Review of: "The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 4: Global America, 1915-2000," by D. W. Meinig

Blanke, David

English

Dada/Surrealism

The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History.  Volume 4, Global America, 1915-2000

The Annals of Iowa

Review of:  The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 4: Global America, 1915-2000,  by D. W. Meinig

Iowa Research Online

The Annals of Iowa 
Volume 65 Number 2 (Spring 2006) pps. 272-274 
The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 
Years of History. Volume 4, Global America, 1915-2000 
David Blanke 
Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi 
ISSN 0003-4827 
Copyright © 2006 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, 
not for redistribution. 
Recommended Citation 
Blanke, David. "The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of 
History. Volume 4, Global America, 1915-2000." The Annals of Iowa 65 (2006), 272-274. 
Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.1061 
Hosted by Iowa Research Online 
272      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. 
Volume 4, Global America, 1915–2000, by D. W. Meinig. New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 2004. xvi, 467 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, 
notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth. 
Reviewer David Blanke is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M Uni-
versity–Corpus Christi. He is the author of Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril 
of America’s Car Culture (2007) and Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer 
Culture Took Root in the Rural Midwest (2000). 
In his fourth and final volume of The Shaping of America series, D. W. 
Meinig adds additional depth and substance to his claim that history 
and geography are mutually reinforcing disciplines; both “by their 
very nature” are “analogous, complementary, and interdependent 
fields.” Yet, in spite of their similarities, there remains “little evidence 
of significant interaction and convergence between them in common 
American practice” (xiii). Meinig’s ability to correct that imbalance 
while spanning no less than five centuries has generated richly de-
served praise for his astonishing contribution to both fields. Gener-
ously illustrated, clearly written, and methodologically sound, the 
books should find a place in most libraries and will serve students of 
the United States for many years to come.  
 Meinig prefaces this book with a quote from folklorist Henry 
Glassie, who holds that “history is not the past, but a map of the past 
drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern trav-
eler” (vi). Meinig’s particular point of view in this volume is what 
scholars once termed the American Century, and is here divided into 
three broad sections. The first examines the technological changes af-
fecting Americans’ understanding of national space and identity. The 
second probes the “morphological” shifts caused by human migra-
tions and the resulting policies that affected a national consciousness. 
The last surveys the assertions and impositions made by Americans as 
the nation gained political and economic hegemony across the globe.  
 The ambitious scope of the work opens the book to charges of 
over-generalization. Indeed, many fundamental social categories, such 
as gender, race, class, and ethnicity, are not treated systemically in 
Meinig’s formulation of national consciousness. Moreover, the book 
slights most environmental aspects of geographic history, such as cli-
mate, topography, water resources, and other natural determinants. 
By and large, for Meinig, the intersection of geography and history is 
best understood within the traditional realms of the marketplace (in-
cluding technology and engineering) and national and international 
politics. But within those limits, Meinig provides a compelling and 
Book Reviews and Notices      273 
generally persuasive narrative of the key changes to twentieth-century 
America.  
 In the first section, on technological and market shifts, the author 
synthesizes a fairly traditional narrative covering the modern trans-
portation revolution, including automobile, rail, air, and water transit. 
The emergence of a federated system for national planning and large-
scale market efficiencies determined the geographic transit patterns 
seen today. The sequential influence of cities, suburbs, and edge cities 
throughout the twentieth century explains most of these patterns. 
Meinig uses numerous maps and charts to show an emerging trans-
portation network that anticipates our contemporary appreciation of 
the transit and technology hubs—such as Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, 
and Denver—that affect national commerce. Given the repeating pat-
terns, for example between national rail and air travel (57, 59, 76), I 
would have preferred a more nuanced discussion of urban determin-
ism—along the lines of William Cronon’s “logic of capital”—to the all-
inclusive narrative provided by Meinig. But his inclusion of more re-
cent shifts in information technologies, local air service, and massive 
corporate mergers makes such a close analysis an unwarranted luxury. 
Certainly, his valuable synthesis of television, telephony, and the 
internet into the broad national narrative justifies his choice.  
 The arrival of new technologies, market forces, and transportation 
services lays the foundation for Meinig’s second and, in my view, most 
important section of the book. Here the author details the various 
migration streams, immigration policies, and multiple “doorways” 
whereby people responded to the changing technological footing of 
the country. Scholars of Iowa and the broader Midwest would do well 
to review Meinig’s assessment of regionalism in the middle decades. 
As he notes, “That the massive Core of the United States that had been 
firmly in place for a century could have become so eroded and coun-
tered in its power in so short a time . . . represented a drastic restruc-
turing of the nation” (277). Here, Meinig effectively blends current 
urban and social history to show how the growth of cities, such as 
Chicago, St. Louis, or Kansas City, and the influence of immigration 
led to a relative weakening of regional identification and the markets 
that sustained them. Meinig adds the trajectory of several peripheral 
populations, including those in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and on 
Native American lands, to again tempt the reader to explore his many 
secondary references.  
 Although the concluding section sustains Meinig’s ambitious the-
sis, it seems the least compelling of the three. Perhaps the overlay of 
American hegemony and the nation’s assertions of global power fol-
274      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
lowing World War II are simply too similar to the geopolitical realms 
of the Cold War to engender any new or unexpected patterns. For 
much of this section, America and “the West” are one and the same. 
Again, geographically peripheral areas, such as the “polar confron-
tation” of the Cold War, offer the most compelling and thought-
provoking reactions to the nation’s “victory” over communism.  
 But these criticisms are trifling compared to Meinig’s overall con-
tribution. This is a text that deserves wide circulation and one that 
compels others to heed his warnings about excluding geography. 
Without this perspective it is doubtful that anyone can fully under-
stand America’s national contours. 
 
 
Wisconsin Politics and Government: America’s Laboratory of Democracy, 
by James K. Conant. Politics and Governments of the American States. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. xx, 415 pp. Maps, tables, 
graphs, bibliography, notes, index. $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. 
Reviewer John D. Buenker is professor emeritus of history at the University of 
Wisconsin–Parkside. He has written extensively on American political history 
and culture and is the author of The History of Wisconsin, vol. 4, The Progressive 
Era, 1893–1914 (1998). 
The most important feature of Wisconsin society, government, and 
politics in the twentieth century, according to James K. Conant, was its 
“progressive nature”: issue-oriented politics, scandal-free government, 
efficient and effective administration of policies and programs, consis-
tently large voter turnout, and citizen involvement “in political activity 
in ways that extended beyond elections.” Such an orientation “seems 
to correspond with the democratic ideal posited by Alexis de Tocque-
ville in his classic work Democracy in America,” and differentiates it 
from most other midwestern states. Conant is quick to point out, how-
ever, that it has not always been that way and that, by the end of the 
twentieth century, “some of the Progressive premises or boundaries” 
were “severely tested or broken” (xv–xvii). 
 To explain this bipolar pattern, Conant posits an ongoing conflict 
between the “marketplace” and “commonwealth” conceptions of so-
ciety and divides Wisconsin’s history into “four major periods of ex-
perimentation.” In the former, politics is a struggle for power and tan-
gible rewards among private interest groups, while the purpose of 
government is to aggrandize those interests and professional politi-
cians. In the latter, the purpose of politics and government is to protect 
citizens and public resources from exploitation by those same interests 
and professional politicians.    


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The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 4, Global America, 1915-2000

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