Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

History Historical Geography

European Settlement and Development in North America

edited by James R. Gibson

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Dec 1978
Category
Historical Geography, Pre-Confederation (to 1867), General
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781487597528
    Publish Date
    Dec 1978
    List Price
    $27.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

Andrew Hill Clark (1911-1975) was responsible for much of the recent rise of historical geography in North America. The focus on his research was the opening of New World lands by European peoples, and this North American experience is the subject of this collection of essays written by eight of Clark's students. They examine the role of a new physical and economic environment – particularly abundant and cheap land – in the settlement of New France, the cultural and physical problems that conditioned Russian America, the transformation of cultural regionalism in the eastern United States between the late colonial seaboard and the early republican interior, the changing economic geography of rice farming on the antebellum Southern seaboard, the interrelationships of the European and Indian economies in the pre-conquest fur trade of Canada, differential acculturation and ethnic territoriality among three immigrant groups in Kansas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the development in England and the United States of similar social geographic images of the Victorian city, and the erosion of a sense of place and community by possessive individualism in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

 

The essays are preceded by an appreciation of Clark as an historical geographer written by D.W. Meinig and are brought together in an epilogue by John Warkentin. The work is an unusually consistent Festchrift which should appeal to all interested in the patterns of North American settlement.

About the author

James R. Gibson is a professor emeritus and Senior Scholar of the Department of Geography at York University in Toronto, where he taught from 1966 until 2000; he has also taught at University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.

James R. Gibson's profile page