Geography, History, and the American Political Economy

John Heppen

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780739140987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Economics

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 shifts in America's past. The essays illustrate changes in U.S. settlement, development, and political structure through the lens of the restructuring of the American economy and society over approximately fifty year cycles of crisis and recovery. They demonstrate the extension of American'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 questions of 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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Approaching America’s Geographical History
• Chapter 2: Earle’s Theory and Conception of the Geographical History of the United States
• Chapter 3: The French in the Illinois Country, 1699–1735
• Chapter 4: Economic Diversity, Industrialization, and Urbanization in Early-Nineteenth-Century Connecticut
• Chapter 5: The Structural Transformation of the Antebellum Red River Valley Settlement Systems in Louisiana
• Chapter 6: Earle’s Dialectical Policy Regimes and the Erie Canal
• Chapter 7: The Interplay of Manufacturing Employment and Population Concentrations in the United States, 1840–1990
• Chapter 8: Regional Income Convergence and a Decennial Core-Periphery Regionalization of the United States 1929–2000
• Chapter 9: Pre-Industrial, Industrial, and Post-Industrial Electoral Alignments in Ohio
• Chapter 10: Globalization Bites Back
• Chapter 11: Conclusion: The Rhythms of America’s Geographical Past
• About the Contributors