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BOOK REVIEWS Edited by John T. Bauer Department of Geography University of Nebraska-Kearney Contents: In the Land of Giants: A Journey Through the Dark Ages by MAX ADAMS reviewed by Judith Otto Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History by ALAN BEWELL reviewed by Robert M. Briwa The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present by BERNARD DEBARBIEUX and GILLES RUDAZ reviewed by Joshua Hagen The Politics of Staying Put: Condo Conversion and Tenant Right-to-Buy in Washington, DC. by CAROLYN GALLAHER reviewed by Patrick Oberle In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region by SETH GARFIELD reviewed David M. Cochran, Jr. Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps by STEPHEN J. HORNSBY reviewed by Steven M. Schnell Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier by REBECCA J. KINNEY reviewed by Matthew R. Cook City on a Grid: How New York Became New York by GERARD KOEPPEL and Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817-1898 by JON SCOTT LOGEL reviewed by Reuben Rose-Redwood California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage by ELIZABETH KRYDER-REID reviewed by Jeffrey S. Smith Historical Geography Volume 45 (2017): 252-289 © 2017, Historical Geography Specialty Group, American Association of Geographers

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George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape by PHILIP LEVY reviewed by Andrew Milson Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935 by PHILLIP GORDON MACKINTOSH reviewed by Daniel Ross Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past by KAREN M. MORIN and DOMINIQUE MORAN reviewed by Virginia James Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America by MICHELE CURRIE NAVAKAS reviewed by Maria Lane After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century by WILLIAM RANKIN reviewed by Garrett Dash Nelson Corey Village and the Cayuga World: Implications from Archaeology and Beyond by JACK ROSSEN, eds. reviewed by Jolene Keen Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity Since the Eighteenth Century by ANDREW SLUYTER, CASE WATKINS, JAMES P. CHANEY, and ANNIE M. GIBSON reviewed by Patrick D. Hagge Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands by ANDREW STUHL reviewed by Arn Keeling Salvage: Cultural Resistance Among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia by KRISNA UK reviewed by Kurt Borchard Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps by KÄREN WIGEN, SUGIMOTO FUMIKO, and CARY KARACAS, editors. reviewed by Rex J. Rowley America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond by RANDALL WILSON reviewed by Connor Martin Great Plains Indians by DAVID J. WISHART reviewed by Mark R. Ellis

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 In the Land of Giants: A Journey Through the Dark Ages. MAX ADAMS. New York: Pegasus Books, 2016. Pp. xi+445, maps, photographs, timeline. $29.95 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-68177-218-9. This book describes ten journeys taken by writer/archaeologist Max Adams in which he sought to reconstruct for the reader some important landscapes of the Early Medieval Period, the three-hundred year span following the collapse of Roman control over Britain in 410 CE. Interspersed between the chapters that document the individual journeys is a set of interludes describing a separate set of explorations along Hadrian’s Wall. These journeys, narrated as if the reader were by Adams’s side, explore the physical, political, economic and cultural geography of the period, using Adams’s training and archaeological technology to augment the thin historical record. The giants of the title are the mythical race that were once believed to have built the thousands of earthworks, forts, churches, monasteries, burial tumuli and other ruins that are scattered throughout the British Isles, many of which have never been excavated or studied. Adams’s aim is to understand, through the material culture of these ancient ruins, but even more, through their spatial relationships, the shift from Iron Age evanescent tribal feuds and alliances, to a command economy distantly controlled by Rome, to a new conception of political control. “[T]here is little doubting the intellectual revolution which took place in ideas of kingship and statehood during the sixth and seventh centuries. It fostered a rational, self-aware theory of a state that might survive the death of the person of the king; a sustainable and hugely influential model” (p. 175). Each chapter begins with a hand-drawn map (alas, missing scale, legend, and compass direction) that traces the route and its major landmarks; the endpapers serve as locus maps to allow the reader to understand the spatial relationships between the journeys. In pursuit of the landscapes of the shadowy kings, warriors and saints of medieval history, Adams has covered every corner of the British Isles. He has traveled 660 miles on foot, 743 miles by boat, and 1,337 miles on his motorcycle. His knowledge of ancient sites and ancient texts is encyclopedic. But following his routes requires much greater knowledge of the geography of the British Isles than an American, even a geographer, is likely to have, and I read most of the chapters with Google Maps open beside my book, moving with Adams through highlands and forests, tracing rivers, and noting the relationship of ancient sites to contemporary cities and towns. Adams was deliberate about his choice of mode of transportation: walking allowed him to experience the topography and scale of the landscape as the ancients had, and sailing replicated the pace and way-finding challenges of ancient visitors from France and the lands around the Mediterranean Sea. His knowledge of the etymology of place names in many medieval languages (for example, “Tarbert” refers to an isthmus suitable for portage) gave him additional clues to understand how medieval travelers navigated an unknown land. He was everywhere keenly sensitive to the rhythms of the day, the seasons, and the tides, as well as the effects of weather, and his accounts of the joys (and struggles) of walking and camping form pleasant diversions from the main narrative. He skillfully draws parallels across fourteen centuries, as he compares the political uncertainties and bloodshed of earlier times to the turmoil and suffering of the present day. Several important themes emerge from the book. First, religious orders and their leaders played a critical role in stabilizing political conflict, sustaining intellectual endeavor, maintaining connections with Rome and the Holy Lands, and applying technological innovation to solve

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practical problems. The monasteries’ relationship with their political leaders (and patrons) was symbiotic: monks got military protection and land grants that could not be revoked, in exchange for providing prayer, healing, and knowledge. In fact, monasteries were centers of practical knowledge for agriculture, art and artisanship as well, because of their stability in the face of shifting political boundaries. Their fixed land tenure allowed the monks to accumulate agricultural surpluses and “to invest sweated labour (their own and their serfs’) in capital projects of increasing ambition” (p. 325). Second, the early medieval world was built not only on the ruins of Roman imperialist construction (both material and ideological) but also was reliant on earlier, pre-Conquest cultural traditions. Christian theology and customs merged syncretically with Pre-Conquest animist religious beliefs and practices. Tribal lords lived in the splendor of Roman villas, recycling fragments of Roman luxury goods, while managing their environments by highly practical IronAge era means. The early medieval world was almost as cosmopolitan and externally oriented as its Roman predecessors had been; social protocols evolved to structure far-flung connections to the Mediterranean and beyond. For example, foreign visitors came with letters of introduction from mutual acquaintances who could vouch for them, in an early version of contemporary networking. Third, the ancients used landscapes tactically. For example, Dunadd, thought to be the capital of Dál Riata, the ancient Gaelic kingdom, can be reached only across an expansive bog that lies on the shore of a treacherous whirlpool that would drown the inexperienced sailor. King Oswald, making a play to control the ancient kingdom of Bernicia, may have massed his armies at a strategic location invisible to his enemy, and Adams and his colleagues have used hightechnology scanning devices at Heavenfield, north of Hadrian’s Wall, to locate a potential site. This book, although ostensibly about archaeology, contributes much to the field of historical geography. Reading it requires much deeper knowledge of early medieval British history than most readers will have, but asking the reader to piece the stories together is, in a rhetorical sense, like armchair archaeology: one notes clues, hypothesizes about connections, digs around the Internet for additional information, and draws conclusions by seeing the same saints, warriors, and landscapes from slightly different angles. The book would be suitable as a supplementary text in a European geography course, a tourism geography course, or even simply as a model of exquisite prose for any university classroom. The words sparkle on the page; rarely have I read a book with such beautiful sentences. Erudition, imagination, and the craft of writing blend here to put the writer in the midst of early Anglo-Saxon and British medieval society. Judith Otto Framingham State University  Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. ALAN BEWELL. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii+393, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4214-2096-7. Scholars across the humanities turn to the written word to capture the thoughts and views of those who no longer have a voice. In Natures in Translation, Alan Bewell demonstrates that Romantic nature writing in its myriad forms—from explorers’ compendiums systematically describing flora and fauna of former terrae incognitae to deep ecologies of familiar home-places and environments to poetry capturing the spirit of a place—was a powerful tool of eighteenth

256 Book Reviews and nineteenth century British writers for expressing their understandings of a world that was rapidly changing. Through examining these always fascinating and sometimes poignant texts, Bewell reminds us that writing is a primary means for geographers and others to resurrect ways of “historical seeing” and reframe our understandings of the past. Critically, however, Bewell suggests that scholars of Romantic writers must move beyond understanding Romantic literature “as the product of isolated geniuses,” and should instead understand their works as part and parcel of the “social and cultural contexts within which it is circulated and from which it derived much of its contemporary relevance” (p. 9). Natures in Translation largely succeeds in this task— and in doing so illuminates new insights on Romantic writing and writers. Bewell challenges a long standing assumption that Romantic writers were producing literature in reaction to modernism. Instead, he suggests these authors were themselves challenging their contemporaries’ assumptions about nature as an unchanging entity. Writers as diverse as Erasmus Darwin, Gilbert White, and Joseph Banks all recognized that nature, far from being static, was in a state of flux, and that for better or for worse these changes were a product of Britain’s colonial ambitions and its overseas expansion. Natures in Translation has nine chapters, each examining a particular Romantic writer’s work and showing how it reflects an awareness of the larger changes wrought to environments the world over as a product of colonial acts of translation. Bewell defines translation as the mobilization of people, biota, words, and things that become transformed in the act of mobilization—and he suggests that these acts of translation are simultaneously the core driving force and principal means of illustrating colonial power. Through bringing his own close readings of Romantic writers into conversation with a far-reaching and eclectic body of secondary scholarship, Bewell resurrects Romantic views of natural worlds and their relationships to imperial acts of translation. Some writers, like Joseph Banks, saw the translations made visible through botany and natural history as tools of effective imperial statecraft and as the ushering in of a new “cosmopolitan” nature that would benefit the world’s human populace. Others, notably John Clare and William Wordsworth, saw acts of translation as erasures, irrevocably transforming familiar living landscapes and natures into haunted reminders of what was and can never be again. Bewell is at his best when he uses Natures in Translation to breathe life into the writers he examines, as he does in his analyses of Gilbert White and John Clare. Through tracing White’s personal relationships with other naturalists and examining his private letters, for example, Bewell echoes the storytelling that he sees as a central hallmark of White’s published work. Such an approach does not merely produce a sentimental narrative, however, for Bewell ties White’s voice into Natures in Translation’s larger thesis through clear engagement with secondary scholarship that places White into his larger historical contexts. In doing so, Bewell effectively shows us how individual writers promoted particular views towards the environment in powerful and enduring ways. In contrast, Bewell’s chapters that rely too heavily on others’ literary criticism and his own formalist literary analysis, notably his discussion of Shelley’s Frankenstein, struggle to capture the reader’s imagination and obscure Natures in Translation’s greater takeaway messages. Natures in Translation offers a sorely needed commentary on how Romantic thinkers understood the environment and represents a much-needed reminder of the possibilities interdisciplinary scholarship has to illuminate our understandings of environmental history. At a little under 350 pages of richly illustrated and evocatively argued text, Natures in Translation might be profitably paired with Clarence Glacken’s magnum opus Traces on the Rhodian Shore to form the core readings of semester long upper level undergraduate or graduate courses exploring Western environmental thought or environmental history prior to the twentieth century. Alternatively, selected chapters could offer useful early and foundational readings in graduate

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level seminars on geographic thought, environmental history, or political ecology. In particular, Bewell’s discussion of the rise of natural history and its consequences in colonial worldviews complement and contribute to ongoing discussions within these fields on the nature (and power) of constructed scientific knowledge. From a geographer’s standpoint, however, Natures in Translation’s lack of engagement with parallel discussions within our discipline is troubling, though at no fault of the author. Cultural geographers versed in place identity and the geographic imagination, for example, will no doubt find familiar (and delightfully articulated) ground in Bewell’s chapter on White’s The Natural History of Selborne, yet find our own voices missing from his analysis. Rather than critique Bewell for this oversight, perhaps we should reframe geographers’ silences in Natures in Translation as a reminder to ask ourselves how to better contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary research lying at the crossroads of humanities and environmental studies. Robert M. Briwa Montana State University  The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present. BERNARD DEBARBIEUX and GILLES RUDAZ, translated by Jane Marie Todd, foreword by Martin F. Price. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. xi+354, maps, tables, photographs, index. $50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-2260-3111-8. Mountains have evoked a range of feelings from awe to dread since antiquity. Little wonder then that mountains have occupied, in both literal and figurative senses, central positions in an array of religious and cosmological narratives. Mountains also figured prominently in the development of the scientific revolution and more recent notions of environmental conservation and sustainability. That provides the starting point for The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present, but instead of covering that familiar ground, Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz offer a wide-ranging examination of how mountains have served as frameworks and justifications for various types of social and political action intertwined with the larger project of modernity. In that sense, the authors’ focus is not on the mountain as a reality or a representation but rather as a multifaceted framework “to identify the initiatives intended to configure, and often to naturalize, a category of knowledge and territorial practices” (p. 10). In the process, mountains are conceptualized as platforms for specific sets of politics and ideologies. As the authors note: “To put it succinctly, we shall study the processes by which societies construct their mountains” (p. 1-2). Those processes are inherently political and reflected in the considerable attention that modern societies and states have afforded to promote specific conceptualizations of mountains. The authors regard “this labor of definition, delimitation, and characterization of the mountain as one modality among others for constructing worlds that are at once natural, social, and political” (p. 3). Or put somewhat differently, The Mountain is not about mountains per se, but rather how people have thought politically about and through mountains. Chapter one reviews attempts to apply scientific approaches to studying the origins and distributions of mountains, as well as their associated flora and fauna, since the Enlightenment. Although rooted in empiricism and the scientific method, these endeavors soon extended to encompass the human inhabitants of mountainous regions and the promotion of environmental determinism and cultural stereotypes. The remainder of the book is divided into two main parts based on the scales at which ideas of the mountain are configured to naturalize certain courses of political thought and action. Part one focuses on developments at the scale of the state, while part two examines the politics of mountains in the context of colonial empires and contemporary globalization.

