D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 2, Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

SYNOPSIS:

Emphasizing the complex ways geographic structures and systems affect historical change, Meining's history of the United States argues for a more nuanced appreciation for geographical context. Charting the country's spread westward from 1800 to 1867, Meining asserts that ever-shifting local conditions played an important role in how historical actors made their decisions, and in how the country developed throughout the nineteenth century. If historians are to understand the expansion of the United States, argues Meining, they must better understand America's changing geography.

EXCERPT:

"Taken together these dissident and ambivalent areas of North and South define the traumatic zone of this ragged vivisection (fig. 79). And perhaps the best indication of the breadth of the tear in the body politic were the thousands of young men who crossed the Ohio River or left other Northern-held lands and headed south to join the Confederate army and the thousands who fled north from the seceding states to join the Union forces (more than 30,000 from Tennessee). It was a profound sorting that affected not only districts, towns, and countrysides but clans and families, and it took place from the Atlantic seaboard to the Plains (where the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations each split and sent men to both sides). Finally, the ugliest wound in this American trauma, the narrower borderland that equaled anyone's worst fears, was soon defined by guerrilla bands, bushwackers, barnburners, looters, and assassins who ravaged every district of divided or contrary allegiances from western Virginia to eastern Kansas. For the unfortunate citizens of those areas the failure of peaceable secession brought not just war but chaos." (487)

"Maps cannot convey the pain and suffering attendant upon the disintegration of the United States, but our search for a geographical definition of the borderlands can at least suggest how we must surely have something more than a simple map of North and South, of a Mason-Dixon Line (even as a shorthand term), of the Union and the Confederacy as two entities, if we are to have any sense at all of what 'secession' meant in this complicated geopolitical structure during its unprecedented crisis." (489)

RELATIONSHIP:

We agree fully with Meinig's emphasis in his marvelous multivolume work.