Popular Geography Writing in America, 1783–1888

Abstract

"Popular Geography Writing in America, 1783–1888" is an intellectual and cultural history that traces the connections among geography writing, print culture, and nationalism. It challenges the conventional historiographical paradigm that understands antebellum and postbellum periods in United States history as fundamentally discontinuous. The study suggests that the published geographies of Jedidiah Morse, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Arnold Guyot, William Gilpin, George Perkins Marsh, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albert Richardson, Clarence King, and John Wesley Powell created a popular discursive sense of equivalency between the physical landscape of a North American continent and the United States as a nationstate.