258 Book Reviews Part one includes chapters two through five. Here, the authors draw attention on the roles mountains played in state formation and notions of territorial sovereignty, mostly in western societies. Chapter two examines on the notion of mountains as providing natural boundaries between sovereign states. The proposition seemed straightforward but generally served as a thin excuse to advance preconceived political agendas. Chapter three assesses the role of mountains in the construction of national identities. The image of the mountaineer, for example, was frequently imagined to epitomize key aspects of national identity, like strength, independence, and resilience. The mountain as a resource is covered in chapter four. This notion provided a foundation for policies favoring nationalization and resource extraction, as well as the somewhat later basis for national parks and nature conservation. Part one concludes with chapter five and its examination of the mountain as a place of residence. Previous chapters were largely driven by external actors, but eventually inhabitants of the mountains come to see themselves as distinctive and therefore deserving of greater state support or levels of autonomy. Part two broadens the discussion to encompass western colonialism and globalization. Both developments witnessed the expansion of western notions and practices of the mountain to other parts of the world. And both developments ultimately worked to initiate re-configurations of the mountain that transcended the nation-state scale. Chapters six and seven outline how western notions of the mountain were exported around the world. The act of exploring and physically climbing mountain areas, for example, was motivated in part by assumptions that those arduous endeavors helped establish colonial claims. Chapters eight and nine bring the story forward to globalization and efforts to re-conceptualize mountains within international and cross-border frameworks for promoting sustainable development and conservation efforts. Despite some limited successes, these efforts have been largely ineffectual as state and local policy preferences tend to prevail over global scale concerns. Efforts to codify mountains in European Union institutions, the subject of chapter ten, were also limited, because those regions remained too diverse in their policy goals. Finally, chapter eleven concludes with an examination of various cross-border initiatives aimed at conceptualizing mountains as refuges of biodiversity and nature conservation. Again, these efforts achieved limited success in the face of prevailing state-centric decision-making and reluctance localities. The authors have pieced together a solid narrative positioning the mountain as a mental framework “around and through which a set of conceptions of the natural, social, and political world has taken shape” (p. 284). Given that, the authors argue that we should understand that “the mountain as a category of cognition is in the first place a collection of ideas, before being a field for the implementation of operations, regulations, and public policies. It is therefore a category of collective action” (p. 285). The text flows nicely and is well-reasoned. The authors draw examples from around the world that simultaneously demonstrate to ubiquity and diversity of the politics of the mountain. It remains unclear how the mountain as a category of cognition and collective action differs from or is related to comparable categories, such as the idea of nature. The analysis would have also benefitted from more direct engagement with recent theoretical work on the concept of scale. Overall though, the authors provide an insightful study of the varied ways people have made politics through the notion of the mountain over time and space. Joshua Hagen Northern State University

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 The Politics of Staying Put: Condo Conversion and Tenant Right-to-Buy in Washington, DC. CAROLYN GALLAHER. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. Pp. x+265, maps, diagrams, photos, appendices, index. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4399-1265-2. If the history of gentrification is fundamentally a story of displacement, be it directly forced or indirectly induced, then we must also wonder how such displacement is resisted. Carolyn Gallaher’s recent book, The Politics of Staying Put: Condo Conversion and Tenant Right-toBuy in Washington, DC examines the means through which city residents at risk of displacement via gentrification, specifically though the conversion of rental apartments to condominiums, push back against developers using Washington’s unique laws allowing tenants a right of first refusal in such cases. Rich in historical and empirical detail, this book is a welcome addition to an ever-growing body of work on contemporary practices of urban development. Unlike much gentrification research that focuses on the aggregate effects of development and capital circulation through the built environment, Gallaher examines how one law, the Tenant Option to Purchase Act (TOPA), provides a means for low-income residents to resist gentrification in ways that are at once banal and extraordinary. With a mix of historical evidence, quantitative analysis, resident interviews, and an account of her own experience with her building’s conversion to a condominium, Gallaher traces the creation and use of Washington’s answer to unjust urban redevelopment. In Chapter 1, Gallaher recounts her personal experience of moving into a gentrifying DC neighborhood and an explanation of the history of TOPA. She also places the research in the context of three broad literatures that she briefly reviews: the role of condominium conversions under gentrification and neoliberalism, assessing the politics of local autonomy in urban governance, and finally methods for assessing displacement. Chapter 2, poetically titled “From Bullets to Cocktails,” is a largely historical account of the gentrification of Washington, DC since the 1980s and especially since the city’s bankruptcy in 1995. Scholars of urban planning history will find little new here, but the chapter provides a sound basis for the rest of the book’s empirical and theoretical interventions in contemporary DC. The mix of historical information with maps and tables showing DC’s demographic and economic transformations are helpful. In Chapter 3, Gallaher lays out her take on gentrification theory, grounding it with selections from her ethnography and interviews. Her review of the gentrification literature is well researched, easy to understand and jargon-free. Gallaher’s framing of her intervention is timely and appropriate and well-supported through a discussion of gentrification’s racial element as expressed in DC. Chapter 4 outlines the TOPA process as well as how it interacts with other housing and rental laws in DC. Readers attuned to method will find Chapter 5 interesting as Gallaher describes her sampling process and site selection for her case studies. Notably, the DC city government does not keep data on TOPA conversions, so Gallaher had to build her own dataset through detailed examinations of seven different apartment complexes that underwent a condominium conversion under TOPA. The next three chapters (6, 7, and 8) consist of the results of Gallaher’s seven case studies and very different outcomes each group of tenants experienced using TOPA to resist displacement by developers. Especially useful as a point of comparison is the Chapter 8 analysis of a “95-5” conversion – a loophole that allows a developer to avoid the mandatory notice of sale required under the TOPA law and used to displace residents without their consent. Finally, Chapter 9 links her case study analyses back to DC’s history of gentrification and concludes with a discussion on the effectiveness of TOPA as an anti-displacement measure.

260 Book Reviews As a whole, there is little fault to be found in this book. It is well researched and the arguments Gallaher presents about displacement are all well supported with her historical, ethnographic, and interview-based evidence. What I found particularly helpful and even refreshing were the ways this book personalizes the process of gentrification. We often encounter gentrification research through the lens of more dramatic forms of resistance, such as Neil Smith’s work on the Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988 (Chapter 4 in A.D. King, ed. Re-Presenting the City, NYU Press, 1996). In contrast, Gallaher presents the more everyday contradictions of antidisplacement activism in a compelling way. For example, the explanation of buyouts on pages 138-146 presents an interesting conundrum: when a tenant takes a buyout from a developer, they are effectively displaced, but the buyout amount can also be life changing. One interviewed tenant described his buyout as enough to make a down payment on a house (p. 145). The politics and morality of actually existing gentrification never seemed so muddled. By way of sympathetic critique, Gallaher’s discussion of the role of non-profit developers in Chapter 7 felt not as well thought out as the rest of the book. However, the role of non-profits in contemporary urban governance is understudied and is ripe for new investigations. Gallaher provides some good food for thought here, though, and a potential avenue for a sequel. Finally, scholars of gentrification, displacement, and urban governance will no doubt find this book useful and insightful, especially for its excellent ethnographic methodology. I would also recommend this book for a lay audience, as its review of gentrification is concise and easy to understand for non-experts, with the book’s empirics being well grounded in the theory, but with little needless jargon. Overall, The Politics of Staying Put is a welcome and timely contribution. Patrick Oberle Syracuse University  In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region. SETH GARFIELD. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. xiii+343, maps, illustrations, tables, notes. $27.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8223-5585-4. The Amazon has been regarded simultaneously as an isolated frontier, an unprotected border region, a promised land for the rural poor, and an uncharted wilderness whose biological and cultural diversity is of global significance. The Amazon has long captured the imaginations of a myriad of actors and stakeholders, not the least of whom were the Brazilian political elites, who have collaborated and competed with each other for centuries to realize their visions for the region. In Search of the Amazon is a well-written and meticulously researched study that focuses on the Amazon in the 1940s, a pivotal decade of political-economic and environmental change in which the region first came into focus as an integrated and integral part of modern Brazil. Timed about halfway between the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and environmental crisis of the late twentieth century, the 1940s represent a watershed in the history of modern Brazil. The rise of Imperial Japan and its conquest of Southeast Asia left the United States cut off from critical supplies of rubber and other strategic commodities at the beginning of the Second World War. The Good Neighbor Policy espoused by Franklin Roosevelt promoted free trade and economic development across Latin America in an effort to shore up the alliances between the United States and its southern neighbors, and to ensure their support for the Allied cause. Getúlio Vargas, President of Brazil, realized that greater ties with the United States might further his own authoritarian goals of economic nationalism and help him transform Brazil

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from a pre-industrial plantation society into a modern, industrial economy. In Search of the Amazon provides a detailed account of how the development of the Amazon during the Second World War was a critical component of the Estado Novo (New State), a nationalist project of the Vargas regime that sought to jumpstart industrialization and bring about the economic and territorial integration of Brazil. Drawing from meticulous archival research, Garfield provides a detailed account of how the Brazilian government, backed by the United States, undertook a massive effort to expand rubber production in the Amazon. Central to this process was the national-scale mobilization of labor, which brought individuals from all over Brazil. Many came from the environmentally marginal northeast where severe drought brought agricultural collapse in the 1940s and left much of the population ready for a new life and a new home. Enticing the rural poor to the Amazon, however, was not enough to create the modern industrial work force Vargas hoped would fuel his Estado Novo. Despite financial and logistical assistance from the United States, the socioenvironmental realities of the Amazon persistently hampered efforts to expand rubber. The humid, tropical climate of the region and the difficult work conditions associated with the rubber industry resulted in high mortality among workers. Others simply left. The unique nature of rubber production also worked against the Brazilian elite to transform the industry. Unlike other plantation-style crops, the production of rubber is a decentralized activity. Rubber tappers range over large areas of forest, enjoying a great deal of autonomy in their work. The Brazilian elite found themselves limited in their ability to force rubber tappers to increase production. Garfield astutely notes that similar tensions continue to characterize arrangements of labor and production within the Amazonian rubber economy to the present day, as is illustrated in the life and activism of Chico Mendes. Ultimately, like so many other grand development schemes undertaken in the Amazon, efforts to expand rubber during the Second World War met with limited success. Vargas was unsuccessful in creating the Estado Novo as he had hoped and the United States got only a limited return on its investment in Brazil. The campaign nevertheless had long-lasting impacts. Some of the migrant workers stayed in the Amazon and settled down into land-based subsistence and market activities, including rubber tapping, that have sustained them and their descendants ever since. Likewise, the political-economic processes designed to integrate the Amazon with national society brought about permanent transformation of the region and helped to further the dreams of the Brazilian state to finally take control of its vast tropical frontier to the north. In Search of the Amazon is an eminently readable book and I highly recommend it. The narrative is well-researched and supplemented by almost a hundred pages of detailed endnotes and references. Additionally, Garfield has included dozens of well-reproduced photographs and propaganda posters that greatly contribute to the narrative and portray a sense of life, especially in the city of Manaus, during the 1940s. A series of well-crafted maps contribute to the overall interpretability of the book and provide readers with portraits of settlement, infrastructure, political administration, and rubber production across the Amazon. In Search of the Amazon is most relevant to historical geographers and political ecologists with expertise in Latin America and Brazil, but anyone interested in the Second World War will find a fascinating and largely untold chapter of the war. Likewise, In Search of the Amazon would make for ideal reading material in upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that focus on Latin America or political ecology. David M. Cochran, Jr. University of Southern Mississippi

