The most cited articles published since 2010, extracted from Scopus
Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 90-101
Derek H. Alderman
There are growing calls from some African Americans, particularly in the U.S. South, to create sites of counter-memory that recognize the often forgotten historical struggles and contributions of the enslaved. Commemoration of slavery is not only a contentious issue for whites but also African Americans, who differ with each other over how best (or even whether) to narrate these difficult memories. Few geographers have explored the politics of remembering slavery among African Americans and how these struggles shape the commemorative landscape. I explore the efforts of Abigail Jordan to establish a monument to the enslaved in Savannah, Georgia (USA) and the ensuing public debate that took place over the appropriateness of inscribing the monument with a description of the inhumanity found on slave ships during the Middle Passage. Led by two outspoken black officials, Savannah's city council refused to give final approval for the monument until the inscription was revised to end on a more optimistic note. An analysis of public comments made about the Savannah monument reveals that the inscription debate served as an arena for multiple ideas about how best to represent African Americans as victims of slavery, the legacy of racism and slavery in contemporary America, as well as conflicting personal and political visions within the black community. In interpreting the Savannah case, I suggest that the politics of remembering slavery be examined in terms of surrogation, the search for a suitable commemorative stand in for the enslaved, and textual politics, the recognition that the words used to represent slavery are at the heart of the struggle to remember (or forget) the trauma of enslavement. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 38, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 181-191
Mark A. Carey | Adam French | Elliott O'Brien
Climate change adaptation measures can generate long-term unintended consequences, as this paper demonstrates through an empirical case study of water conflicts at Lake Parón in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range. This decade-long struggle culminated in 2008 when a coalition of local groups (stakeholders) from the Cruz de Mayo and Caraz communities in the Callejón de Huaylas seized control of the Lake Parón reservoir from a private multinational corporation, Duke Energy. This clash over Parón's water in the Llullán and Santa River watersheds emerged much earlier than climatic-hydrologic models had predicted, and it occurred, this paper argues, largely because of previously successful climate adaptation measures. The drainage tunnel and floodgates originally installed at Parón in the 1980s to prevent a climate-related outburst flood led to unintended or perverse outcomes because these technological artifacts subsequently allowed a diversity of stakeholders-including rural subsistence farmers, urban residents, national park officials, tourism promoters, the state energy company Electroperú, and Duke Energy-to manage water differently depending on their priorities and the existing governance structures. Neoliberal reforms that altered state-society-environment relations in Peru played a key role in these changing stakeholder power dynamics that were reflected in the management of water infrastructure at Parón. Examining this water conflict that emerged from the unintended effects of climate adaptation demonstrates not only how technology and society are mutually constitutive, but also why the politics of technologies must be considered more carefully in the analysis of social-ecological systems, hydro-social cycles, and climate change adaptation. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 1-18
Noam Levin | Ruth Kark | Emir Galilee
Historical maps of the Negev Desert which comprises half of the total land area of Palestine can be viewed from several intersecting perspectives relating to aspects such as their contribution to tracing patterns of settlement and agricultural history, imperialism and mapping, and legal geography of land ownership and indigenous people. Here we focus mainly on the first theme, incorporate new methods and demonstrate their application to studies in historical geography. Since the end of the 18th century the Negev has attracted considerable attention due to its strategic location straddling three continents, its history, and its archeology. After the European powers recognized the geopolitical importance of this area in the mid 19th century, numerous surveys and mapping efforts were conducted. In this study we reviewed 375 historical maps covering parts or all of the Negev between 1799 and 1948. These historical maps are crucial to the understanding of colonial developments, as well as landscape and settlement processes and the sedentarization of the Bedouin population. We scanned and rectified these maps using geographic information systems (GIS) to enable quantitative analysis of their accuracy, and to reveal new insights into settlement and sedentarization processes. Whereas the median error of maps that were based on explorers notes during most of the 19th century were at the order of several kilometers, the various Palestine Exploration Fund surveys (1872-1890) reduced these errors to the order of several hundred meters, and later maps produced by the British during World War I and by British Mandatory Survey of Palestine obtained errors well below 100 m. Careful analysis of these maps allows us to delineate the boundary between cultivated land and the desert, to follow the establishment of new settlements, and to quantify the sedentarization process of the nomadic Bedouin population. We conclude that analyzing historical maps with GIS provides a tool to determine their accuracy and hence potential usefulness for the study of topics such as settlement processes and legal disputes over land ownership. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 36, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 377-387
At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain's settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 43-56
