots) and Anglo-Tidewater elite house types and their diffusions. In the third chapter, Rehder turns his eye to other structures and artifacts—the sugar mills, barns and outbuildings, stores and churches, fields and fences, agricultural implements, landings, and levees—that give equal, if not more, meaning to the sugar landscapes. Here he is concerned with functional descriptions along with assessing routes and rates of removal. Chapter 4, "A Prescription for Landscape Decline," looks at events over time that have determined landscape change. Rehder proposes an evolutionary model that tightly fits what has unfolded here, with particular attention given to the past several decades. In brief, the traditional plantation (since 1795) held sway until the 1930s when new forms emerged in the wake of the Depression. First, a corporate-local form combining plantations of the old familial type developed. In the 1970s the California...