Project MUSE®: Historical Geography - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Historical Geography.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 45 (2017) through current issueLatest Articles: Historical GeographyTWOProject MUSE®Historical Geography2331-75231091-6458Latest articles in Historical Geography. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From the Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963907
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We are delighted to be presenting our second volume as the editors of Historical Geography. We begin with Daniel Arreola’s 2023 Distinguished Lecture for the Historical Geography specialty group.Daniel Arreola is a cultural and historical geographer who specializes in the study of the Mexican-American borderlands and Latino/a cultures in the US. A native Southern Californian, he earned bachelor’s and PhD degrees in geography from UCLA. He is emeritus professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University where he was a member of the faculty for twenty-six years.Arreola is the recipient of the Paul P. Vouras Medal from the American Geographical Society for his studies of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallFrom the Editors2025-06-25text/htmlen-USFrom the Editors2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®41822026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25The Mexican Restaurant in America
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963908
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The study of restaurants might confer on anyone a reflection on the way restaurants have shaped a life. My first job at the age of thirteen was at a Jewish delicatessen on the boardwalk in Venice, California. During my high school years, my mother worked part time as a waitress, and I followed her to become a dishwasher after school at our neighborhood Farmer’s Daughter, a small family-owned café in Santa Monica. Of course, I was not alone in these early restaurant attachments. In the 1940s, my maternal grandparents operated a malt shop in Puente in the San Gabriel Valley. Grandfather called the shop El Sumidero, Spanish for “The Drain,” perhaps understanding all too well the cost of operating an eatery. Other
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallThe Mexican Restaurant in America2025-06-25text/htmlen-USThe Mexican Restaurant in America2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®919852026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Reterritorializing Frederick Jackson Turner’s Rhetorical Cartography: Reconsidering the US Census 1870–1900 and the Multiple and Intersecting Landscapes of the American Frontier
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963909
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In 1893, as a young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to a small audience attending the American Historical Association (AHA) Conference in Chicago being held alongside the World’s Columbian Exposition. With a literary flourish Turner declared the US frontier— which he described as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” and crucible of American democracy— was now closed.1 Quoting Robert P. Porter, a British journalist and superintendent of the 1890 Census, Turner informed his audience: “At present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallReterritorializing Frederick Jackson Turner’s Rhetorical Cartography: Reconsidering the US Census 1870–1900 and the Multiple and Intersecting Landscapes of the American Frontier2025-06-25text/htmlen-USReterritorializing Frederick Jackson Turner’s Rhetorical Cartography: Reconsidering the US Census 1870–1900 and the Multiple and Intersecting Landscapes of the American Frontier2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®1350562026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas by Mirela Altic (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963910
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Though this book is a detailed history written mainly for academic historians of cartography, the layman historian will enjoy access to maps and information often found only in faraway archives. While numerous other authors have focused on Jesuit cartography tangentially, or on particular locations of Jesuit expeditions, Mirela Altic is the first to create a comprehensive, detailed historical and analytical collection concerning Jesuit cartography, one that is “a first attempt at a synthesis of the history of the Jesuit mapping of the Americas” (325). She takes the reader on a deep dive, scouring over a hundred archives and libraries both in Europe and the United States, citing hundreds of scholarly works and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallEncounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas by Mirela Altic (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USEncounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of the Americas by Mirela Altic (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®80682026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification by Mike Amezcua (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963911
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Mike Amezcua’s book Making Mexican Chicago offers insight into how Latino politics and anti-immigrant sentiments are directly linked to issues of housing, property, and neighborhood control. He touches on the multivalent ways that ethnic Mexicans built sanctuary and community empowerment in the racially hostile neighborhoods of postwar Chicago. The disillusionment with midcentury liberalism led moderate and conservative ethnic Mexicans to “unlock the commercial ventures and entrepreneurial desires” for their communities (15). They made business power an avenue for political power, Amezcua argues. Meanwhile, Chicano activists in 1970s Pilsen, similarly disinvested in the Democratic Party, sought to ward off
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallMaking Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification by Mike Amezcua (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USMaking Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification by Mike Amezcua (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®108702026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Waves of Influence: Pacific Maritime Networks Connecting Mexico, Central America, and Northwestern South America ed, by Christopher S. Beekman and Colin McEwan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963912
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Since the early twentieth century, archeologists and researchers from multiple fields have pondered the pre-Columbian connections among the human cultures that inhabited the Pacific coasts of West Mexico and South America. In Waves of Influence: Pacific Maritime Networks Connecting Mexico, Central America, and Northwestern South America, the “contributors reassess the evidence for Pre-Columbian maritime contacts between western Mexico and the Pacific coast of northwest South America” (1). The book is composed of sixteen chapters and is divided into four parts: “Deep Time and Broad Brush” (Part 1), “Early versus Late Networks Along Two Key Coastlines” (Part 2), “Point-to-Point Contacts Between Ecuador, Costa Rica