Robert Andrew McLeman | Sam Herold | Zoran Reljic | Michael Sawada | Daniel W. McKenney
This article describes the development of a GIS-based model of historical drought and population change in western Canada, designed to support qualitative field research into drought adaptation and migration. The model combines digitized census data and recently available modeled historical climate data at a 10 km2 grid cell scale and can be used to generate maps of 'hotspots' where historical declines in rural populations may be associated with extended periods of heat and lack of precipitation. The results suggest a promising avenue for expanding and refining GIS-based modeling of historical human-climate interactions to support qualitative research and to potentially serve as a stepping stone toward forecasting future risk areas of drought-related migration in continental dryland areas. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 121-131
Isobel Jane Tomlinson | Clive A. Potter
The Dutch Elm Disease outbreak of the late 1960s and early 1970s was arguably one of the most dramatic environmental events to affect the British countryside in the last fifty years. The demise of over 28 million elms destroyed the much celebrated, and publicly valued, 'elmscapes' of lowland England and brought about extensive habitat loss. During the middle and later phases of the epidemic, the policy response from the UK Forestry Commission, Ministry of Agriculture and local government came to be seen as 'too little, too late'. Yet forty years after the outbreak it is still unclear whether the epidemic could have been better managed and how far any lessons can be drawn for the way present day disease risks to trees should be tackled. Drawing on the extensively documented (but hitherto unexplored) public record of the outbreak held at Forest Research and the National Archives, together with materials from retrospective interviews conducted by the authors with scientists and policymakers closely involved in the epidemic at the time, this paper presents a fresh analysis of Dutch Elm Disease in the UK. The paper seeks to explain the catastrophic outcome of the outbreak, not only in terms of the underlying (and highly malign) pathology of the disease itself, but also because of an initially inaccurate scientific assessment of the nature of the threat constructed within a small but influential community of forest pathologists and policy officials. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 38, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 69-80
During the early Cold War, no part of the Arctic was as important to the United States' strategic interests as Greenland: situated on the shortest straight-line route between the industrial centers of the two superpowers, Greenland was integral to North American continental security. The US desire to control Greenland, however, was complicated by the island's isolated geography, harsh climate and barren landscape. Between 1948 and 1966, US forces in Greenland were entrenched in the 'other cold war': the struggle with the ice sheet environment which threatened to impede American capabilities in the region. This paper explores the 'other cold war' through two case studies: US scientific efforts to understand and cope with polar whiteouts and the plastic deformation of ice. These case studies illuminate a struggle between two philosophical approaches to nature: a brash, aggressive approach which aimed to conquer the Greenland environment, and a more nuanced approach which aimed to collaborate with that environment. I show that the second approach won out as Greenland's exceptional geography and environment forced the US military to reassess its relationship with nature: rather than striving for control over the island space, US military personnel ultimately chose strategic cooperation with that space. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 38, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 81-89
Paul Ashmore | Ruth Craggs | Hannah Neate
This paper draws upon experiences of working in a personal archive in a domestic space in order to contribute to recent debates about archival formation, conduct and practice. By exploring the collaborative practices of working-with an archive owner in ordering and cataloguing a collection, we provide methodological insights into how historical geography research is carried out. Although such working-with in archives is, we argue, a common practice amongst researchers, these interactions with others are often absent from published work. This paper provides an explicit discussion of these often hidden collaborations and socialities, highlighting their importance for the conduct of archival research in three specific areas. First, we show how working-with actively (re)shapes and (re)makes archival materials and the stories that emerge from them. Second, we argue that working-with the owners of archives, but doing so without clearly defined research aims and going against the grain of productivist methods of working, can be rewarding both within and beyond academia. Third, in focussing on working-with, the paper extends conceptions of the archive and archival practice. We argue that the domestic setting of archival work produces particular patterns of archival conduct and disrupts the boundaries of collections themselves. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 37, Issue 3, July 2011, Pages 288-299
Richard D. Hunter | Andrew Sluyter
The study of colonial surveying and cartography has become key to understanding the history of European colonialism because of the recognition that land surveys and maps not only represent territory but form part of the process through which territory comes into being. While many studies have therefore focused on the history of instrumental surveying and cartography in New Spain, roughly equivalent to present-day Mexico, between the seventeenth and twentieth century, the textual surveys of the sixteenth century that helped to bring the initial colonial territory into being have gone largely unstudied. Content analysis of textual land surveys included in sixteenth-century viceregal land grants for sheep and cattle ranches demonstrates variation in references to distance, direction, and borders that begins to reveal a process of negotiation among local actors and centralized state power that was contingent on environmental, economic, and demographic differences between highland and lowland landscapes. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 453-465
