Reviews for Poetic freedom and poetic truth

The average rating for Poetic freedom and poetic truth based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-02-03 00:00:00 Jay Ellison Review title: Filling in the middle In the title of volume 3 of his monumental geographic history of the United States, D. W. Meinig nearly repeats the subtitle of his Volume 2: Continental America, 1800-1867. But while the second volume ended in mid 19th century with American territory on both coasts, "what had been no more than a vast imperial sphere of potential attraction and development in 1850 had become an integral domain of a vigorously developing nation in 1900." (p. 177). By the 1915 close date of this volume, the United States was a national economic system, centered on and managed by the largest cities in the pattern confirmed by the selection of 12 Federal Reserve districts, a federal political system administered by a growing but subordinate national government and dominated and ruled by state governments, and a regional system of cultures knit by religion, ethnicity, and geography and intersected by railroads (250,000 miles representing half the world's total) and telegraph lines. If at its founding the defining geographic significance of the United States was its "location on the Atlantic opposite Europe", by 1915 its global imperative was its "location on the Pacific opposite Asia", in the words of a 1903 history (p. 389). We were, at last, truly a Transcontinental America. Meinig begins this third volume of his masterwork with the United States at a critical juncture in its history. The need to reunite a badly broken union north and south after the violent and prolonged civil war, the effort to bind it east and west with a transcontinental railroad, the continued war against the Native Americans in the vast western lands, and the goal of filling in the geopolitical middle with white settlers and states were the major drivers of contemporary events and influences on the subsequent history of the country. Meinig devotes most of this account to those themes, beginning with the story of California and making his way eastward in documenting the social, economic, and physical conditions that shaped the territories into states and cultural reasons. California earns pride of place because of the uniqueness of its Hispanic heritage, explosive growth of (largely male fortune seeking) population in its northern gold-mine region, and its distinct climate conditions which gave rise to new experimental kinds of agriculture--and, in the south, new kinds of marketing of that dry temperate climate as a "winter sojourn, retirement, or migration" spot (p. 64). This was indeed a new pattern of migration in our history--people moving in comfort (on the new transcontinental railroads) for comfort (to invest and live in new solidly middle-class businesses and communities). While Meinig paints with a broad brush in creating his account, he also fills in details that make his history most usable and important. As he moves east and details each migratory center, he uses finer brush strokes to point out their similar patterns but specific characteristics that make each unique. New Mexico (the territory much larger than the eventual state) had been the long-time center of Hispanic North America (Santa Fe its oldest capitol), and with a large and settled native population of Navajo and Pueblo and no known exploitable resources in its wide open semi-desert landscape, it attracted few white American migrants and was the last continental territory to be granted statehood (1912). Colorado, meanwhile, with its location astride many of the cross-prairie tracks and trails and the discovery of gold and silver in the steep and seemingly impassable Rockies behind the new terminus of Denver, quickly became the "least isolated, least provincial, least resistant to rapid integration" (p. 145) of the western regions. The state of Utah was explicitly the Mormon Zion, with a homogeneous religious theocracy that, even as it was leavened with non-Mormon "Gentiles", had a huge formative impact on this aspiring nation. Mormon believers came to stay, not to settle, farm, mine, and move on, a cultural difference with a geopolitical impact. Behind and through every regional story is the persistent, consistent, and unrelenting genocide of Native Americans and the containment of the surviving few on reservations of the most marginal lands not wanted by white miners, farmers, or lumberers. Further east, by far the central subject of the Middle of the century was how to reunite the broken Union. While Reconstruction is a huge historical and political topic, Meinig focuses in on the geographic component and how it affected American life, politics, and culture then and down the decades to today. He first briefly looks at the topic through the lens of the defeated Southern states as a conquered imperial holding, transitioning through periods of military rule (via military districts run by Northern officers), imperial agents attempting social and political reform, extraction of wealth by northern businesses, and resettlement and investment--although it may be the final stage of "exploration and description" of this seemingly new and exotic region in the midst of a new united America that is the most telling (see p. 189-193). Here we find that the South, now defined and delimited by its defeat and restoration, is more a folk culture than a nation'"a great family"'a regionally rooted, interrelated, dispersed