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallWaves of Influence: Pacific Maritime Networks Connecting Mexico, Central America, and Northwestern South America ed, by Christopher S. Beekman and Colin McEwan (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USWaves of Influence: Pacific Maritime Networks Connecting Mexico, Central America, and Northwestern South America ed, by Christopher S. Beekman and Colin McEwan (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®91312026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 by Daniel J. Burge (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963913
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William Henry Seward is best known for his role as secretary of state in President Abraham Lincoln’s war cabinet and for his purchase of Alaska in 1867 from Russia’s Emperor Alexander II. The latter ignominiously labeled at the time as Seward’s Folly cuts right to the heart of Daniel J. Burge’s A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny. In his tome, Burge argues convincingly that historians have vastly overestimated the popularity of manifest destiny in America. Once defined as a continental project that envisioned the United States encompassing a hemispheric landmass from Canada to the tip of South America and every region in between, manifest destiny also served as a political football for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallA Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 by Daniel J. Burge (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USA Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 by Daniel J. Burge (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®79492026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963914
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Deutsch’s Making a Modern U.S. West is a masterful, comprehensive history of the American West from 1898 to 1940. Responding to Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” which emphasizes a settler-colonial process of “winning a wilderness” as key to the West’s success and character (17), Deutsch argues that the definition, content, and meaning of the modern West was contested, with elite government officials, corporate investors, speculators, and working-class people of diverse backgrounds haggling over the meaning of the West’s modernity, and over whom to include and on what terms. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was a key inflection point in that historiography. Deutsch’s argument is dialectical: Both elite
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallMaking a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USMaking a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®91052026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Streetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto: A Visual Analysis of Change by Brian Doucet and Michael Doucet (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963915
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Have you ever spent time looking at a box of photographs and wondering what will happen to these random pictures? Perhaps they are like the ones taken of a group of World War II Navy WAVES disembarking on ice at the Harbor Field, a water-based airport, established in the middle of the last century at Dundalk, Maryland. The names of the people in that photograph are long lost, but the sea-aircraft in the picture is well documented, which makes the photograph take on new significance for a subject that was not intended to be the main focus of the photo. Pictures, moving from a family or personal interest and transforming into a subject of interest to historians and geographers: This is what Brian and Michael Doucet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallStreetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto: A Visual Analysis of Change by Brian Doucet and Michael Doucet (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USStreetcars and the Shifting Geographies of Toronto: A Visual Analysis of Change by Brian Doucet and Michael Doucet (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®79162026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25A Carceral Ecology: Ushuaia and the History of Landscape andPunishment in Argentina by Ryan C. Edwards (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963916
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The political map of any country contains familiar features to the insider and the outsider; these include names of provinces or states, capital cities, and political boundaries. If one wanted to know more about what is behind these maps, we could investigate monies the national government has spent on various institutions and features such as highways, colleges and universities, libraries, museums, hospitals, national parks, and military bases. In short, an atlas of federal spending on institutions and programs would reveal a vast array of institutions, facilities, networks, and programs that are funded and located at various places within a country. Unfamiliar yet significant institutions that are important in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallA Carceral Ecology: Ushuaia and the History of Landscape andPunishment in Argentina by Ryan C. Edwards (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USA Carceral Ecology: Ushuaia and the History of Landscape andPunishment in Argentina by Ryan C. Edwards (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®87102026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic by Catherine Gibson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963917
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Catherine Gibson’s Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic presents a unique transnational approach to the Imperial Baltic utilizing the field of ethnographic cartography. By analyzing the former Imperial Baltic states through the perspective of ethnographic mapmaking, Gibson paints a picture of the complex elements and histories that make up the sense of place as well as the field of cartography. Gibson situates this history in the broader field of Russian studies and geography by masterfully connecting the disciplines with the importance of place-based cartographic perspectives and building on influential works such as Steven Seegel’s Mapping Europe’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallGeographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic by Catherine Gibson (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USGeographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic by Catherine Gibson (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®81292026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism by Jarrod Hore (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963918
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In Visions of Nature, Hore takes on the daunting task of connecting the Tasman world with the American West, specifically California, through the assemblage of a series of anglicized settler-colonial projects. While Hore pays special attention to landscape photographers and their ability to create and solidify new imaginaries, such as highlands, lowlands, and wastes (chapter 2), the author carefully acknowledges that their labor and photographic productions do not unilaterally shape settler-colonial imaginaries. Instead, late nineteenth-century photographers like John Beattie and Carlton Watkins (chapter 1) are enrolled in a burgeoning milieu of technical objects, techniques, subsequent labor practices, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallVisions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism by Jarrod Hore (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USVisions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism by Jarrod Hore (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®87452026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Frontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism ed, by Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyun Lee, and Edward Vickers (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963919
