We were as much where we were as who we were, as many Americans from 1500 to 1900 identified more with their present spaces than they did with their past characteristics. In this collection of
13 interdisciplinary articles contributors describe how Americans expressed that identity, whether based on the imaginary or the experienced. Their topics include the cultural geography and
linguistic development of America, the influence of the fight over federalism, the association of panorama pamphlets with manifest destiny, the maps of Chateaubriand and Balzac as delineators,
the writing of William Emory about the US/Mexico border, the building of the American cemetery system and railroad into literary devices, land speculation and its maps in Melville, revisionist
geographies of abolitionism and of the American slave, geographies of the self in nineteenth century women's travel writing, and the reduction of the world to the level of a gameboard by the
media. Annotation 穢2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
