Geography, History, and the American Political Economy

This collection takes on the call issued by reviewers of The American Way for a critical application of Carville Earle's framework to more geographical examples of political and economic shits in America's past. The essays illustrate changes in U.S. settlement, development, and political structure through the lens restructuring of the American economy and society over approximately fifty-year cycles of crisis and recovery. They demonstrate the extension of America's sphere of influence outside of the United States as a larger scalar shift, and they underscore the utility of geography in answering very local questions concerning poorly documented settlement histories. Focusing on the geographic responses to periodic cycles of crisis and recovery and the more general underlying intertwining of geography and history, Geography, History, and the American Political Economy is an incisive demonstration of how the constant restructuring of American politics and economy occurs within spatial and historical constructs. Book jacket.

John Heppen is associate professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Samuel M. Otterstrom is associate professor of geography at Brigham Young University.