Michael Gentile | Örjan Sjöberg;
Throughout much of the Soviet period, access to housing was a major consideration, both for individual citizens and employers intent on increasing their number of employees. Because of the heavy emphasis on industry, and despite the progress made within the area since the late 1950s, Soviet urban residential provision never managed to fully recover from the acute housing shortage that characterized the Stalin years. In this paper, we address the quantitative side of housing construction during the socialist era. Using the mid-sized diversified industrial town of Daugavpils (Latvia) as a case study, we set out to investigate the extent to which employers were involved in decisions concerning housing provision. To do this, we consult a large volume of archival records, our focus being on documents tracing entries indicating that new living quarters were ready and could be allocated to employees of sponsoring organizations and enterprises. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 37, Issue 4, October 2011, Pages 470-482
Kyle T. Evered | Emine Ønhan Evered
In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population - in terms both numerical and medical - provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic's anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 37, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 40-54
Despite its centrality to the production of knowledge in the early modern period, the ship remains a rather marginal site in the work of historians of science. Accounts of 'floating universities' and 'laboratories at sea' abound, but little is said of the countless other ships, and their crews, involved in the production of knowledge through maritime exploration and travel. The central concern of the paper is the life and work of William Dampier (1651-1715), a seventeenth-century mariner who sailed as a pirate and authored genre-defining and well received scientific travel narratives. The thesis presented here is that the 'way of life' encouraged among the crews of the pirate ships aboard which Dampier travelled rendered him well-placed to gather the 'useful' knowledge and experiences which made his scientific name. Understanding this juxtaposition requires a focus which moves beyond the materiality of the ship, and which ultimately brings into view some of the social and epistemic geographies which took shape in and beyond the ship. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 143-156
The first years of World War II were marked by a series of battles in and over the fields of California. Workers struggled with growers, growers struggled with the state, and federal and California bureaucrats struggled to gain control over the anarchic labor conditions that marked California agriculture. The introduction of a guest worker program - the bracero program - that brought farmworkers from Mexico to the harvests of California and other states, brought these battles to a head as growers ought to secure their traditional access to 'cheap labor' and their presumed right to control the farm labor process in the state. This paper examines these battles to show how growers fought - and managed - to preserve a landscape of great power and profit. The paper argues that the agricultural landscape extant at the beginning of the war shaped the nature of these multifaceted struggles, even as it was an object of those struggles. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 37, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages 216-222
The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) contains a corpus of around one hundred letters sent by Élisée Reclus to Pëtr Kropotkin between 1882 and 1905. The correspondence is mainly concerned with their geographical works, notably the collaboration of Kropotkin with the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1876-1894) and the Brussels edition of Kropotkin's Orographie de la Sibérie (1904), edited by Reclus. In this paper, we deal first with the importance of this source: it is an example of the material work of a network of geographers who were at the same time the founders of the international anarchist movement. We suggest the correspondence falls into two parts: the first period (1882-1886) when Reclus was in exile in Switzerland after the Paris Commune of 1871, and Kropotkin was in prison in France; and the second period (1888-1905) when the two anarchist geographers discuss the role of geographical education, historical geography in Europe and its part in the globalisation of their era. The archive also contains significant evidence of their relationships with British geography: Kropotkin lived in London and joined the Royal Geographical Society and was on familiar terms with leading Fellows, such as John Scott Keltie and Halford Mackinder. The paper addresses the significance of the correspondence for understanding the relationships between geography, politics and public education, and the role of these heterodox geographers in the construction of geographical knowledge. The paper is accompanied by the publication, for the first time, of an edited selection of the letters. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 38, Issue 4, October 2012, Pages 372-386
Patrik Krebs | Nikos Koutsias | Marco Conedera