262 Book Reviews  Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps. STEPHEN J. HORNSBY. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. xii+289, color plates, maps, index. $45.00 cloth. ISBN 9780-226-38604-1. When I was younger, I remember spending hours with my pictorial map jigsaw puzzle of the United States, poring over the details—the rattlesnake out in the Oklahoma panhandle, the London Bridge in Arizona (!), and that poor guy stuck in prison in the Dry Tortugas. It was a map that spurred the imagination, and led ten-year-old me to think, not for the last time, about what places were like, and how they were represented. This map puzzle was one of countless such maps, whose heyday extended from the 1920s to the 1960s. Picturing America, by Stephen J. Hornsby, is a loving exploration of the history of such maps, and is drawn from the Library of Congress’ cartography collections. Pictorial maps were not typically produced by professional cartographers, but rather graphic designers and artists, and were riotous and festooned with details—human figures, buildings, landscapes, and countless other decorations bringing the maps to life. Such depictions of place were widespread in American culture for decades, in the form of tourism promotions, newspaper illustrations, campus tour maps, decorative wall hangings, instructional maps, industrial braggadocio, and countless other products. Some were whimsical, some were earnest, some contained politically pointed commentary (such as the sadly timely map from the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940 extolling the virtues of different immigrant groups in different parts of the country), and some were just plain trippy (a map of New York seen through wispy clouds, bookended with images of the Statue of Liberty and . . . a pterodactyl?). One of the final maps in the book, a view of the earth from space from 1959 entitled “It’s an Interesting World in an Interesting Time,” portrays typical (or stereotypical) images of place (loincloth-clad hunters in east Africa, hula girls in Hawaii, Mounties in Canada, llamas in Peru), interspersed with satellites being launched into orbit, world leaders glowering at each other through TV sets, and sprightly mushroom clouds blooming over Russia, the south Pacific and Nevada. Interesting times indeed. Hornsby sorts the maps roughly into thematic sections—maps to amuse, maps to instruct, maps of place and region, maps for industry, maps for war, and maps for postwar America—and explores the recurrent themes that run through such maps, as well as the individual quirks and idiosyncrasies of the mapmakers. The historical introduction places these maps in their historical and cartographic context, with brief profiles of some of the more prolific and innovative map artists. My biggest (and really, only) complaint is with the formatting of the book; a large number of landscape-oriented maps are reprinted on a single portrait-oriented page, leading to lots of blank space on the page and maps whose legibility is sometimes badly compromised. If the book had been oriented in landscape format, or these color plates rotated 90 degrees, the reader would much more readily be able to peruse all the details portrayed here—surely one of the biggest joys to be found in this kind of map. This book is part of a much broader return, in geography, the arts, and many other fields, to quirky and personal cartography—see, for example, Katherine Harmon’s books, Rebecca Solnit’s alternative atlases, or David Banis and Hunter Shobe’s Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas (Sasquatch Books, 2015). Perhaps this is a reaction to the growing computerization and automation of the characterless day-to-day maps we see on our phones and navigational devices, or to the growing

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technocratization of map-making through GIS. There is clearly much more to mapmaking than accurate depiction of factual information; maps are also a golden opportunity to depict soul, weirdness, and the spirit of place. As the advertisement for one of the maps in this book reads, “When you travel—You’ll get there by following a good road map, but it won’t be much of a trip if you see no more than those hard, black road map lines. Take a Graphic History Map with you. It will make the country come alive with all the glamor of history and legend. See history as you go” (p. 46-48). The same could be said of this book, which is a worthy addition to this growing literature on creative uses of maps and examinations of the relationships between people and place. Steven M. Schnell Kutztown University of Pennsylvania  Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier. REBECCA J. KINNEY. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Pp. xxvii + 209, figures, index. $25.00 paperback. 978-0-8166-9757-1. As a newcomer to the Detroit area, I was excited to review Rebecca Kinney’s Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier because I wanted to learn more about the iconic city I visit multiple times a week. As I began to read, I quickly realized that even though I live in Ypsilanti—about 35 miles west of downtown—I probably should not call myself a “Detroiter” around Southeast Michigan, but to the rest of the country that only knows Detroit through the slant of media representations, I can, in fact, adopt that demonym. Kinney speaks to the point of media narratives right off the bat in the introduction by calling to task Time, Inc. (publisher of Time magazine) and other media that have sensationalized Detroit over the last decade as a phoenix rising from the ashes. The narrative of Detroit’s rise, fall, and potential to rise again has sold well, Kinney argues, but as she points out, ironically, national and international media have been less quick to cover the “good” news of Detroit’s post-2014 recovery. Throughout the relatively quick read, Kinney’s thesis is one with which geographers will likely find themselves nodding in agreement: there has long been and continues to be great value—both narrative and financial—to viewing Detroit through the lens of the American frontier myth. While Kinney’s subtitle references Detroit as a postindustrial frontier in the present, the city was first quite literally on the frontier of the United States during the era of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Detroit then became a technological frontier with the meteoric rise of industry and the automobile in the US before wealth accumulation and a rising middle class facilitated white flight to the suburbs beginning in the 1950s. The corollary to Kinney’s thesis about Detroit-as-frontier is that the “demise” of Detroit and its subsequent rebirth have been deeply racialized projects. Detroit’s demise following the 1967 urban rebellion (Kinney’s term for what is often referred to as the Detroit Race Riot) and subsequent urban decay provide the backdrop for the concept of “wasteland” referenced in the book’s title. The fact that the city came to be considered a wasteland to national and international publics, Kinney argues, was driven by many genres of popular culture. The negative pop cultural references included media coverage such as a 1990 cover of New York Times Magazine featuring a full bleed photograph of an African American boy looking away from the camera toward one of Detroit’s many ruined houses with the words “THE TRAGEDY OF DETROIT” in an all-caps, block font for the headline. The image, alongside many other representations of Detroit from the period, clearly draws upon the 1967 riot and the narrowly defined stereotype of the city and its population (76 percent African American in 1990) largely as a failure. The shift in popular rhetoric and conversation surrounding Detroit to a city with potential began in the late 2000s, according to Kinney’s personal observations. She notes the curiosity behind

264 Book Reviews researching and writing the book came from “the seemingly banal small talk of everyday life” (p. x) with friends in California who, circa 2009, started to notice that Detroit was changing into a haven for artists, for example, or an edgy place that was “awful and wonderful, bleak and thriving” (p. ix). This ties into the title’s notion that Detroit-as-wasteland can also be “beautiful,” but only as the city began to be “settled” once again by white outsiders. Kinney finds that dominant narratives of Detroit as a city on the rise, both historically and in the present, are consistently argued to not hinge on race, despite so much of the privileged access to capital and other structural benefits of whiteness having been key to Detroit’s rise. Simultaneously, while Detroit’s (re)birth is ostensibly color blind, its historical demise, noted above, is popularly believed to have been brought about entirely because of black destruction. The theoretical framework Kinney employs throughout Beautiful Wasteland will be familiar to most human geographers, especially those with an eye for urban geography and critical historical or cultural geography. Within the first few pages, the author jumps into literature from David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier (London: Routledge, 1996) and critical race scholars, including Jodi Melamed, George Lipsitz, Michael Omi, and Howard Winant. Through each of the five main chapters in Beautiful Wasteland, Kinney takes as her main material specific cases from popular culture that she then analyzes for evidence of racial formation in the narrative’s tropes. Each chapter takes on a different medium: the Internet discussion board City-Data.com, the 1980s and 1990s ruin photography of Camilo José Vergara, the 2011 Chrysler commercial “Born of Fire,” early 2010s documentary films Deforce and Detropia, and finally national media coverage of Detroit’s new appeal to the “creative class.” As Kinney summarizes, “The way the world is seen emerges from a cacophony of stories, and in today’s modes of storytelling that means car commercials, conversations among anonymous posters on an Internet forum, and magazine articles about urban pioneers. …the everyday stories of places are the sites where one can most convincingly see the legacies and the continuation of the racialization of place…” (p. 148). My critiques of the book are minor. First and foremost is that the book lacks cartographic representations that could help illustrate Kinney’s points. The sole map is a 1938 map showing the percentage of “race of households” by neighborhood, produced as part of the Detroit Real Property Survey. Even something as basic as a reference map showing key locations and neighborhoods to which Kinney frequently refers would be a welcome addition. The only other complaint I would note is that the table of contents would usefully be followed up with a list of figures. Overall, Kinney’s end product is a broadly appealing book that is also quite accessible: I believe it would have a place in advanced undergraduate classes and graduate seminars alike. Historical and cultural geographers plus scholars with an interest in the US Midwest, manufacturing history, or urban history will likely find this a welcome addition to their shelves— or night stands: the book was a compelling read and difficult to put down. Matthew R. Cook Eastern Michigan University

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 City on a Grid: How New York Became New York. GERARD KOEPPEL. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015, Pp. xxiv+296, illustration, notes, bibliography. $17.99 paperback. ISBN 978-0-306-82549-1 $29.99 cloth. ISBN 978-0-306-82284-1. Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817-1898. JON SCOTT LOGEL. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. ix+262, illustrations. $45.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-8071-6372-6. On December 6, 2011, the Museum of the City of New York opened The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, an exhibit curated by Hilary Ballon showcasing the history of the city’s famous grid street plan, known as the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. (An online version of the exhibit can be accessed at http://thegreatestgrid.mcny.org.) As one of the contributors to this exhibition and the accompanying book (Hilary Ballon, ed., Columbia University Press, 2012), I appreciated the way it brought New York’s history to life, even if I was skeptical of the heroic monumentalism underpinning the curator’s overall framing narrative. Yet one thing was clear: museum exhibits such as The Greatest Grid have the potential to reach a much wider audience than most academic works can ever hope to achieve, inspiring both popular and academic interest in urban history and geography. Another contributor to The Greatest Grid exhibit, Gerard Koeppel, has delved even deeper into the story of the Manhattan grid in his latest book, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York, which is his third book on New York’s history, following Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Nation (Da Capo Press, 2009). In City on a Grid, Koeppel casts himself as the Manhattan grid’s first and only “biographer,” since “[i]n the two hundred years of New York’s grid, no one has written a book about it” (p. xxii). This is, of course, pure hyperbole since there have been numerous scholarly theses, journal articles, book chapters, and books published over the past century that examine the city’s grid plan of 1811, not least of which is Ballon’s The Greatest Grid for which Koeppel himself was a contributor. Indeed, much of the material covered in City on a Grid has been well documented by prior studies. Yet Koeppel’s primary achievement is having written an accessible narrative on the development of New York’s grid plan, tailored primarily for a popular, rather than strictly academic, audience. Following a brief preface and introduction, City on a Grid is divided into 13 chapters with playful titles such as “Come Hither Old Grid,” “Getting Square with Right-Angled Living,” “The Grid That Ate Manhattan,” and “Back to the Rectilinear Future.” Koeppel begins by explaining that the 1811 grid plan transformed an “island of hills” (the Lenape meaning of the name Mannahatta) into a “flattened landscape of numbers” (p. xvi). However, he insists that “Manhattan also remained a poetic place of names” (p. xvii). Koeppel then proceeds to describe how most scholars have been “brutal critics” of New York’s grid plan while conceding that “many smart people have embraced the grid” (p. xx-xxi). In his role as historical narrator, Koeppel portrays himself as a neutral observer, insisting that his “book doesn’t judge. This book presents the story of the grid’s creation by the primary men—three gentlemen Commissioners and their single-minded young surveyor—and the events in its lengthening life, and suggests you come to your own conclusion” (p. xxi-xxii). However, City on a Grid does far more than this and—like any study of history—can’t escape the need for interpretive judgment. In many respects, this book is an extended meditation on the aesthetics of the grid, and Koeppel uses the opportunity to highlight how grids are “dull and ugly generally” (p. 1). In particular, he contends that New York’s grid plan resulted from “the intentional exclusion of

266 Book Reviews beauty by the Commissioners in 1811” (p. 218) and maintains that “the lack of beauty was and is the gridded city’s heartache” (p. 232). This aesthetic interpretation of the grid has been a wellworn trope in popular and academic commentary on New York’s grid plan for over a century, and it generally frames discussions of the 1811 plan as being a matter of economic utility triumphing over aesthetic concerns. This utility/aesthetics binary is problematic for a number of reasons, including the fact that the symmetry of the grid was the hallmark of neoclassical aesthetic imaginaries during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Indeed, one of the designers of the 1811 grid plan, Street Commissioner Simeon De Witt, wrote an entire treatise on linear perspective in which he espouses the virtues of symmetry, order, and proportion (The Elements of Perspective, Albany: H.C. Southwick, 1813). The point here is not to defend the aesthetics of the grid but rather to suggest that the aesthetic argument that Koeppel rehashes in City on a Grid obscures the ways in which urban designs—both in New York and elsewhere—are subject to competing aesthetics, which, more often than not, are associated with competing politico-economic interests in urban development. If Koeppel’s aesthetic ruminations on the grid leave much to be desired, he is on more solid ground when discussing the history of surveying and mapping in New York. In particular, he provides an excellent discussion of the role that pre-1811 surveys of Manhattan played in establishing the grid pattern of property division as a template for the 1811 grid. Koeppel also offers a detailed account of the work of the Street Commissioners and the Randel surveys of the grid, yet, again, much of this story has been explored by other scholars in previous studies, including Marguerite Holloway’s recent biography of John Randel, Jr., chief surveyor of the 1811 grid plan (The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor, W.W. Norton & Co., 2014). In the second half of the book, Koeppel narrates the history of the grid’s development, focusing on everything from the political machinations of city hall to the bureaucratic workings of the Street Department in “opening, regulating and paving streets” (p. 165). Overall, City on a Grid retells the story of New York’s grid in an entertaining style tailored primarily for popular consumption, but it will also be of interest to scholars working in the fields of urban historical geography, urban planning history, and the history of cartography. The role that technical experts played in the history of nineteenth-century New York is also the focus of Jon Logel’s Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817-1898. As its subtitle suggests, Designing Gotham examines the involvement of West Pointtrained engineers in the development of New York as a modern metropolis. Written primarily for an academic audience, this book reads in large part as an institutional history of the West Point Military Academy and the achievements of its graduates in New York City, with the author noting that “Academy graduates … brought water to the city, created Central Park, and represented the interests of New Yorkers in the U.S. Congress” (p. 3). Logel repeatedly portrays West Point engineers as bringing “order” to the “chaos” of the city, maintaining that “West Point gave men the ability to apply order and reason to the increasingly disordered world of nineteenth-century America” (p. 8). This narrative of masculinist control infuses the entire study, and, while the author acknowledges the shortcomings of West Point engineers, Designing Gotham calls attention to “West Point’s legacy” of accomplishments in the making of modern New York (p. 180). After providing an overview of the study, Logel then examines the establishment of West Point as a center not only of military training but also of engineering education based upon the French tradition of the Ecole Militaire and the Ecole Polytechnique. He focuses particularly on the influence of West Point superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, who developed the Military Academy’s engineering curriculum, as well as Dennis Hart Mahan, who served as Thayer’s “responsible

