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1 Approaching the Question Is the United States becoming a placeless land? Have all those place-toplace differences in our humanized landscapes and the communities that inhabit them, has all this geographic particularity become a thing of the past? Although our pollsters may never have posed this intensely geographic question to a sample of the public, such a judgment would seem to be virtually universal nowadays among our rank-and-file citizenry. Furthermore, the great majority of men and women in the knowledge industry who have commented on the topic have endorsed the notion of nationwide homogenization in terms of economy, landscape, lifestyle, and all manner of consumption, offering publications with such titles as The Geography of Nowhere, No Sense of Place, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life, and Television and the Erosion of Regional Diversity. Indeed “a rising chorus of modernday Jeremiahs proclaims the death of place in American life” (Halttunen 2006, 1). In any event, how could we not believe in the dissolution of American places awash as we are in mass-produced commodities, bombarded ceaselessly by nationally uniform news, entertainment, and advertising in our print and electronic media? We are a population, after all, that spends much of its time outside the home (all too often a cookie-cutter structure devoid of regional resonance, where television mesmerizes us several hours a day) shopping or eating in lookalike chain or franchise operations, driving along featureless highways built to governmental specifications, sitting in anonymous airports, and sleeping in forgettable motels. It is essential to note that, whenever I speak of “place,” the reference is solely to mappable tracts of humanized land or objects, that is, place as a personal or social construct. However much Americans may have been modifying terrain, biota, soils, hydrology, atmosphere, and even climate, it 1 The Argument 2 | Chapter One would be ludicrous to speculate about a convergence of the various physical regions of the land. What is the true picture if we look at the country closely and dispassionately ? Although there are lesser revelations along the way, the central argument , or finding, of this volume is a counterintuitive, indeed paradoxical, one: that, since its inception, the United States has experienced constant homogenization spatially in terms of society, culture, economy, and, most visibly, the built landscape, but, at the same time, it has also retained the identity of many of its multitudinous places and, in fact, increased their number and variety while also preserving the integrity of some regionally defined cultural items. Such a claim will initially strike many, probably most, readers as dubiously contrarian, even outlandish. I believe, however, that after we have sifted the large and varied mass of evidence in the following pages, we may become reconciled to a convoluted reality, the fact that we live in a land where simple generalities seldom hold up against critical inspection. What, then, do we mean when speaking of our humanized places? In the most general sense, a place is a specific humanly created and humanly perceived , real or imagined segment of terrestrial space-time. “Place stands in contrast to space. Space is an empty theater in which something may or may not happen. When something does happen, we say it ‘takes place,’ and the space becomes a place” (Griswold 2008, 5). Given the innumerable modes of genesis, past and present, it is fair to say that our universe of places is virtually infinite. In terms of size, they can range all the way from a single chamber or cave upward to the entirety of a nation-state. Temporally, a place’s duration can stretch from a matter of hours or even minutes to entities persisting for millennia. The most fully realized places are usually the objects of a certain degree of cogitation or emotion, whether affection, curiosity, coveting, dread, or loathing. Every individual can generate places in abundance—dwellings, workplace, play area, hideaway, or something emerging from dreams, reading fiction, or listening to music—or else places can be the product of collective cognition by a social group. Thus a major category of place is the localized variety, those patches of territory that may be meaningful to the immediate community but are less obvious to the stranger, for example, neighborhoods, plazas, parks, playgrounds, lovers’ lanes, hangouts, and the like. For the purposes of this study, I limit attention to a single category of places (but one that is more than huge enough): such fractions of the American territory as are...

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