During the Middle Ages and the early modern period the cultivation of the chestnut tree became dominant in various mountain regions in Western Europe. Large numbers of giant chestnut trees have been reported throughout the continent that may be considered the living heritage of this period. In this paper we used a systematic inventory of giant chestnut trees in southern Switzerland for reconstructing the eco-cultural niche related to the long-term cultivation and conservation of such remarkable trees. To this purpose we implemented a retrospective logistic modelling approach with the presence of giant chestnuts as response variable compared with 65 environmental and cultural predictors. We performed different logistic regression analyses using untransformed and transformed variables. Out of the 42 models produced, we finally selected two models, on the basis of their parsimony and accuracy. Many of the selected predictors, such as distance from the lake, abundance of small livestock or number of secondary settlements, reveal that former local and regional socio-economic conditions and environmental constraints have considerable explanatory power. The approach allows us to detect several aspects of the targeted eco-cultural niche that may have acted in the distant past to support the development of the traditional fruit chestnut culture, as well as more recently, to preserve the giant chestnut tree population during the disruption phase of this culture. Most results are in line with the historical documentation, while others go beyond the dictates of written history and reveal interesting traits of the past economic and cultural systems. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 38, Issue 3, July 2012, Pages 209-219
Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of town planning have opened up interesting new perspectives, with respect to both the evolution of spatial knowledge and the genealogy of territorial techniques and their relation to larger socio-political projects, that would be enriched if combined with other discursive traditions. This article proposes to conceptualise English parliamentary enclosure-a favourite episode for Marxist historiography, frequently read in a strictly materialist fashion-as a precedent of a new form of sociospatial governmentality, a political technology that inaugurates a strategic manipulation of territory for social change on the threshold between feudal and capitalist spatial rationalities. I analyse the sociospatial dimensions of parliamentary enclosure's technical and legal innovations and compare them to the forms of communal self-regulation of land use customs and everyday regionalisations that preceded it. Through a systematic, replicable mechanism of reterritorialisation, enclosure acts normalised spatial regulations, blurred regional differences in the social organisation of agriculture and erased the modes of autonomous social reproduction linked to common land. Their exercise of dispossession of material resources, social capital and community representations is interpreted therefore as an inaugural logic that would pervade the emergent spatial rationality later known as planning. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 305-314
Changes in the cultures and spaces of death during the Victorian era reveal the shifting conceptualisations and mobilisations of class in this period. Using the example of Brookwood Necropolis, established 1852 in response to the contemporary burial reform debate, the paper explores tensions within the sanitary reform movement, 1853-1903. Whilst reformist ideology grounded the cemetery's practices in a discourse of inclusion, one of the consequences of reform was to reinforce class distinctions. Combined with commercial imperatives and the modern impulse towards separation of living and dead, this aspect of reform enacted a counter-discourse of alienation. The presence of these conflicting strands in the spaces and practices of the Necropolis and their changes during the time period reflect wider urban trends. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 266-275
Colin G. Pooley
Despite increased concern about environmental damage and resource depletion, the private motor car, and associated automobility, are taken-for-granted aspects of twenty-first-century life. This paper makes the counterfactual assumption that private ownership of cars was severely restricted at the start of the twentieth century, and uses a range of historical data to examine the ways in which such a scenario might have impacted on transport infrastructure, personal mobility and urban life. It is argued that, even without the wholesale adoption of the motor car as a means of personal transport, patterns of everyday mobility would not have differed significantly from today so long as other forms of transport had remained or expanded to cope with this demand. However, such a scenario would probably have required journeys to be planned in different ways, may have been qualitatively different from travel today, and could have disadvantaged particular groups of the population, including some women. A landscape without cars would probably also have altered the form of cities, with services provided closer to where people live, and levels of air pollution substantially lower. The counterfactual historical analysis is used to argue that, although there is little likelihood of cars being banned in Britain, greater restrictions on private motor vehicles would not necessarily lead to the fundamental changes in everyday mobility that some might predict. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 205-214
In Western and Central Europe, many woods are clearly separated from the surrounding countryside by permanent physical boundaries. While such boundaries are now out of use, in the past they were widespread and important landscape features. This paper argues that many woodland boundaries originate from the Middle Ages and perhaps even more from the Early Modern Period. Their existence was connected to a specific form of woodland management (coppicing) but also to ownership structures and through these to grazing regimes. With their various forms, permanent woodland boundaries served to separate woodland from the surrounding countryside both in a legal and physical sense. There are four basic types of permanent woodland boundaries: woodbanks, walls, stone rows and lynchets, all of which can still be studied in the landscape today. Because of their varied state of preservation and also because of the difficulties in creating relative chronologies, dating woodland boundaries is a very challenging task. However, even a basic typology can provide valuable information for a number of scientific disciplines, including landscape history, historical geography, archaeology and ecology. Permanent woodland boundaries are a part of European cultural heritage. They should be recognised and protected similarly to all other ancient landscape features. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 37, Issue 3, July 2011, Pages 348-357