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heir, faithfully shepherding cadets through the engineering curriculum” (p. 33). Logel describes the West Point curriculum in great detail, and his discussion of the inclusion of topographical drawing in the engineering program will be of particular interest to historians of cartography. He also offers a useful summary of the establishment of engineering programs in U.S. universities during the nineteenth century as well as the creation of professional organizations such as the American Society of Civil Engineers. The remainder of the book explores the various ways in which West Point engineers shaped the growth and development of New York, especially with respect to the construction of large infrastructure projects such as the Croton Aqueduct, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge, among others. In each case, Logel selects one or more West Point alumni to exemplify West Point’s influence on New York, including George Greene, John Newton, Egbert Viele, Henry Slocum, George McClellan, and Fitz John Porter. Of all the cases considered in Designing Gotham, the chapter on Egbert L. Viele’s New York (Chapter 5) will likely be of particular interest to historical geographers. Viele is perhaps most well-known for his famous “Water Map,” which records the pregrid watercourses on Manhattan Island, and, as Logel explains, “the map is still the starting point for any engineer or architect looking to do construction in Manhattan” (p. 109). Logel discusses Viele’s Water Map as well as his report on The Topography and Hydrology of New York, both of which played an important role in the history of sanitation reform in nineteenth-century New York. He also recounts the “personal rivalry” between Viele, who served for a time as engineerin-chief of Central Park, and the more well-known figure of Frederick Law Olmsted. Although Olmsted and Vaux’s famous Greensward design of Central Park was eventually adopted over Viele’s plan, Logel contends that “[w]ithout Viele’s surveying, preliminary drainage work, and initial construction of the site, Olmsted and Vaux might not have had such a large plot on which to develop their masterpiece of landscape architecture” (p. 97). Logel therefore laments that Viele’s contributions to the development of Central Park are “seldom emphasized” by historians despite their importance to the “park’s history” (p. 96). In his discussion of Viele as well as the various other West Point alumni highlighted in the book, the primary task that Logel sets for himself is to underscore their “leadership in shaping the spirit of Victorian New York” (p. 122). There is, of course, certainly a measure of truth in such a claim, yet at times it comes across more as hagiography than scholarly critique. This may be partly due to the fact that Logel’s initial interest in writing Designing Gotham arose from his time leading walking tours of the West Point Cemetery, which he gave while serving as an instructor of U.S. history at West Point. (Logel is now an Associate Professor of War Gaming at the U.S. Naval War College.) As Logel explains in his acknowledgements, such tours generally entailed highlighting the accomplishments of West Point’s alumni, which eventually led Logel to question whether the script for such tours might involve a hint of “embellishing” the legacies of West Point’s heroes (p. 191). While Designing Gotham does provide a more nuanced account of the relations between West Point and the “rise” of New York, its walking-tour origins are still apparent in the general emphasis on seeking to reclaim West Point’s “legacy” in the making of the modern city. Considered together, City on a Grid and Designing Gotham narrate New York’s history largely as a story of politicians, bureaucrats, and technical experts redesigning Manhattan’s landscape as an embodiment of the “utilitarian-technological spirit” (Logel, p. 8) of nineteenthcentury America. Framed in these terms, such a narrative takes as its focus the accomplishments of elite white men engaging in public actions on the urban stage. When other groups, such as African Americans or working-class immigrants, are mentioned, they are generally portrayed as passive victims of the march of modern improvement rather than active subjects of history in their own right. This historiographic framing is, of course, not confined to the two books under

268 Book Reviews review here but is part of a long tradition of historical narration that privileges the historical experiences of political, economic, and social elites. The typical response to such a critique is that, since it was elite white men who designed Manhattan’s grid plan, Central Park, etc., historical accounts of such topics must necessarily highlight the ideas and actions of those elite historical figures. Yet, as numerous scholars have shown, there are various ways of reading history against the grain of the social hierarchies of the past and present. Although neither of the present studies take this as their aim, this absence will hopefully serve as inspiration for others to contribute more critical histories and geographies of New York in the future. Reuben Rose-Redwood University of Victoria  California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage. ELIZABETH KRYDERREID. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Pp. xv+355, preface, acknowledgments, figures, color plates, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-81663797-3. As the Spanish settled the northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth century, they left an indelible imprint upon the land. There were a number of consistent features commonly found among the Nuevo Mexicano, Tejano, and Californio settlements including presidio outposts, extensive irrigation projects, and far-reaching transportation networks. But the element in the built environment most closely associated with Colonial Spain is the mission church. Under the guiding principles of the Laws of the Indies, Spanish citizens were instructed to build their missions in close proximity to indigenous communities so as to bring more converts into the Catholic fold. One requirement of the Laws was that the indigenous community must not be harmed. As history tells us, however, the Encomienda and Repartimiento systems were far from altruistic. Native populations were exploited for their labor and the quality of their life rarely improved. In California Mission Landscapes, Elizabeth Kryder-Reid documents and deconstructs one element of the missions – the gardens. Her main objective is to investigate how heritage has been constructed, appropriated, and mobilized to reflect and favor California’s wealthy elite. As one installment in the Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series, the book is comprised of an introduction, four content chapters, and a conclusion. The writing is clear and accessible, supported by ample illustrations including thirteen color plates, and delightfully welledited. The Introduction (Missions, Memory, and Heritage) provides background information and lays the theoretical foundation for the book. It begins by discussing the history of California’s twenty-one missions, key individuals, characteristics of the indigenous population, and the changing political and administrative environment in which the missions have operated. This opening chapter also presents an overview of the theoretical terms landscape, memory, and heritage. I was pleased to see a couple familiar geographers (e.g. Denis Cosgrove and Richard Schein) in the section on landscape, but the author missed out on referencing the work of other geography luminaries (geographers can fill in the long list of names here). Chapter 1 (Colonial Mission Landscapes) provides an historical overview of the founding of the twenty-one missions dating from 1769 to 1833. Its main focus is to place the indigenous population within the newly established Spanish/Catholic system. The chapter highlights differences between the Native population and the Spanish in such things as settlement patterns, land use practices, animal husbandry, and family dwellings. It moves to a full description of labor and social control and ends with a detailed analysis of sacred spaces. Throughout the chapter are numerous examples of syncretism (both cultural and religious).

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Chapter 2 (Inventing Heritage) picks up in 1833 and traces the establishment of the “mission gardens” into the twentieth century. It is revealed that the verdant gardens we see today were not a colonial product, rather an invented space for California’s wealthy, white elite including the likes of Martha Nelson McCan, Marah Ellis Ryan, Charles Lummis, and Helen Stevens. The bulk of the chapter focuses on six missions. Mission Santa Barbara was the first to have its grounds transformed into a park-like setting and it became the model for others to follow. Mission San Fernando is used to showcase how a select group of California elites can fabricate a history to justify their efforts to “restore” the mission landscape to meet their desires. Mission San Juan Capistrano demonstrates how various actors (e.g. priests, parishioners, community leaders) design a space with the specific intention of attracting tourists. Mission La Purísima stands out because the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) used the site to relieve high unemployment in the region. Since it was a government-sponsored restoration project, all references to the religious nature of the structure were removed. This is ironic given the building’s original purpose. Mission San Gabriel and Mission San Antonio de Pala demonstrate the eclectic groups of people coming together to “preserve,” “restore,” and “protect,” the missions for the future. But who’s past and future are they protecting? In the third chapter (Cultivating Heritage) Kryder-Reid “analyzes the narratives, tropes, and conceptual metaphors that frame the construction of the past ... [and] it interrogates the connections of power, space, and visuality mobilized in the materality of the landscape to signify a shared heritage that naturalized certain interests and marginalized others” (p. 28). As the chapter explains, “[B]y the mid-twentieth century the missions had become must-see destinations for tourists seeking to experience a uniquely Californian past ...” (p. 136). But why? In much the same way as the Santa Fe style does for New Mexico, the beauty, timelessness, and sacredness of the mission gardens speaks to the heritage of California. As readers finish the chapter it comes as little surprise to learn that many of California’s mission gardens are actually an amalgamation of Australian-origin plants with the Mediterranean garden style. Chapter 4 (Consuming Heritage) explores how the missions have been appropriated to advance tourism, gardening, and selective memory. The chapter begins by explaining who visits the missions, and then talks about how the various mission garden landscapes are sculpted to elicit the most favorable responses from visitors. The author explores viewsheds, soundscapes, and light, before hinting at touch, smell, and taste. The message is clear that the Native American “other” has been left to wither, while California’s desirable colonial heritage has been meticulously cultivated. The concluding chapter is the most rewarding. Here the author explores ways in which the California Mission gardens could be used as a Third Space. Third Spaces are places where divergent narratives are brought into conversation. Instead of perpetuating the California white, elite perspective at the expense of the Native American perspective, the Third Space perspective calls for the creation of a landscape where a dialog takes place. A long list of geographers have explored various aspects of this. The author only mentions a few including Edward Soja and Gillian Rose; the list is much longer! I have very few concerns with the book. It is well written and reflects solid research. The book was even awarded the 2017 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the American Association of Geographers, which attests to its overall quality. It is more than evident that the author has spent the most time at the Santa Barbara mission. The concluding chapter is worth the price of the book and would be an effective reading for a graduate seminar; there are a number of interesting perspectives that could generate classroom discussion. The book’s greatest strength is in reinforcing the idea of landscape as text. As geographers are fully aware, researchers with a

270 Book Reviews trained eye can behold and decipher many messages from the landscape. The author identifies some works by geographers, but there is a large body of literature that she did not tap into. Perhaps geographers need to broadcast their message more loudly. Jeffrey S. Smith Kansas State University  George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape. PHILIP LEVY. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015, x + 234 pp., notes, figures, maps, photographs, index. $22.99 paperback. ISBN 978-1-940425-90-0. $79.99 cloth. ISBN 978-1-940425-89-4. $29.99 epub. ISBN 978-1-940425-91-7. In George Washington Written Upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape, Phillip Levy explores the childhood of George Washington. Given the limited historical record on the early life of the man, Levy tackles the myth of Washington and the ways in which that myth has been inscribed on the landscape of Ferry Farm where the Washington family resided. Ferry Farm is the setting for the famous cherry tree story invented by Mason Locke Weems. As Levy explained, “Washington’s earliest years [are] the most fiction-ridden part of his biographical writing. The gaps and silences [in the documentary record] have allowed Washington’s childhood to become a wonderful area for historical invention and authorial projection. Its characters and its central location – Ferry Farm – have become canvases on which generations of meaning makers have portrayed a host of fantasies and wishful thoughts” (p. 8). Levy characterizes his work as a landscape study – specifically how the landscape of Ferry Farm gained meaning – and he poses an intriguing question early in the book: “What does it mean for a real landscape to be defined by a fictional story?” (p. 12). Levy’s book is organized into two parts of three chapters each. In the opening chapter, Levy provides a very interesting and thorough historiography of Washington’s childhood. Though more than one hundred and fifty biographies have been written, Levy explains that the writing about Washington’s childhood has been “prone to visible bouts of wishful thinking, canonical retellings, and long-lived canards” (p. 28). Levy concludes that “the childhood narratives are often less about Washington than they are about locating him within a set of emerging middleclass values and virtues” (p. 29). Washington’s ancestry, wealth, education, physical strength, and immediate family – particularly his mother and brothers – have each been constructed in a variety of ways to suit the social concerns and historical arguments of the period in which they were written. What emerged was the image of a self-made man who was of the proper ancestral stock, appropriately rustic, locally schooled, and unquestionably masculine despite the early death of his father. The second chapter is a fascinating exploration of a three-page handwritten survey that Washington made in 1771. Levy argues convincingly that this survey is one of the few texts that Washington penned that provide insight into his childhood and his relationship to Ferry Farm. Levy asserts that, “Washington’s wording and choice of objects on the land are all a hidden text about how he understood the place he came of age” (p. 60). The survey is a captivating document in part because it was not meant to be seen, it did not become a map, and it is somewhat incomplete. In 1774, Washington sold the property and claimed that it had not been surveyed. How interesting that Washington fibbed about the land made famous as the place where he could not tell a lie. Levy argues that this irony is the best evidence that Washington viewed his 1771 survey as a personal act. The narrative that emerges from Washington’s own hand about his childhood farm suggests that Washington recalled the land as “a place with a view” and his time there as one of irritation and poverty (p. 88-89). In the third chapter, Levydiscusses