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In the last years of the twentieth century, the concept of memory has come to appear constantly as an unavoidable framework to understand not only the past but also the transformations that characterize the period we are living in. Among the many ways to approach such a concept, I encountered the very enriching attempt by the contributors to Frontiers of Memory in theAsia-Pacific. Even though these authors do not follow a unique pattern in their memorial analysis, they offer an important approach that leads to rethinking how World War II memories still “haunt” the political agenda in the Asia-Pacific region.The main purpose of this book is to defy the strong Western influence that lies in many studies on memory
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallFrontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism ed, by Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyun Lee, and Edward Vickers (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USFrontiers of Memory in the Asia-Pacific: Difficult Heritage and the Transnational Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism ed, by Shu-Mei Huang, Hyun Kyun Lee, and Edward Vickers (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®76782026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963920
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Kathryn Olivarius brings a fresh perspective to our thinking about the culture of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the nineteenth century by examining perceptions of health and disease among elites, migrants, businesspeople, news correspondents, and politicians in New Orleans and its environs. Using an anthropological lens, Olivarius explores perception of epidemics, especially mosquito-borne illnesses such as yellow fever, from the perspectives of evolving medical knowledge, conventional wisdom, and prevailing prejudices concerning migrants from the northern states, slaves, and immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere in western Europe. In many ways, notions of susceptibility and immunity from pandemic illnesses
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallNecropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USNecropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom by Kathryn Olivarius (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®61942026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963921
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Those in search of a textbook on slavery or the US South for an environmental history course should certainly consider this innovative volume. The author has organized the material thematically rather than chronologically or geographically, resulting in an emphasis on the roles of various aspects of the environment in a topic usually approached from a social, economic, political, or cultural perspective. Between a brief introduction and an equally brief conclusion, seven substantive chapters address themes that range from soils and swamps, to water, weather, and war, to forests and animals.Each chapter provides a synthesis of relevant secondary literature on colonial times through the Civil War and its immediate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallScars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USScars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®78732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada ed, by Ann Shteir (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963922
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In this volume, editor Ann Shteir has assembled an impressive collection of papers from an October 2017 workshop on “Women, Men, and Plants in Nineteenth-Century Canada: New Resources, New Perspectives.” In the introduction, Shteir acknowledges anticipated shortcomings of the collection, in particular the lack of diverse voices such as Indigenous women and women of other nonwhite communities, and she discusses what might come next in an attempt to broaden the discussion “beyond British and settler-colonial communities of practice” (9). Even so, I struggled with the singular focus on white women and men. Why couldn’t other voices have been included even if they were not part of the workshop? Why weren’t they part of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallFlora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada ed, by Ann Shteir (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USFlora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada ed, by Ann Shteir (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®86012026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands by Juliet Wiersema (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963923
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Spanish scholar Germán de Granda once referred to the Pacific lowlands of New Granada as “the periphery of the periphery” (6). It is easy to see why, as the vast region was a little-known, sparsely settled backwater on the western fringe of a relatively poor viceroyalty. Yet the region was the viceroyalty’s principal source of gold— its only global export. The paradox of being poorly known and underdeveloped yet politically and economically central means the history and historical geography of the region need to be explored in a way that looks beyond the sparse textual record. Fortunately, the wonderful new book by Juliet Wiersema, a professor of art history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, provides an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallThe History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands by Juliet Wiersema (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USThe History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Colombia’s Pacific Lowlands by Juliet Wiersema (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®88932026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25Mac McCloud’s Five Points: Photographing Black Denver, 1938–1975 by William Wyckoff (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/963924
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Many American Black communities, including Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, experienced a history of racial segregation, divestment, blight, and urban displacement throughout the twentieth century. William Wyckoff, a cultural and historical geographer, brings a fresh perspective to this story by presenting a visual narrative of Five Points “when both enduring racial prejudice and Black cultural vitality created a community” that represents “an evocative snapshot of post–World War II Black America” (19). The information and images Wyckoff presents are useful tools for scholars and educators seeking to unpack the impact of racist housing and urban development policies. It is an important step forward in an ongoing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/738/image/coversmallMac McCloud’s Five Points: Photographing Black Denver, 1938–1975 by William Wyckoff (review)2025-06-25text/htmlen-USMac McCloud’s Five Points: Photographing Black Denver, 1938–1975 by William Wyckoff (review)2025-06-252025TWOProject MUSE®90072026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002025-06-25