The emergence and organisation of amateur networks of observation in Britain in the period between 1920 and 1940 are addressed in this paper. It examines the geographical, organisational and epistemological associations between networks of ornithological observation (traced through the British Trust for Ornithology), which emerged from the 1920s, and amateur ethnography (traced through Mass-Observation) which emerged in the late 1930s. I approach these 'observational cultures' as spaces which brought together new concepts of the local, of everyday nature and society, as well as the possibilities of changing the everyday. The paper suggests that popular observation during the period partly constituted a reframing of ways of knowing Britain differentiated through the everyday production of natural and social knowledge and the construction of the active citizen and new communities of practice. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 253-260
This paper connects philosophical debate concerning the metaphysics and epistemology of counterfactuals to the methodological concerns of historical geography. It argues that counterfactual claims are implied by a wide range of common epistemic judgements, specifically those regarding evidential support and explanatory connection. In addition it argues against those who have sought to restrict the use of counterfactuals to, in particular, rational action, or systems that are inherently chancy. Rather it argues in favour of an expanded role for counterfactual method in history and geography, in the forms of imaginary experiments and the questioning of 'what might have been'. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 243-244
Volume 36, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 441-452
After the declaration of independence in 1918, the Estonian government initiated a number of land reforms within a relatively short period of time. Although the reforms varied in aim, they led to similar outcomes in terms of the status and structure of landed properties. This paper explores, first, how the land reforms transformed a diversity of tenure systems into a coherent property regime, and second, how the reforms related to the political discussion on the proper spatial organization of land rights in Estonia. I argue that an important aim of the reforms was to contribute to the spatial and cultural consolidation of the new nation. The paper places the land reforms in a geopolitical context, proposing that the land reforms served to fend off a number of real and perceived threats to territorial integration. The paper is based on statements by politicians and intellectuals of the time, and on land reform records stored in Estonian State Archive. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 315-326
Javier J. Silvestre | Ernesto Clar
Water management and population issues have always been particularly important in Spain, a country historically characterized by severe environmental constraints on agricultural growth and intense rural depopulation. This paper evaluates whether irrigation projects in Spain over the course of the twentieth century have achieved one of their main objectives, which was to reduce rural population decline. This paper makes two contributions. First, we compare the evolution of population in two of the earliest and most ambitious irrigation projects in Spain, the Riegos del Alto Aragón (Upper Aragon Irrigation System) and the Canal de Aragón y Cataluña (Aragon and Catalonia Canal System), both located in the Ebro basin. Second, the time period of the study spans an entire century. This long-term approach is crucial if we accept that irrigation requires time to consolidate its effects and, therefore, its impact on population may be long delayed. We show that the evolution of population in each of the two projects has been substantially different. We also analyze the factors that have caused or prevented population growth. We argue that financial, economic and environmental limitations have been significant, but also that political and geographical factors have played a major role. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 194-204
Simplistic interpretations of the impact of newcomers on South American ecosystems retain currency in the environmental history of the subcontinent. European settlement is almost invariably seen to produce a continuous and linear destruction of the environment. On the basis of several crisis narratives contained in historical documents, it is widely accepted that there was a severe decrease in the extent of woody vegetal formations in the Río de la Plata area during the 19th and 20th centuries. To test this perception, and to develop a more accurate and more complex analysis of the environmental consequences of European occupation, this article focuses on Uruguayan territory from c. 1800 to 2000. Changes in the shape and extent of forest lands in this broad area were assessed by comparing 251 land-survey charts, drawn between 1830 and 1860, with modern-day forest maps. Changes in shrubland abundance were assessed by comparing current distributions with those inferred from the accounts of five travellers who passed through this territory in the first half of the 19th century. Over 200 years, there is no evidence of major changes in forest distribution, extent or shape, and shrublands appear to be much more abundant today than in the early 19th century. These observations, although based on limited data, contradict the most common interpretation of regional environmental evolution. They confirm other claims that the idea of forest destruction in the early 19th century was created and manipulated by actors involved in land conflicts. Close examination of such socially-constructed crisis narratives, through the use of new archives, leads to a better understanding of recent changes in the South American environment. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.