population united into political action when its basic social system was challenged by external forces. Defeated in mortal combat, forced to accept the end of slavery, that same broad body of people dug in, resisted, and with even greater unanimity eventually overturned further programs of social reform and reestablished firm control over its own sociopolitical affairs. All of that was accomplished by an upwelling of action in every locality, without central direction, and the resultant redefined racial caste system continued to be enforced by the people as a whole'that is, by the ruling people as a whole: White Southerners in every city, town, and countryside. Such folk solidarity was an expression of insecurity as well as conviction, for this new mode of social control, based on a suppression of civil rights and protected by a political armistice at the highest national level, was ever vulnerable to some renewal of attack from external forces'and from an upwelling of revolt from those suppressed. (p. 226) When Reconstruction was rolled back by a federal government no longer energized in opposition to the separation of states, " 'the American people made the decision to have the white South substantially control its own destinies. . . . Local control of government and negro inequality had long been values' not only of Southern life but 'of American life nationally.' " (p. 209) As the century turned to the 20th, ethnicity apart from color (in addition to blacks and native Americans, immigrants from China and Japan also faced violence and legal opposition) became a major geopolitical factor in America as immigrants poured into New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco. And joining the older primary sources (England, Ireland, Germany) came millions from southern and Eastern Europe seeking economic opportunities and affordable land in the sparsely populated regions of the country--even though many never moved beyond the growing port cities and settled in family and ethnic conclaves that replicated a small piece of their homeland in language, religion, occupation, and education. These "hyphenated Americans"--yes the term originates from this time period--spurred a reactionary nativism which attempted to limit immigration or force assimilation. The 1910 census reported that 35% of Americans were foreign born or first generation descendants of a foreign-born parent, and the distribution of that population shown on a map (p. 293) shows a startling near-universal dispersion of these newest Americans across the continent--except the near-total absence of immigrants in the former Confederate states. This blank space on the map is a silent reminder that while the assimilative powers of the clichéd "melting pot" contributed to America's greatness and growth as an integrated, heterogeneous, global power, it still held centers of nativism and racism close to its core. As with the other volumes in Meinig's masterwork, I feel that even this lengthy review has given it short shrift; see for example, his section on Canada's own transcontinental journey that mirrored the United States from east to west even though both countries encountered geographic barriers that might have made north to south alignment more feasible (p. 327-347). He illustrates his data and arguments with many well-drawn maps, both contemporary and modern, includes a substantial bibliography by chapter, and footnotes specific quotations. While this is surely required textbook material for many university-level classes, it is also highly recommended for the general reader who is a deep student of the history of the United States who is seeking a view of the geographic influence on that history. I look forward to the final volume where Meinig continues his analysis up to the beginning of the 21st century.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-31 00:00:00 Carla Vince Review title: Skitch, how did we get here? One of the great movie lines from an often overlooked minor classic (That Thing You Do), my review title captures Meining's unique perspective on how geography shaped the European "discovery", exploration, and colonization of the Americas. He describes a simple set of activities ("seafaring, conquering, and planting", p. 7) set in a complex context of European sources, cross-ocean routes, commercial, national, or personal purposes, intended destinations, and encountered cultures, geographies and climates. The 500-page result takes the reader up to 1800 as the new American nation (a federated republic of regional societies surrounded by disparate and not always friendly geographies and peoples) stands on the threshold of continental expansion (covered in Volume 2) that spans coast to coast (Volume 3). He moves from the particular to the general, from history to theory, and back again multiple times throughout his account so that we understand what happened and can say something about why. So, as the seafarers from two major European "hearths" plowed new furrows across the Atlantic they began the process of making a new world: Generalizing more broadly once again, we can see that the two great thrusts out of the two creative source regions [the Spanish-Mediterranean "cultural hearth" and the British-Dutch Northwestern Europe "cultural hearth"] carried two distinct versions of European civilization across the ocean, initiating a Catholic imperial America in the south and a Protestant commercial America in the north. But these direct extensions were increasingly caught up