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viewed his 1771 survey as a personal act. The narrative that emerges from Washington’s own hand about his childhood farm suggests that Washington recalled the land as “a place with a view” and his time there as one of irritation and poverty (p. 88-89). In the third chapter, Levy discusses the archaeological work that has been done in recent decades at the site of Ferry Farm and demonstrates that this work has unveiled the “conflicted material record” that complicates the myths of biographers and the silences of Washington himself. The material record reveals “the spatial relations of social dynamics within a landscape that was both a dwelling place and a work place” (p. 114). Importantly, the archaeological project provides insight into the conditions of the enslaved peoples resident at Ferry Farm and situates the Washington family within the broader context of British colonization, American consumerism, and the contradictions of eighteenth century life along the Rappahannock River. While the first three chapters focus on how Washington and Ferry Farm have been understood through biography, surveying, and archaeology, the second half of the book explores the role of memory and folklore in the construction of the historical landscape of Washington’s early years. The fourth chapter examines the imagined landscape constructed by Mason Locke Weems. Parson Weems created morality tales about cherry trees and the like, but he also fashioned Ferry Farm as an American Eden that served to build and reinforce American national identity. As Levy explained, “For Americans confronting warfare, market collapses, sectionalism, and, finally, civil war, having stories and images of a place like Ferry Farm in mind was one of the many ways to bolster confidence in the national project” (p. 193). In the fifth chapter, Levy turns attention to the buildings and objects that have been tied to Washington memory – even though they do not date to Washington’s time. One of these objects is a 1870s farm building that was promoted as Washington’s surveying office. Trees on the land, of course, have also led an interesting life over time as historicity was invested in the symbols of Washington lore to support touristic suspension of disbelief. In the final chapter, Levy discusses the future of Washington memory. He argues that Ferry Farm offers a lesson on the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene and remarks that “it might be that the next era of Washington memory will be less concerned with what he was and did and more with the places his memory inspired and the lifeways they reimagined” (p. 229). Levy’s book should be of great interest to historical geographers focused on landscape and memory. He expertly delves into multiple dimensions of the topic and draws upon sources and scholarship from a variety of disciplines. Andrew Milson University of Texas at Arlington  Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935. PHILLIP GORDON MACKINTOSH. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. xv+348. Hardcover, $70.00 CDN. ISBN 978-1-4426-4679-7. ebook, $70.00 CDN. ISBN 978-1-4426-6657-3 What do sidewalks and street pavements tell us about the historical city? In this book, Phillip Mackintosh examines seventy-five years of street improvement agendas in Toronto, paying particular attention to the modernizing bent of the city’s two largest newspapers. The liberal press, he argues, was a key actor promoting the ordering and resurfacing of the city’s streets, as part of a larger reformist program that was at once civic-minded and self-interested. In Newspaper City, these mixed motives are just one of the ironies of the “contradictory city” (p. 33-34) shaped by the clash between communitarian and individual goals under liberal capitalism. Throughout the book, Mackintosh is successful in using newspapers and everyday infrastructure as means to better understand politics and life in a modern industrial city.

272 Book Reviews Other scholars, including Richard Harris in Unplanned Suburbs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), have described how Toronto’s rapid urban expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries outpaced the civic administration’s faltering attempts to build adequate urban infrastructure. In 1861, at the start of Mackintosh’s period, this Great Lakes city’s population was 65,000; by the 1930s it was more than 800,000. Paving Toronto’s streets, like the expansion of the streetcar network, was in part an effort by the city to integrate dozens of newly-built residential suburbs into the more established infrastructure networks of the older core. However, that did not mean that citizens, even those who complained of being mired in mud or choked by dust, rallied to the idea. As in other North American cities, property owners were wary of street improvements, whether because they did not want to pay for them or because they were concerned about increased through-traffic and noise. Anyone interested in locating the Victorian roots of anti-infrastructure NIMBYism would do well to read Chapter 4 on Toronto ratepayers’ use of deputations and petitions to resist municipal paving plans. By the late 1800s, Newspaper City argues, the press took it upon itself to champion a vision of a city remade in concrete and asphalt, with considerable benefits for public health, commerce, and quality of life. Like their counterparts in Chicago, New York City, or Buffalo, the editors of Toronto’s Globe and the Star attacked the glacial pace of progress and the short-sightedness of parsimonious ratepayers who were content with cedar-block pavement or no pavement at all. One of Mackintosh’s insights here is that there was more to this stance than liberal reformist ideals. The “newspaper city” (p. 35-62) presented in the pages of the dailies blurred public goals and private profit in the name of progress. Newspapers had a material stake in urban growth, since new infrastructure promised new subscribers; acting as a forum for civic debates also helped sell copy. Of course, in a period defined by efforts to reform nearly every aspect of city life, there were always issues that were higher priority than street surfacing. Mackintosh is sensitive to this larger context, and gives the reader a few glimpses of what newspaper editors thought about public transit, slum housing, or youth delinquency. The battle to order the city’s streets did not stop with their paving; there was a process of symbolic construction at work as well. With modern materials came new logics for the management of public space. Concrete sidewalks were regulated by a growing number of bylaws and police interventions to maximize flow and efficiency; freshly-laid asphalt roads were increasingly understood as the sole province of mechanical transport, with pedestrians designated as interlopers. Whereas the first part of the book has few parallels in existing scholarship, here Mackintosh engages with work on car culture and pedestrianism. Many readers will be familiar with the idea of “flow” from Nicholas Blomley’s Rights of Passage (Routledge, 2011), and with the making of the motor-age street from the work of Peter Norton (“Street Rivals,” Technology and Culture, 48(2), 2007, p. 331-359). In this section of the book, newspapers deplore the deaths of children struck by the city’s growing number of private cars while celebrating the bourgeois mobility this new technology enabled. Initiatives like the Globe’s “Just Kids Safety Club”—265,000 members across Canada in 1928—which emphasized segregation of uses and pedestrian responsibility for road safety, were key moments in the construction of North American automobility. Newspaper City’s focus on the street brings out a different narrative of the historical construction of urban modernity, one that emphasizes mundane, incremental change over grand schemes to improve the human condition. Toronto’s liberal reformers, including its major newspapers, were armed with the latest urbanist ideas originating in London, Chicago, or New York City, but it was local conditions—fiscal conservatism, empowered ratepayers, bureaucratic inertia—that determined to what extent they were implemented. This book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the role of the press in urban reform, or the way in which new infrastructure technologies changed the look, feel, and function of the modern city. Daniel Ross Université du Québec à Montréal

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 Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past. KAREN M. MORIN and DOMINIQUE MORAN, editors. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. v+232, photographs, maps, index. $118.40 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-1388-5005 Prisons may look as though they are an island unto themselves, but Karen Morin and Dominique Moran clearly develop a well-articulated framework for how this is not the case. In Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past, they arrange multiple perspectives into one unifying voice that uniquely express the complexities found within the prison landscape. When reviewing the literature about carceral geography, both editors are primary authorities on the subject, while multiple contributors enrich the context of this book. It is categorically organized into three parts: prison techniques and development; recommissioning of prisons in history and for artistic expression; and carceral economies and geographies. Furthermore, photographs and maps are provided throughout the text for visual reinforcement. In the introduction, we grasp Morin and Moran’s position that “social and spatial legacies” help us understand the extent of the carceral crises we see today (p. 1). Advocating for “usable pasts,” they do not emphasize solely the history of prisons, in their simplest form. The consistent message in this book is that carceral presents and pasts are intertwined. Indeed, disciplining prisoners via extensive and compounding regulation(s) has developed for centuries, and a culture of hegemony lives on, whether within prison walls or across the globe. In part one, Katie Hemsworth examines the presence of silence, surveillance, and sensory deprivation for disciplinary practices. Brett Story conveys how prisoners had agency—collective or individual—and it was with this agency they could create a political and organized presence despite being incarcerated. Rashad Shabazz focuses on the Black gangs of Chicago, in the 1960s. After examining masculinity and gender expectations, their relationship to carceral toughness, and the lack of resources for community members, Shabazz candidly suggests how past circumstances affect the present, and that this must be understood and altered. In part two, Jennifer Turner and Kimberley Peters demonstrates the usable past of a prison museum, its mission to educate contemporary audiences, and how they try to relate carceral realities with general public intrigue. Kevin Walby and Justin Piché review how one small prison transformed into a historic site, but through the remaking of its historic legacy, the larger discussion about contemporary growth of Canadian prisons is ultimately lost. Carol Medlicott assesses the development of historic Shaker sites into institutional facilities or campuses such as structures for the destitute, elderly, or ill, and prisons. Susana Draper concludes the section with an assessment of memory building and sustaining art by imprisoned women in Argentina. In part three, Clare Anderson and her co-authors trace an extensive network of carceral transportation and penal settlements during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involving European and Latin American countries, as well as Japan. Empires’ protocol regarding convicts varied and in some cases; they had more agency than one would imagine. Jack Norton examines the increase of prisons in a New York district at the end of the twentieth century. The relationship between degrading community economic developments and rural demographic changes fostered prisons-as-development campaigns (p.180). Brian Jordan Jefferson analyzes hyperpolicing, social stigmas applied to culprits, and the existence of transcarceral spaces. Using one tool of crime pattern mapping, law enforcement could observe community-level behaviors; some areas were profiled for a need for increased law enforcement, or were dubbed problematic spaces. Anne Bonds introduces how a private corrections company influenced the construction of a Wisconsin

274 Book Reviews prison, rather than a state level resolution and procedure. The 1970s saw a nationwide interest in increasing and expanding criminalization of drug possession and paraphernalia. Bonds explores the unevenness of racial minority and geographic patterns of incarceration, as well as the increase in prisons within the state. Similar to Norton’s examination of prisons-as-development in New York, Wisconsin faced comparable circumstances. The book provides an extensive collective framework for readers of various disciplines or studies: historians, sociologists, geographers, criminologists, law enforcement personnel, human rights advocates, etc. As each chapter offers an additional perspective of expertise in carceral histories, the spectrum of viewpoints is quite vast. In truth, before reading it, I would have known logically that there is a prison network alive today because of centuries of incarceration practices and locations. However, I was enthralled by the unique pieces of in-depth information provided in each chapter. At times, it took some reflection on how some of the chapters fit together. Yet, learning about varied subjects such as soundscapes, prison museums, Shakers, and the network or web of punishment in time, space, and place, made this book hard to put down. The wealth of perspectives is its strength, and it offers a multitude of topics that one could research, all related to historic, spatial, and temporal carceral geography. The text would be applicable in a higher education classroom environment, a museum professionals workshop, a cultural competence or social services training, and more. Virginia James South Dakota State University  Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America. MICHELE CURRIE NAVAKAS. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 248, maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth. ISBN 9780812249569. $49.94 ebook ISBN 9780812294422. In this provocative literary and cartographic history focused on antebellum Florida, Michele Currie Navakas effectively employs a geographic lens to explore notions of empire, nationhood, and belonging. Liquid Landscape draws on a wide variety of sources to show that early Florida was conceived as a realm of shifting and uncertain topography, thus confounding the very concept of solid ground on which early U.S. conceptions of settlement, possession and empire were based. North America’s southernmost peninsula, then, provides an intriguing case study for re-examining the U.S. expansionist imperative of manifest destiny, rooted as it was in an ideal of taking possession of contiguous continental territory through agricultural settlement. Navakas argues that acceptance of Florida’s impermanent geography – in both literature and maps – challenged the manifest destiny narrative, and she credits early writing about Florida with “exposing how some of the nation’s most politically significant concepts of self, nation, and empire rested on assumptions that were as contingent as its topography” (p. 3). Furthermore, she concludes, important literary works set in or near Florida have been overlooked for the role they played in conjuring alternate methods of “taking root” at a time when American national identity was yet in a formative stage. Drawing on recent scholarship that takes spaces of imperial periphery seriously, Liquid Landscape uses Florida’s environmental and cultural geography to illustrate the many contingencies that necessarily develop at the margins of imperial territory. The book also participates in a broader rethinking of settler colonialism, which recognizes displacement-through-settlement as the essential vehicle through which imperial technologies and cultures are developed and deployed. Navakas offers Florida as a compelling case for scholars in both of these areas to

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consider, given that the peninsula was peripheral to multiple European empires over time and also served as a site of refuge, haven, and settlement for various cultural groups in its long history between Spanish contact and the U.S. Civil War. Liquid Landscape moves easily between a variety of source materials – settlers’ guides, captivity narratives, military account, woodcuts, lithographs, maps, natural histories, adventure stories, geodetic surveys, and canonical works of literature. Each chapter focuses on a few key sources and provides extensive historical context to guide the reader to a critical understanding often at odds with how these pieces have previously been understood. Although the book is deeply historical, it is organized not chronologically but rather geographically, with each chapter devoted to a specific form of shifting landscape. This organizational scheme effectively emphasizes Navakas’s key point that antebellum notions of Florida’s “topographic instability, geographic indeterminacy, and demographic fluidity” (p. 15) undermined the continental ideal of America in important ways. Chapter 1 begins with the first British survey of Florida, which cartographically acknowledged the indeterminacy of Florida’s topography – estuaries, marshes, sinks, springs, and shores – yet presented the shifting landscape nonetheless as territory that could be claimed. Later visitors, including Audubon, Bartram, and Cushing, built on this early construction, using Florida’s landscapes to explore concepts of rootedness, possession, and belonging in relation to settlement and national identity. Chapter 2 also begins with cartographic representation, noting how frequently Florida was presented not as a coherent peninsula but rather as a collection of islands, inlets, and shoals. Navakas argues that the long endurance of these depictions, even after detailed survey had shown Florida’s peninsula was mainly contiguous, indicates broad acceptance of the region’s indeterminate boundaries, fluid connections to the Caribbean, and defiance of settlement norms. Chapter 3 focuses on Florida’s harbors, keys, reefs and gulfs, recounting popular fiction that used these settings to define Florida as a “wrecker empire” in which robust flows of commerce were both enabled and endangered. South Florida’s proximity to other Caribbean and Gulf ports, for example, was an important source of wealth production both in the British colonial era and in the U.S. territorial era. Underwater topographies presented perilous challenges to these flows, however, giving significant power to those in the wrecking/salvaging trade whose environmental knowledge could account for shifting geographies. Navakas notes that popular fiction depicted military approaches – building massive forts on tiny yet strategically located islands – as nonsensical, yet lionized wreckers’ mode of “floating” along the reef as a more effective form of possession and belonging. Chapters 4 and 5 turn attention to the shifting cultural geographies of Florida. Chapter 4 focuses on marronage in the swamps, savannas, and hammocks of the Everglades. Navakas examines military reports, maps, and captivity narratives that portrayed the ’Glades “as territory that defies U.S. experience and understanding, while sustaining other populations” (p. 92) who actively resisted incorporation into the nation. These populations included indigenous groups like the Creeks (later called Seminoles) as well as Africans who escaped slavery in the American South or elsewhere in the Caribbean before migrating to Florida to found independent communities. Rather than simply denying or erasing these non-white peoples’ presence, Navakas shows, military accounts presented the landscape of the Everglades as a site of non-white control, giving the landscape itself credit for the US army’s failure’s and the enemy’s success. Non-military works used traditions of early American literature to imagine what these non-Americans’ lives were like, often giving them agency to interact with other groups outside the region and to “pursue

