The transformation of world geography in American life, 1880-1950

• Main Author: Schulten, Susan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: ScholarlyCommons 1995
• Subjects: American history|Geography; North Pole
• Online Access: https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9615122

In the 1880s, the United States remained politically isolated from the rest of the world and inexperienced with overseas possessions. During the upheavals of industrialization and urbanization, however, Americans developed a strong national identity and, soon thereafter, a firm commitment to international stewardship. This rise to globalism fueled--and was fueled by--equally dramatic changes in the ways Americans learned about and understood world geography. This dissertation investigates the growth and reorganization of three areas of geography during this transition: university geography, school geography, and popular cartography. In the 1870s and 1880s, all these types of geography presented the world as a rigid, hierarchical, and ahistorical place where race, climate, and location were organically connected. After the Spanish American War, the United States came to control a number of territories overseas, heightening popular interest in the nation's role abroad. Textbooks and atlases reflected this new activism by bringing a more immediate commercial interest to the world beyond American borders. By demonstrating the fragility of diplomatic and trade networks, the First World War entrenched American commitments to both, reinforcing a geographic ideal of the world as a marketplace that depended on America's participation to ensure a peaceful future. In the 1940s the advent of aviation and the effects of a global war completely reconfigured America's view of the world. With more Americans buying maps than ever before, the war illustrated not only the limits of the Mercator projection, but also the dangers of a map that did not take into account the shocking proximity of the United States to Eurasia over the north pole. The events of the 1940s also generated a new language of distance and diplomacy known as geopolitics, affecting school geography, cartography, and professional geography by drawing each away from the economic focus of the interwar years toward an explicitly strategic and political understanding of the world. The rise of American stewardship in an age of heightened proximity recast both the spatial organization of the world and the place of the United States within it.