into larger Atlantic circuits binding together four continents, three races, and several cultural systems, complicating and blurring the processes of extension and transfer. . . . . By 1630 Europe held dominion over every seaboard sector and huge portions of the interior. America had become incorporated into the routine concerns of European nations, but this was not simply an enlargement into a Greater Europe. It is better seen as a new Atlantic world. The ocean had become the "inland sea of Western Civilization," a "new Mediterranean" on a global scale, with old seats of culture on the east, a great frontier for expansion to the west, and a long and integral African shore. (p. 64-65) One of the hearths and routes that Meinig includes is the "Middle Passage" of captured Africans from the west coast of that continent to the Caribbean Islands and then the eastern mainland shores from Brazil north through to the Chesapeake Bay where they were sold into slavery and became a key cultural and economic component of the geographic history. While writing decades before the creation of the 1619 Project--which places the fact of black slavery at the core if the American experience--and the controversy surrounding it, Meining has this to say: "We can at least insist that in place of the long-standing tendency to regard 'the Afro-American community created by the [slave] trade as an alien body on the periphery of national life' we must see it, quite the contrary, as an ancient, integral, and central component of American development." (p. 84) As Meinig works his way south along the eastern coast of North America from Nova Scotia, he summarizes the major geography and settlement patterns of New England and Pennsylvania: But there was also a difference so fundamental as to become the great characterizing contrast in the cultural geography of the two regions: the difference between Puritan corporate self-righteousness and Quaker individual tolerance; between the active discouragement of settlers of different ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs and the active recruitment of a wide variety of peoples; between a remarkably uniform New England and a strikingly heterogeneous Pennsylvania. Each was a distinctive American creation. (p. 144) In Virginia, the geographic and settlement pattern resulted in a very different "special kind of 'English Nation.' It was a hierarchical, Anglican, rural commercial society" (p. 149), based on the roots of the colony in the commercial search for wealth from gold, silver, and finally tobacco, the swampy and malarial southern riverside environment, and the near presence of a strong and at times hostile native population. Creating a broad theoretical framework to summarize all of these new demographic patterns, Meinig uses the terms --"encounter and change" (encounter in its definition both as chance meeting and meeting in battle) between Europeans and native Americans, --"migration and change" as Europeans encountered new climates, geographies, plants, and minerals, and --"enslavement and change" as Africans were captured and sold into slavery, subjugated to European masters, and forced into new environments and cultures. All sides in these interactions were changed, challenged, threatened by aggressors, and acted as aggressors, as they variously tried to survive, establish dominance, assimilate or reject new influences, and reestablish stability (a "new normal") in a world irreversibly changed. Native Americans were addressed by "conquest and enclosure" in isolated communities in the older colonial coastal regions, by "articulation and interdependence" in those areas behind the coasts where the native tribes remained viable and the European and native communities interacted through agriculture and trapping and trading, and "participation and reverberation" where encounters often attempted to enforce domination or destruction by either party. While all this interdependent interaction sounds like a feel-good story of practical cooperation, Meinig reminds us that in these cultural meetings between Europeans, native Americans, and Africans that the Europeans never recognized the others' "rights of sovereignty, property, or corporate identity except in temporary, manipulative fashion, and could not envision a genuinely plural society that would encompass tribal, non-Christian peoples." (p. 212) By 1750, the eastern seaboard from Canada down to Georgia was essentially a contiguous European settlement, albeit with wide variations of population and density, and limited penetration into the continent in most places due to economic constraints, conflicts with displaced natives, and lack of access to navigable rivers. Regional societies--Canada, New England, Hudson Valley (New York and eastern New Jersey), greater Pennsylvania (including western New Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland), greater Virginia (including tidewater Maryland and parts of North Carolina), and greater South Carolina (with parts of North Carolina and Georgia)--were more important to the daily flow of economic and cultural life than the nominal political boundaries that defined them, "now so firmly rooted in place that they could absorb . . . whatever geopolitical changes might be imposed upon them from afar as pawns in the vast worldwide game of European politics." (p. 250). Those shocks, first the British victory over France in their European war waged with native allies on the interior frontiers of those societies and then the confederation