276 Book Reviews experiences, economic activities, and roles unavailable to them anywhere else in North America” (p. 95). Chapter 5 looks at white Anglo settler narratives from central and northern Florida, showing many ways they rejected standard notions of possession and knowledge. In a short coda, Navakas ties these landscapes together, presenting literary and cartographic Florida as an exceptional space in the antebellum period, “a place where land and water change places with little warning, dissolving homes and communities along with concepts of land, boundaries, and foundations — yet thereby encouraging modes of roottaking that would not elsewhere emerge” (pp. 156-157). This central premise is well supported throughout the book, although it sometimes renders Florida through an overly exceptional and environmentally deterministic lens. The reader may wonder why no comparative reference is made, even in a cursory way, to the bayous of Louisiana, where many of the same marshy, insular, and noncontiguous landscapes presented similar challenges to the Spanish, French, British and later American colonial settlers. This critique notwithstanding, Liquid Landscape makes an important intervention by revealing the clear variability and contingency of antebellum notions of belonging, nationhood, and empire. It will be of wide interest to scholars of empire, early America, historical geography, and the narration thereof through literature and maps.



Maria Lane University of New Mexico

After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century. WILLIAM RANKIN. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. vii+398, color and b&w figures, notes. $55.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0226339368. $10.00 to $55.00 e-book, ISBN 9780226339535. It is common now to see bumper stickers, T-shirts, and souvenir memorabilia with the outline of a US state and some sentimental slogan, such as the shape of Oregon with the label “Home,” or Illinois with a heart superimposed over Chicago. They testify to the way that cartographic representations of territory still produce an imagination of the world as a system of discrete geographic places to which individuals and communities might belong. Yet in almost every modern form of mapping, from the pixels of Landsat imagery to the millions of GPS navigation routes traced out daily on smartphone screens, space is not at all a mosaic of interlocking territories with distinct shapes, but rather a geocoded matrix of numerical coordinates marking out points and relations in a mathematical system that sweeps effortlessly over political and physical borders. In William Rankin’s ambitious book After the Map, he explains how this shift in mapping practices not only tracked the geopolitical and technical transformations of the twentieth century, but also dramatically reordered our basic conceptions of spatiality as well. Rankin describes his task as an investigation of “geo-epistemology”—a history of knowledge which emphasizes “the importance—and the unavoidability—of tools” (p. 2). Cartographic and surveying instruments, along with the particular types of information structures which grow around them, are therefore the prime movers of this story. But tools and knowledge systems are certainly not neutral actors, and so the major motivating question of the book grows from a debate familiar to geographers: what are the relationships between geography, territory, networks, state sovereignty, and the material and immaterial flows of globalization? Rankin acknowledges his indebtedness to a proposition from critical geographers: cartographic representation must be scrutinized as a process which yields “a constant reaffirmation of certain

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arguments about land, law, and power” (p. 13). As a historian of science, however, Rankin draws our attention back to the manner in which technical practices, largely but not totally in thrall to socio-political power systems, have been employed to produce geographic ways-of-knowing that are tied to the context of certain moments. Debates about territory, then, should not be “defined by legal, political, or economic geography alone,” Rankin argues. Instead, territory “is also a category defined by practices of knowledge” which can themselves be historicized (p. 15). Rankin structures his book in thirds, each of which follows a moment in the gradual atomization and abstraction of spatial representation. In the first section, the key story is the production of the International Map of the World, a dream of global scientific standardization and universalism which was nevertheless utterly dependent on the administrative institutions of the imperial-era Great Powers. As such, the IMW’s orderly catalogue of map plates depicted a world which was neatly arranged into political units. Yet in its survey methods, cartographic conventions, and publishing systems the IMW tried to fashion a transnational system which exceeded the local specificities of each nation-state’s domain and answered instead to the globalizing ambitions of modern science. The conclusion of this process—and also its dead end—came during World War II, when new kinds of global projections came into popular use for depicting a world regional geography focused on aerial routes and theaters of war, at just the same time as these all-encompassing, scopic systems of knowledge were becoming obsolescent in the face of single-purpose maps generated for specific instrumental purposes. Thus begins the arc which eventually leads to a geo-epistemology which, as Rankin’s title has it, comes “after” the map. In the second section, Rankin follows the development of grid systems, like the Lambert in Europe and the State Coordinate Systems in the US, and the way they formed a new kind of spatial logic whose principal fealty was to the laws of trigonometry, not the territories of nations and empires. Rankin’s explanation of the grids developed on the battlefields of World War I is history of science at its finest. He shows how a practical problem very much contingent on a historical exigency—artillery batteries trying to accurately target enemy trenches for torrents of explosive cruelty in an absurd militaristic death-match—brought together the power of the state with the theories of mathematicians and the embodied work of surveyors in the field in order to create a new system of geographic knowledge whose consequences ultimately far exceeded the context of the original moment. With the creation of the Universal Transverse Mercator grid system by the US military, a battlefield logic eventually sublimated into a seemingly-objective standard for parsing out the geography of the whole world. The process by which a practical concern forged in the heat of a state-sponsored war for territory gave rise to a new geo-epistemology which threatened to undo the concept of territory itself is brought to a fever pitch in the third section. Radionavigation and finally satellite positioning, Rankin argues, achieved a “pointillist” reconceptualization of space, in which a coordinate position in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is conceptually no different than a point in the middle of Times Square, or a point over a compound in Yemen where a suspected terrorist is taking cover. And yet this supposed final irrelevance of territory, Rankin reminds us, is more complicated than it seems. First, radionavigation and GPS were and are reliant on the physical maintenance of technical facilities, like LORAN transmitters or satellite launch pads, thus necessitating a physical reach around the planet by the states which strive for this universality. Second, and more importantly, “territory has not disappeared; it has simply been renegotiated,” (p. 298) and the technical ability to pointillize the world has certainly not undone the competition for power, knowledge, and dominion that still characterize even a fully globalized geopolitics. Although I am not fully convinced that the book’s case studies “form a remarkably unified historic narrative,” as Rankin claims, (p. 17) there is nevertheless a powerful and highly compelling story here which Rankin has done an admirable job stitching together. By situating

278 Book Reviews the complicated debate about territory into a historical trajectory which focuses on the sites and practices of knowledge-making, he has made an important contribution which emphasizes the claim that globalization and scientific universalism have not heroically triumphed over older systems of spatial organization, but instead emerged from them and rearranged them. Rankin is himself an accomplished cartographer, and the book sometimes bears the marks of this background. In places that takes the form of underexplained concepts: I had a difficult time understanding the science of the “Bowie loop” system of triangulation adjustment. Other times it risks making the tail of cartography wag the dog of society: for all the emphasis on politics in the book, non-military political actors are surprisingly absent, and we therefore miss the other ideological currents which flowed together to construct different geo-epistemologies. Yet this is still a work that should be praised for leading the charge in joining critical cartography with the history of science. It goes a long way towards clarifying what we actually mean when we talk about territory, globalization, and the contestation of geographic knowledge— not as theoretical categories pasted onto an ahistorical globe, but as the negotiated productions of historically contingent episodes. Garrett Dash Nelson Dartmouth College  Corey Village and the Cayuga World: Implications from Archaeology and Beyond. JACK ROSSEN, editor. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. Pp. ix+235, b&w photos, tables, maps, acknowledgements, index, list of contributors. $39.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8156-3405-8. Jack Rossen’s Corey Village and the Cayuga World presents the results of two field seasons of archaeological excavations at a native North American village site in New York State. The site is located near Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes. It was conducted as part of an effort to claim Corey Village and other sites in the region as historical places for the modern Cayuga people due to political efforts attempting to deny that they ever populated this area. While the Cayuga council would have preferred that no excavations take place, the present need to find proof of their past land ownership outweighed their usual inhibitions. In recent years, archaeology has been making the shift to becoming more involved with native populations during their studies and excavations, also known as indigenous archaeology. The involvement of indigenous peoples expands the understanding of these sites by including the expertise and oral traditions of tribal members and works to further the rights of indigenous peoples. Jack Rossen continued this cooperation by relying on the opinion, experience, and knowledge of several members of the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois Confederacy) and the Cayuga Council during the research for this book. It is a great example of how archaeologists and native peoples can come together and work together to better understand the past while remaining respectful of their sacred sites. Through this collaboration they were able to not only study the site and the artifacts from a scientific point of view but also draw on the oral traditions of the Haudenosaunee for better interpretations. For example, elders were able to emphasize the importance of the medicinal herb garden below the site, changing the way the entire site would be viewed. Instead of another general occupation village, it is more likely that the village was known for its medicinal specialty. The book begins with a project overview and brief description of the site. Next, it focuses on the detailed analysis of each type of artifact assemblage including ceramic, lithic, faunal, and botanical artifacts. Finally, it concludes with a history of the Cayuga people and some of the

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challenges facing them today and discusses the implications this research has on those issues. It presents a holistic view of the site by applying a multidimensional site analysis including detailed ceramic, lithic, faunal, and botanical artifact analysis as well as geophysical surveys. It draws on the contributions of nine authors whose level of educational ranges from undergraduate students to university professors and professional skills range from archaeologists to geophysicists. Apart from Chapter three that could benefit from explaining highly specialized, discipline-specific terminology, the majority of the book includes enough discussion, background information, and appropriate writing tone that would make it understandable to even the lay reader. This is important because it helps make archaeological information more accessible to the general public and when the general public is aware of the importance of these sites it helps with future preservation efforts. As for Chapter three, the author refers often to pictures that contain multiple artifacts in order to make comparisons between them. For example the author will refer to photograph 3.1a, 3.1b, or 3.1c; however in some cases there is no indication as to which object in the photograph is object a, b, or c. This could be a problem for those who do not have training in prehistoric ceramics and are unable to identify them by sight. The book addresses the various geographies of the site from both an internal and external perspective. Internal geographies include the general layout of the village and the distinct activity spaces within it while external geographies include the relation of this site to surrounding sites at a local, regional, and continental scale. The process included traditional archaeological surveying and excavation as well as a geophysical survey which identified subsurface features and assisted in the decision making process for excavations. I appreciate the inclusion of a magnetic gradiometer survey as part of the study as such techniques are becoming increasingly popular in archaeology because of their non-destructive nature and because they offer much broader coverage of a site than unit excavations alone. Geophysical surveys aid in the selection of unit placement before excavation by identifying subsurface features of interest, allowing archaeologists to make more informed decisions. In this case, the survey identified areas of increased variability which turned out to be the location of longhouses and post holes. I am pleased to see archaeological surveys that take advantage of non-destructive methods. As for external geographies, it is important in archaeology to not only study a site itself but to place it in a broader regional landscape in order to fully understand how the people at that site interacted with and perceived their world. This book effectively did this by discussing the distribution of production methods and decorations of ceramics not common in that area as well as the presence of seeds and other botanical remains not native to the region. These outliers indicate the presence an extensive trade network. Rossen indicates that the findings presented in this book were able to challenge the popular idea that this was not originally Cayuga territory and that these villages were at a constant state of war. Instead, he found that the Cayuga territory did indeed extend farther than previously thought and that the lack of palisades and other defensive features as well as the presence of trade objects and peace symbolism indicate the site most likely saw peace more often than conflict. This all contradicts the prevailing notion of villages in conflict. Overall, I found this book to be a very enjoyable read. The analyses and results were presented in a clear and well organized way and the importance of this investigation was placed into the broader history of New York and the Cayuga people. This book would be an excellent example for anyone wanting to learn more about what a comprehensive archaeological study is and how it is conducted. Jolene Keen American Association of Geographers

