Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings Book

As geographer George L. Henderson would categorize it in his article "What (Else) We Talk About When We Talk About Landscape: For a Return to Social Imagination," John R.Stilgoe's Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 uses the term "Landscape as Landschaft" to discuss cultural spaces shaped and used by particular human communities. Landscape here is not cityscape, but rather, it is the rural farmsteads and village-scale communities that share agrarian European building traditions and customs. Stilgoe organizes his book into broad themes'Landscape, Planting, National Design, Agriculture, Community, and Artifice'and attempts to move chronologically and geographically within those themes to include Spanish, English, Dutch, German, and other European influences that contribute to land use patterns and vernacular buildings common to the early American landscape. Basically, Stilgoe argues that "common landscape" in America persisted with a characteristic national identity with slight regional variations until the 1840s when "traditional design contested with innovation, common buildings with professional engineering, regional identity with national form." At this point, urbanization and industrialization radically altered landscape in favor of cityscapes and suburban landscapes that maintained "keepsakes" from landscape but nevertheless departed.

The strengths and weaknesses of Stilgoe's arguments, like those of J.B. Jackson, are bound up in his broad generalizations and assertions that help landscape scholars categorize broadly but also have a form work to critique and test against. For example, in Jacksonian �fashion, Stilgoe speaks conclusively about human relations and experiences by asserting broad claims that are clever but sometimes challenging to accept. For example, he asserts the importance of and defines the 18th century "neighborhood" as the "property in which [locals] had vital interests, close knowledge, and frequent reason to travel….the familiar area within one-hour's walk from the family residence." Surely this is a helpful way to understand what "neighborhood" meant in an 18th century landscape with vastly different form and transportation abilities than the present, but without evidence for the claim the distance seems arbitrary. Furthermore, he uses Jackson's invented terms such as "eunomic" and "isonomic" to help contrast changes and periods of town planning in America. Stilgoe asserts that "Unlike the eunomic New England and southern landscapes, Philadelphia's space was essentially isonomic: land was apportioned without regard for a person's religious and social standing." Again, these terms can do a lot of work for comparing general shifts from colonial settlement to settlement in the early national period following the Land Ordinance Act of 1785 that instituted the national grid west of the Ohio River. However, there is a lot to be said about limitations and exceptions to these orders of the landscape that do not get proper treatment and justification.

In the end, Stilgoe does part by warning against the marginalization of cityscapes and industrial landscapes at the expense of the persistent "landscape as landschaft" mentality, but his primary purpose in writing this book is to identify how this mentality shaped early American land use and experiences among early Americans. Sometimes his organization seems a little sloppy and meandering, he has a discussion about "roads" and "farming" and a few other topics several times throughout, but overall it is a very clever and useful encyclopedic book.