of the American colonies and their military and political separation from the British empire, were just beyond the horizon in 1750 and would represent the next great influence on the shape of the American geography. Meinig describes the far reaching impacts of the great imperial wars (waged locally with native allies as the French and Indian War) and then the American Revolution on the geography and demographics of the emerging united colonies, including the inflows and outflows of population and the intercolonial movement of groups. While focusing on the core British colonies, he also documents the changes involving Spain and France at their southern and southwestern borders in Florida, Louisiana, and the Mississippi River, and France and England at their northern border in Canada (the Revolution resulting in not just one new country but two, p. 332, a Canada changed but loyal to the British). The geographical elements of the political, economic, and cultural tradeoffs that enabled the establishment of first the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution was "an immense and remarkable political experiment and its success as a federation and a nation would be determined in no small part by how well it might cope with problems deeply embedded in its historical human geography." (p. 348) Slavery, of course, the deepest problem, would work its damage on the political and geographic landscape for the next century, and the latent racism it caused and effected all the way to today. But the settlement of a governing political structure, including the establishment of a process for admitting new territories to the union as equal member states, opened the gates to allow a newly and properly named "American" population eager to burst beyond the coastal confines to flood west and south across the mountains and the Mississippi and push out and over the remaining native peoples and settlements. Regardless of whether history would find the outcome imperialist, genocidal, ordained by God, or manifest destiny, the result was to become a solid coast-to-coast political entity within the geographical bounds of the North American continent. Volume 1 stops in 1800 as the population clusters at the western colonial boundaries at the start of the Great westward migration; Volumes 2 and 3 take the story through the closure of the frontier in the 20th century. As he wraps up this opening volume at 1800, Meinig draws a general theory of the disintegration of empires (p. 370-375), and then applies it to both the original "British empire" of the United Kingdom (with its imperial capital at London, core of England, incorporated provincial colonies of Scotland, Wales and Ulster, and outlying protectorate of the Gaelic Highlands of Scotland and the west coast of Ireland) and then the North American British empire (p. 375-381). He points out the critical differences between the two applications: the greater distance between the imperial center and the colonies, the much larger size of the colonies and protectorates, and the perhaps surprisingly and ironically more British culture implanted in the American colonies than that encountered in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ("There were no keener students of English political history and philosophy than these New England rebels" who initiated the Boston tea rebellion, p. 382). While extracting a general theory from the specific events of the geographic and historical population of the American colonies, Meinig makes the point that the events and outcomes of the process (native displacement or genocide, implantation of black slavery, and defeat of the British by a united colonial militia) were not inevitable outcomes of the theory or the process (p. 381). Instead, America grew by its own inexorable logic applied to the vast lands between its distant coasts: By leaps of logic peculiar to American thinking, nationalism and "natural rights" were extended to include territorial rights to the North American continent: a nation conceived in liberty had a right to a homeland; in order to enjoy that liberty the people must feel secure; in order to feel secure and to enjoy the freedom to develop their territory in accordance with the "immense designs of the Deity" they must have control of all areas strategic to their homeland. . . . It was clear that most American leaders and spokesmen simply recognized no unalterable barriers to expansion. Thomas Hutchins, official "Geographer to the United States," estimated the habitable area of North America to be three and a half million square miles and stated forthrightly: "If we want it, I warrant it will soon be ours." (p. 416-417) And it would be but not yet. Meinig's map of the United States in North America in 1800 on p. 423 is a reminder that "In 1800 America was a vigorous but rude, provincial outlier of Western civilization." (p. 421) And it was, and is. A republic, a federated republic of regional societies surrounded by disparate and not always friendly geographies and peoples, if we can keep it. This is fascinating history and theory, well-populated with simple maps and diagrams showing complex spatial theories as they worked on land and water across time, contemporary paintings and sketches of the environment as seen by the participants, and a bibliography for following further. I will definitely follow Meining through the remaining volumes to find out the answer to the question: "Skitch, how did we get here?" "I have led you here, for I am Spartacus."