280 Book Reviews

 Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity Since the Eighteenth Century. ANDREW SLUYTER, CASE WATKINS, JAMES P. CHANEY, and ANNIE M. GIBSON. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 194, index. $32.50, paperback. ISBN 978-0807160879. Population growth of Hispanic and Latino communities has been one of the major demographic stories of the United States during the twenty-first century, but the larger truth is that historic Hispanic and Latino influences on portions of the national landscape are centuries old. While historic Spanish designs of St. Augustine or Santa Fe are well-known, the multi-century influence of Hispanic peoples upon New Orleans and South Louisiana is often ignored. Even as various Latin American and Iberian peoples were instrumental in the past and present of several Gulf of Mexico coastal cities, no single work has yet explored Hispanic life in New Orleans. Andrew Sluyter, Case Watkins, James P. Chaney, and Annie M. Gibson have filled this scholarship void as joint authors of the recent publication Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity Since the Eighteenth Century. The book is divided into six chapters, each focusing on a major Hispanic or Latino community that played a critical role in the history of New Orleans: Isleños (Spanish residents originally from the Canary Islands), Cubans, Hondurans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and other Hispanic communities. With a mix of historical narrative, interviews, ethnography, demographic data, and even GIS analysis, this book weaves different approaches together to emphasize the overarching idea that Hispanics and Latinos had – and since Katrina, continue to have – major influences on the geography and development of New Orleans. The great irony is that these influences are often overlooked by the larger New Orleans populace, even as historical Latino linkages in South Louisiana have been manifested at one time or another, especially during 40 years of direct Spanish control in the eighteenth century. Several sections within this book deserve extra praise. One strength of the four authors is their intellectual diversity. Sluyter’s research of Louisiana in the eighteenth century aided sections dealing with Spanish New Orleans; Gibson’s previous work on (and studies in) Havana illuminated the chapter on Cuban residents. Additionally, division of the book into chapters focusing on each community group rather than division of chapters by time period allows for the relevant histories of each ethnic/identity community to clearly be told. A chronological narrative would necessarily jump back and forth between Brazilians and Mexicans and Isleños within a particular period. The result is a work of historical geography, not merely a history. This work also contains excellent analysis of the role played by Hurricane Katrina among New Orleans’ Latino communities. The 2005 Hurricane was largely responsible for an overall population drop of the New Orleans Metropolitan Statistical Area between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, yet the population of Hispanic or Latino groups in the MSA grew rapidly after the storm, with growth concentrated among Mexican and Honduran residents (p. 18). This increase in foreign-born Hispanic residents into a “rebuilt” New Orleans is succinctly said by Humberto, an interviewee whose words grace the introduction, “If you speak Spanish, you are Latino and probably came after Katrina” (p. 1). Over 30 valuable maps accompany the text. Census ethnicity maps in particular show the complex spatio-residential patterns among various Latino groups: Cubans and Hondurans are more concentrated just west of New Orleans in Jefferson Parish while Isleños are overrepresented in St. Bernard Parish east of New Orleans. The authors should be commended for displaying their arguments in a variety of methods.

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Hispanic and Latino New Orleans is important to a wide variety of researchers dealing with various academic studies involving Hispanic or Latino communities, particularly those communities in urban areas in the wider US South. This study of intertwined ethnic identities, histories, and places will have broad readership in the years to come: the book won AAG’s John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize in 2015, and deservedly so. This text takes its place within the field of historical scholarship about New Orleans as the first of its kind: a study of the influences and impacts that various Hispanic or Latino groups have had upon South Louisiana over the past 250 years. While unique in its study, this work is well-situated within existing bodies of scholarship, including histories of New Orleans such as Ned Sublette’s 2009 volume, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books). Studies of other Gulf Coast cities include Thomas Kreneck’s Del Pueblo: A History of Houston’s Hispanic Community (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), and works focused on Hispanics and Latinos in the broader South include Angela Stuesse’s Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016) or Julie Weise’s Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). A typical historical geography work would necessarily have a particular area of interest, and the wider New Orleans region is the obvious focus of Hispanic and Latino New Orleans. A potential critique might suggest for more comparative arguments between the historical geography of Hispanics in New Orleans and similar situations in other Gulf urban areas such as Houston or Tampa, although too much emphasis on such contrasts might risk diluting the New Orleans focus. Similarly, a bit more on the cultural landscapes of the home country situations of post-Katrina Hispanic immigrants might be of interest. But these are minor comments. Hispanic and Latino New Orleans successfully tells the story of a diverse set of peoples instrumental in the making of modern New Orleans; or, as the authors note in Chapter 1, “…books such as this one explicate how real people living in actual communities participate in the creation of specific places over the long term” (p. 9). The authors open the book with a striking phrase, noting that “New Orleans… has long hidden much of its Hispanic and Latino sides in plain sight” (p. 2). Because of the impressive scholarship seen in Andrew Sluyter, Case Watkins, James Chaney, and Annie Gibson’s Hispanic and Latino New Orleans, a better spatial history of these oft-forgotten communities now exists. Professional academics and students alike will find use from this excellent addition to the field of historical geography. Patrick D. Hagge Arkansas Tech University  Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. ANDREW STUHL. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. vii+232, maps, photographs, index. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 978-0-226-41664-9. In this era of concern over the politicization of science and its embattled role in public policy, Andrew Stuhl’s Unfreezing the Arctic offers a timely historical reflection on the important social role of science and scientists. It is far from an uncritical intervention, however; rather, in his exploration of a century of scientific exploration and investigation of the Western Arctic, Stuhl raises deep questions about the entanglements of scientific knowledge and practice with

282 Book Reviews the settler colonial reterritorialization of Inuit lands. In offering a “transnational environmental history of science,” Stuhl’s account represents a novel contribution to histories of Arctic science that will also be of interest to the growing number of scholars exploring historical geographies of science. Departing from traditional scholarly narratives of Arctic exploration situated within national or imperial contexts, Stuhl grounds his study in the Inuit territories of the Inupiat (in Alaska) and Inuvialuit (in Canada’s Northwest Territories) in the transformative period between the 1880s and 1980s. The study traces how Inuit lives and territories were transformed during this period by successive waves of economic, military, and political interventions, each bearing on its crest a raft of scientific and technical experts seeking to characterize, understand, and (to some extent) control the Arctic environment. These successive characterizations are summarized in the titles of the five substantive chapters: dangerous; threatened; wild; strategic; and disturbed. Throughout this history, we encounter a wide range of scientific initiatives and actors, from Hudson’s Bay Company explorers to the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913-18), from tundra scientists studying reindeer herding to permafrost scientists with the U.S. Naval Arctic Research Laboratory. Arranging chapters along these diverse historical themes and episodes allows Stuhl to explore the continuities and changes in the scientific encounter with the Arctic environment (and, to some extent, with Inuit themselves). This strategy comes somewhat at the expense of narrative coherence within some chapters, as Stuhl moves back and forth across topics and national borders—a peril, I suppose, of the novel transnational frame the author adopted. Nevertheless, in focusing intently on the field activities of Arctic scientists, the book ably illustrates how scientific knowledge was both shaped by and in turn facilitated the projects of outsiders in the region, whether economic, strategic, or political. Yet these interventions were not unidirectional, and in the excellent fifth chapter Stuhl deftly explores how the emergence of environmental concerns with industrial development in the “fragile” Arctic intersected with rising Inuit sovereignty and political claims in the 1970s. This chapter provides important new insights into the simultaneous indigenous mobilization and contestation of Western scientific knowledge and southern scientists in their struggles against— and in some cases, for—industrial development. The emergence of environmental assessment requirements for major resource developments such as pipelines provided a platform for Inuit to advance claims for recognition and to assert sovereignty over their traditional territories—often in close collaboration with sympathetic scientists. In emphasising the colonial context of Arctic science, Unfreezing the Arctic resonates with the well-established literature linking science, environment and colonialism associated with historians and geographers of science, including Roy McLeod, David Livingstone, Richard Grove and others. While not entirely neglecting these perspectives, Stuhl roots his study more directly in environmental and Arctic histories which have similarly highlighted the influence of scientific actors in the region’s (inter)national histories. While rightly connecting the modern field sciences with ongoing colonial processes that unfolded throughout the period in question, somewhat confusingly the term “postcolonial” (p. 11) is deployed to describe the entire period and region in question. Although wishing to avoid the term “decolonial” to describe more recent Inuit engagements with science in the era of land claims, the designation postcolonial fails to capture the ways in which settler colonialism provided (and continues to provide) “the structures through which land was used, studied, and managed.” A more explicit engagement with the recent literature in settler colonial studies might have clarified these terms.

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Indeed, Stuhl’s epilogue invites readers to consider the endurance of these colonial relations in the contexts of contemporary climate science, in particular. He rightly criticizes recent scientific and political representations of climate peril that have “re-established the north as empty of people and history, clearing space for another round of intervention” (p. 149). Only in “unfreezing” such ahistorical and colonial representations of the Arctic, and by heeding the experiences, knowledge and aspirations of Arctic residents themselves, Stuhl suggests, can southern scientists (and historians!) contribute to a more ethical and socially just response to the many environmental and social challenges of the region. Arn Keeling Memorial University of Newfoundland  Salvage: Cultural Resistance Among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia. KRISNA UK. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Pp. xxxiv+230. 8 b&w illustrations, 1 map. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-15017-0303-4. $89.95 cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-0302-7. Imagine that you live in a country where “more than a million tons of bombs were dropped” (p. 52). Try visualizing that figure. Next, think about what effect that bombing would have on your country’s population and culture. Krisna Uk spent nearly a year doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Jorai of Northeastern Cambodia, studying one subsistence farming village’s response to such a bombing campaign by the United States, followed by the vicious rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-79. Few such studies of rural villages so affected by explosive remnants of war (ERWs) exist. Uk’s work is therefore an important intellectual contribution, describing the consequences of prolonged trauma from war through her focus on one traditional Southeast Asian culture, in Leu, Cambodia. Uk first considers traditional Jorai culture. Individuals are primarily shaped through their relationship with nature. The Jorai in Leu do not like, and have an oppositional relationship with, the forest—they constantly clear it near their village. As it contains wild animals and spirits, it is considered dangerous. Villagers also need the forest—plants there, for example, are thought to have magical properties. During bombing campaigns (and during Pol Pot’s regime), the Jorai were forced to use the forest for protection, to hide. Food could not be cooked for fear of drawing attention from the planes overhead. The bombing and attacks by the Khmer Rouge, therefore, strongly altered traditional Jorai practices. Spiritual views were also reevaluated and modified based on the bombing campaigns. Gods were considered powerful, requiring sacrifices. Villagers thought the first U.S. planes were powerful gods. Some villagers lost all faith after the war. Uk further presents Cambodia’s history of colonialism and independence from France in 1954, including Prince Sihanouk’s attempt to assimilate minorities under the majority ethnic population, the Khmer. (In this and other sections of the book, Uk provides several handy and helpful tables, such as one giving a chronology of key events, and others discussing, for example, historical regions, individual survivor testimony, and bombing data.) Prince Sihanouk saw other minorities in Cambodia as underdeveloped, in need of Khmer culture, education, and progress (p. 28). Here Uk reveals the intersection of local village and cultural history with both state and global politics. She finds her subjects’ traditional cultural beliefs and behaviors now inextricably interconnected with late modern state building and geopolitical forces. Through direct quotes from villagers her ethnography shows, rather than tells, how villagers then forge a contemporary sense of identity.

284 Book Reviews Given the traumatic context of Cambodia’s recent history, the majority of the book concerns how Uk’s subjects make sense of their lives so as to subsist. Sections such as “Behind the Rationale of Bomb Hunting” (p. 89), “Making the Dead Body Complete” (p. 113), and “The Mnemonic Functions of Sculpting” (p. 146), showcase Uk’s seamless weaving of anthropological theory, historical analysis, and individual/cultural framing. I envied her smooth transitions through discussions of dense theory, reviews of related literature, and traditional anthropological fieldwork. Clearly written and well organized, the book is also a testament to the care that many people, in this case those at Cornell University Press, put into creating such a fine work. Uk describes just how the Jorai reclaim their culture, indeed their very lives, from the bombs and ideologies of others. The Jorai reappropriate war-related objects, refashioning “items originally manufactured to cause death into objects endowed with new life” (p. 94). Imagine what it would take, for example, for a collective of people to create and then regularly use an everyday item, such as utensils or a plate, from such a deadly object. Recycling and reclaiming also involves “bomb hunters,” those searching out bombs to sell as scrap metal. In some instances, such hunters die from what they are seeking. Dog tags from long dead foreign soldiers are also found and then given to young children by the Jorai “to protect [them] from malevolent spirits” (p. 97). The traditional beliefs and accounts of Jorari people, negotiating the past and the present, make for engaging writing. Importantly, however, Uk avoids the sentimental in favor of thick description, giving her ethnography value beyond simple testimonials. Other practices not directly linked to daily survival again bridge traditional Jorai culture and those peoples’ experiences. To give a few examples, weaving and sculpting allow their practitioners to further transmit aesthetic traditions, promoting memory. Rituals are employed and adjusted to help assure the dead avoid a “bad death,” or one where the spirit of the deceased remains unsettled. Those maimed from war are gradually re-integrated into the village through their first living outside of it. The Jorai have, in unique and inspiring ways, adapted their beliefs and behaviors to retain connection to their ancestral heritage despite facing unimaginable trauma and grief. Despite being somewhat specialized, Uk’s work deserves a wide readership. We live in an era of sustained and brutal armed conflicts. These conflicts traumatically and disproportionally affect certain areas and peoples, while others elsewhere appear untouched. Good writing should touch you. Geopolitics affects everyone, but citizens of superpowers like the U.S. may not know that their country dropped a million tons of bombs on a developing nation. Those bombs still affect Cambodians. I am grateful to Uk for teaching me about the everyday effects of my nation’s actions on people an ocean away. Kurt Borchard University of Nebraska Kearney  Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps. KÄREN WIGEN, SUGIMOTO FUMIKO, and CARY KARACAS, editors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xi+269, color plates, diagrams, index. $45.00 cloth. ISBN 9780226073057. Maps are important primary documents for historical geographers and historians. Cartography provides a sense of place to accompany a sense of time for an event, a culture, or, perhaps, an entire era. Maps provide context to other historical documents, give a picture of the way a group of people looked at the world at a particular moment in time, and provide a visual

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representation of spatial patterns and processes. Maps also help us to reconstruct, with hindsight and modern technology, the changes in space and place. Cartographic Japan is a visually stunning and historically detailed compilation that illustrates this inherent power in maps and mapping while telling the story of one country’s history and place in the world. The editors of Cartographic Japan have assembled 47 authors who use individual expertise in some facet of Japanese history and culture to explicate the story, context, and meaning of a particular set of cartographic resources. The book is made up of 58 short essays centered on one or two maps, each reproduced in high resolution and full color in a large format (8 1/2 x 11 inch pages). Most maps are of Japan and individual places therein. Others are conceptions of Japan from foreign cartographers, and some are by Japanese mapmakers illustrating territories it sought or conquered. Each chapter is instructive about a singular moment in Japanese history. The book is divided into four sections. Parts I and II focus on cartography of early-modern Japan and the 250-year period of relative peace under the Tokugawa shogunate. Part III illustrates changes that came with the Meiji Restoration through maps indicative of the modernization, urbanization, industrialization, and imperialization of the Japanese archipelago. Part IV brings readers to the present, with a diverse set of maps exemplifying important moments in recent decades including World War II, natural disasters, and demographic change. The editors introduce each section, giving a coherent package to the collection through a recognition of themes surrounding an otherwise disparate set of maps. Editors Wigen, Sugimoto, and Karacas have done an excellent job in providing such a guide, and have organized the book in a way that, taken together, provides an excellent resource for students of Japanese history, map buffs, or those of us who consider ourselves, in the words of Wigen, “students of spatial history” (p. 188). The editors have achieved their goals in making accessible a set of maps largely unknown to English-speaking audiences whilst telling the history of the island nation and illustrating the state of Japanese cartographic research today. Each chapter is written by expert scholars in their subfield, who, in most cases, have written in much greater depth (in scholarly monographs, academic articles, etc.) on the topics they present here. But, their essays are written in a way that engages the reader in an approachable style, while providing references and suggested reading for those who desire to dig deeper. In this way the authors and editors have contributed to an effort that will please a wide range of lay audiences and academics alike. For historical geographers, this is an important volume, both in its contributions to our understanding of Japanese cartography in the particular, but also in the broader importance of using cartography as a research tool. It is noteworthy that in the very small pool of American geographers dedicated to a study of Japan, two of them are editors of this book and are among the only six authors in the volume who claim a home in our discipline (most authors are historians). Such leadership within historical geography is a significant contribution of this book. Geographers will find an appealing diversity of beautiful maps at the center of each chapter. In some chapters, I spent more time staring at the details of the maps than with the text that explained them. In others, I was left wanting more detail and finer resolution. Shortcomings of the book, in fact, derive from the unavoidable losses in resolution and appearance that come with reproducing maps—many that are, in reality, much larger than a page, a drafting table, or even an entire room—in a printed volume. I appreciated several chapters where the author provided a “zoomed-in” portion of a map to show some additional detail and to help tell the story of the essay. Additionally, I struggled with some annotations added by authors pointing out symbols, patterns, or Japanese words explained in the text. While a necessary technique to understand the broader message behind the map, some markings may distract the reader from seeing the map in its original form. I liked the approach in one chapter about Edo’s (Tokyo) internal structure,

286 Book Reviews its peripheral connections, social structure, and context in international relations in its early development as a city (chapter 16, pp. 75-77). The focus of the chapter is reproduced without annotation on the first page of the essay and then a second copy is included in another figure with markings to orient the reader. A further subset of that same map is used by another author in the next chapter to focus in on segregation within the Tokugawa-era capital (pp. 78-80). The reader thereby has a chance to focus on the whole map as an artifact and piece of art and then can appreciate, through the authors’ interpretations and annotations, its broader meanings during this time in history. Cartographic Japan is a book that remains true to its subtitle as “a history in maps.” It adds perspective to many Japan history books already in print, using geography to illuminate time and place, culture and history. I was initially skeptical of a collection with such a range of authors from a variety of disciplines, realizing the tricky task the editors faced in organizing a compilation that hangs together as a purposeful contribution to the literature. I quickly recognized, however, that almost every chapter, each a separate essay about cartography that is often wholly different from the others, goes beyond a simple analysis of a map or set of maps revealing a window through which readers can see a distinct moment in Japanese history or characteristic of Japanese culture: A set of propaganda maps pointedly illustrates how Japan saw itself within Asia at the height of its imperial push (chapter 43); a painting of a surveying expedition and an early Japanesedrawn world map shows the longstanding Dutch influence in the country (chapter 6); a set of maps detailing the destruction of Tokyo following a great earthquake in 1923 symbolizes the importance of city management along with spatial analysis in the Meiji era (chapters 34 and 35). In short, the spatial histories compiled in this book, taken as a whole, tell a story with maps that provide depth to moments that might be familiar to those who know Japanese history, but do so with a poignant and powerful particularity. Rex J. Rowley Illinois State University  Great Plains Indians. DAVID J. WISHART. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Pp. 147, maps, illustrations, charts, index. $14.95 paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8032-6962-0. Great Plains Indians is the first volume in a new series sponsored by the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies and published by the University of Nebraska Press. This series, “Discover the Great Plains,” highlights broad Great Plains topics and themes in crisp, reader-friendly monographs authored by leading Great Plains scholars. Other books in the series examine Great Plains bison, geology, literature, weather, politics, and birds. The Center for Great Plains Studies wisely recruited David Wishart to write this survey of Great Plains native peoples. He is an expert on the Plains Indians, has taught historical geography at the University of Nebraska for more than forty years, and has numerous publications with a Great Plains Indians focus. This reviewer and Plains scholars such as Pekka Hamalainen and Akim Reinhardt had the pleasure of taking Wishart’s research seminar on the Plains Indians while in graduate school at the University of Nebraska. Much of what appears in this volume grew out of discussions in that delightful course and Wishart’s book on the dispossession of Nebraska’s Indians, An Unspeakable Sadness (University of Nebraska Press, 1997). In this slim volume Wishart traces more than 13,000 years of human occupation of the Great Plains. He emphasizes themes such as adaptation, innovation, persistence, geographical and cultural dispossession, and hope for the future. The book is divided into four chapters that are temporally and geographically broad in scope but specific in the use of

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examples. Chapter 1, for example, covers 13,000 years of Plains history while Chapter 2 hones in specifically on the lifeways of Plains peoples around 1803, the year Lewis and Clark appeared on the Plains and the region nominally fell under the control of the United States. Wishart begins the story in time immemorial when the ancestors of today’s Native population settled in a region that looked much different than it does today. Wishart rightly discusses archeological evidence that links Great Plains Indians to trans-Siberian migrations but he also considers native creation stories from Plains peoples such as the Blackfeet who tell how Old Man (Napi) created the mountains, rivers, grasslands, animals, and humans. Wishart introduces readers to the Pre-Columbian cultures who inhabited the Plains, including the big game hunters of the Clovis culture and then the Folsom, Plano, and Archaic peoples. Warming climatic conditions around 950 CE led to the introduction of agriculture and the appearance of permanent villages along Great Plains river systems. Wishart hints that these early horticultural societies may be the ancestors of the Pawnees. He briefly but adeptly explores the impact of horses, guns, and disease on the lives of Plains Indians. Horses, Wishart explains, expanded the Plains Indian’s worlds but it brought them into contact with other peoples, ideas, and diseases that quickened dispossession. Chapter 2 pauses in 1803 to outline the geographic world and lifeways of the Plains Indians at the time of American contact. Much of what Wishart discusses in this chapter is derived from his many publications on Nebraska’s native peoples. He outlines the annual cycle of Plains agriculturalists such as the Pawnee who deftly integrated farming and bison hunting into all aspects of their society. Wishart is careful to emphasize the importance of place, concepts of time, and ceremonies to Plains Indians. Readers are also introduced to the traditional social systems, religion, medicine, and gender roles of nineteenth-century Plains peoples. Most readers will be familiar with the well-known story of nineteenth-century geographic and cultural dispossession that appears in Chapter 3. Wishart notes that Plains Indians began the century with a land base that stretched from Canada to almost the Gulf of Mexico. Less than 100 years later the United States helped reduce that territory to a handful of reservations in modern-day Oklahoma and the northern Plains. Wishart explores agents of dispossession such as missionaries, traders, and Indian agents, and paints a horrible picture of the impact of disease, dependence, warfare, and diminishing bison herds. Wishart is even-handed in his discussion of dispossession as he highlights the role that intra-tribal warfare played in dispossession. Imperial societies such as the Comanche and Sioux, who benefitted from the availability of horses and guns, preyed upon semi-sedentary tribes such as the Pawnee who were weakened by disease and federal dependence. The final chapter takes the reader through the dark days of allotment and termination but then outlines aspects of hope and persistence with the federal restoration of tribal status and the implementation of the Indians Claims Commission. Wishart also sees hope for the future of Plains tribes as their populations continue to grow, far outpacing the growth of non-Indian Plains populations. With growing revenues from natural resources and casinos, combined with a young and growing population, Wishart concludes his book by suggesting that in the future we might see Indians in “places of influence and authority in the Great Plains and the nation” (p. 124). Let’s hope that he is correct. Great Plains Indians is an accessible and highly readable book that is undoubtedly the best overview of the Plains Indians. The use of Native American sources combined with archeological and historical sources produces a balanced review of 13,000 years of Plains Indians history. The narrative is complimented by illustrations, charts, and maps that help the reader understand Plains tribal territories, geographic dispossession, and population demographics. Although

288 Book Reviews written by one of the premier Plains Indians scholars, this really is not an academic book. There are no citations and it includes only a brief bibliography of the most important sources. The book is grounded in sound scholarship and is drawn from Wishart’s decades-long research, but it is meant as an introduction to the Plains Indians rather than a comprehensive treatise. Great Plains Indians will find its ways into the undergraduate classroom and libraries and should be read by anyone with an interest in the Great Plains and Native American history. Mark R. Ellis University of Nebraska at Kearney  America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond. RANDALL WILSON. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Pp. xii+321, maps, diagrams, bibliography, index. $62.00 hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4422-0797-4. $34.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4422-0798-1. Randall Wilson’s America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond is an exemplary work on the history of United States’ public lands and national park systems. It focuses on federally owned land (not state lands), and on the reasoning and factors behind the United States reserving nearly one-third of its land under public ownership. Wilson is a professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, specializing in environmental policy and management. He has a geographical background, obtaining his doctorate in geography from the University of Iowa, and brings a geographic perspective to his study on the history of public lands. The common theme discussed, specifically in the early stages of the book, is the debate of “preservation” versus “conservation.” The greatest struggle in the management of land throughout the history of the United States, and during the present time, is whether the environment is to be used as a commodity or preserved as an untouched wilderness. The book is divided into two separate sections. The first section concentrates on the origins of a national common area and gives a detailed description of the formation of the public land system. This touches also on the transfer of public lands to private hands, specifically through the Homestead Act of 1862 and various other federal land grants. It also gives a timeline showing how the United States gained territory through purchases and treaties, especially in the early years of American history, and the removal and relocation of Native Americans. The second section looks at the individual branches of the park system (National Parks, National Forests, Wilderness Areas, Bureau of Land Management lands, among others) and how they came to be created. Wilson describes the history of each branch, as well as the role the government had in the creation and expansion of parks and other protected areas. Influential environmental figures, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, first chief of the United States Forest Service Gifford Pinchot, first director of the National Park Service Stephen Mather, and well-known environmentalist John Muir, and their contributions to the management of these lands are highlighted in various chapters. Wilson discusses past and present policies, gives a personal assessment of its effectiveness since its conception, and debates whether the future of the system is bleak or bright. The main difference between this publication and others in the past is the wide variety of information in each chapter. Not only is there a detailed description of the conception of each branch, the book also looks into the various acts and influential people that led to the creation of each agency. The final chapter expresses Wilson’s opinions on the system and challenges readers to do their part in conserving public lands for future generations. America’s Public Lands is clear and concise, and gives a thorough but succinct overview of the public lands system. It utilizes maps showing the extensiveness of the public lands and parks systems that cover more than 650 million acres throughout the country. Chapters are separated

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into individual sections, but are in appropriate order and have a nice flow. It is evident that Wilson spent significant time researching every detail about the system and does not shy away from commenting on the conflicts that have transpired between federal agencies and interest groups. His interest in environmental law and policy is apparent in the construction of the chapters on the different land systems, in which there are various examples and cases that have molded the look of the entire system. If there is one flaw in the book it is that Native Americans are largely absent from the story. There are a few minor errors, such as Table 4.1 on page 74 stating that Yellowstone National Park was established in 1871, rather than 1872. This book could easily be used as a textbook or resource book in college classes on environmental policy, the National Park System, or even a basic United States history class. It also has potential to be used in high schools, as it is not overly technical or wordy. Maps add a nice visual element to the text, but it could also use the addition of more figures, pictures, and graphs for the visual readers. This publication is recommended for those with an interest in environmental protection and anyone who wants to know more about National Parks, known as “the best idea America ever had.” It is a must read for scholars in the field of environmental policy, law, and conflict. The real value of this book is its ability to reach a large audience of all types, ages, and education. Winner of the 2014 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Prize by the American Association of Geographers, the book wonderfully displays the successes, failures, and controversies surrounding the park system and other public lands. It is a gift to the historical geographical community as the National Park Service enters its second century. It gives an insightful overview of historic viewpoints toward nature that allows readers to question the way they see public lands and the way they value these areas in the twenty-first century. Connor Martin Idaho State University