Joseph S. Wood

Village and community in early colonial New England

Abstract The long-standing correlation between community function and nucleated settlement form in early colonial New England is mistaken. Puritan communities were established, but new communities—often called villages in colonial records—were developed and survived quite well regardless of settlement form. As in England at the time, village meant community and community was a social web. Village status in New England provided a community with land and thus enabled the community to undertake settlement. But the social web that comprised community did not require nucleated settlement, and the dispersed settlement form that many colonists had known in England dominated the village landscape of early colonial New England.

Elaboration of a settlement system: the New England village in the federal period

Abstract Contemporary New England villages arose as nineteenth-century central places. The emergence of these commercial places reflected not the creation of something new out of whole cloth but an elaboration of an existing settlement system, a legacy of the colonial period and a manifestation of long-standing cultural habit. Town centers, more or less equally spaced and comprised of little more than a meetinghouse and a tavern, served as foci for town activities, as auxiliary central places. Most of the considerable localized economic exchange that characterized the colonial period occurred at dispersed places. The emergence of true central places about colonial town centers in the federal period marked a shift in scale or a general and widespread development of extra-local exchange, division of labor, and provision of centrality—the ability of a place to provide goods and services beyond the needs of its residents. Central places became accretions of full-time nonfarmers, of storekeepers, artisans, and professional people. Moreover, these places were interlinked to form a system of central places and, although a sorting process took place, the system was both a material manifestation of contemporary economic experience and an elaboration of the colonial settlement system.

A world we have gained: house, common, and village in New England

Abstract The New England tradition of large colonial houses encircling town commons to form Puritan villages was invented in the nineteenth century. Colonial ministers had formed an image of hardbitten Puritans shaping garden out of wilderness, which nineteenth-century Romantic elites elaborated upon to form a myth of Puritan antecedence, democratic society, and patriotic fervor. The contemporary village ensemble, whose substantial houses and village greens a nineteenth-century elite had constructed, became the historical tableau upon which the Romantic myth was played out. Village-improvement, architectural-preservation, and local historical societies self-consciously carved out a landscape of relict features to stand for the whole. Colonial Revival architects reinterpreted colonial form to contrive a historical landscape. Scholars of town origins and of the roots of vernacular building traditions assumed the tradition and converted it to conventional scholarly wisdom. The landscape conceit was a counterpoise for modernity. It provided symbolic attachment to a landscape that justified the past and that legitimized the present.

Geography's American Constituency: Results from the AGS Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey.

Does geography have an American constituency? Setbacks for the discipline at all levels of education over the past 65 years would suggest that geography is universally unpopular in the United States, but is that really true? The American Geographical Society (AGS) polled adult US residents on their understanding of the discipline itself and appreciation for geography and geographic education. Responses to the AGS Geographic Knowledge and Values Survey overwhelmingly indicate that a strong pro-geography constituency does exist, though at present it can only be proven within a specific cohort consisting of adult US residents who are more female, more educated, and less ethnically and racially diverse than the overall population. Respondents in this cohort overwhelmingly support expanded geographic education within the US, but overall knowledge regarding key geographic concepts and the discipline itself is weak. The results have policy implications for all education levels and strengthen the case for increased funding of geographic education.

Intellectuals in the Public: Uniting a Divided Baltimore

The University of Baltimore offered a community-based course following the Baltimore unrest in 2015. The course, which we called Divided Baltimore, engaged scores of students and community members together in a weekly forum of presentations and hard discussion. It focused on how Baltimore became segregated, how segregation affects all Baltimoreans, and what we could do about it. I discuss how the course worked, what we learned, and how we were able to pull off the course in short order. The key to what we accomplished was having built community partnerships around structural racism and racial equity in Baltimore over a period of several years before 2015. The lesson is that we can all do this—all be intellectuals in the public—if first we invest the time, our talents, and our intellectual energy in community engagement.

Between the World and Me; Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea; Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics; and The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir

Between the World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates. New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. xii and 164 pp., photos.

Historical Atlas of Maine

24.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8129-9354-7).Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Id...

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Spaces in Ho Chi Minh City

This elegantly designed, handsomely produced and deeply researched historical atlas is a grand, multi-disciplinary, multi-authored, collaborative project that provides a comprehensive historical geography of the American state of Maine. The editors, geographer Stephen Hornsby and historian Richard Judd, have authored many of the plates and deftly orchestrated the overall work, while Michael Hermann has superbly crafted the cartography and illustrations, including effective use of historical maps, in which the history is played out. The atlas is profoundly visual, much more than is common in historical atlases that too often simply compile maps. The work is comprehensive and has been developed with meticulous attention to detail. Organizationally, 76 original plates divided among four major historical periods capture material life and livelihood over some 13,000 years of human habitation in Maine. The four parts are ‘From Ice Age to Borderland, 13,000 BP to 1790’; ‘Shaping Maine, 1790‒1850’; ‘Industrial Maine, 1850‒1910’; and ‘Maine in the Modern Era, 1910‒2000’. Three narrative strands cross-cut these four parts: different native people’s quest for sovereignty; reliance on natural resources for fisheries, forestry, agriculture, industry and tourism; and growing environmental awareness, especially for its romantic appeal on the one hand andmodern concern for sustainability on the other. A fourth thematic strand is use of historicalmaps in plates across all four parts—maps of early exploration, native-story maps, maps supporting international boundary negotiations, bird’s-eye views, subscription atlas maps, nineteenth-century geological and topographical maps, and a century’s worth of tourist maps—which set out a history of mapping Maine. Importantly, the plates serve as a basis for historical analysis and provide a coherent story, the narrative offering context, thereby supplementing the visual representation, rather than the reverse. Maine is the northeastern-most state in the United States and is bounded by the state of New Hampshire and Canadian provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. But more, it is a land between quite different ecological regimes—looking eastward to the North Atlantic and its continental shelf, but with a vast continental land mass to the west; and between a continental taiga climatic zone to the north and a warm-summer continental forest zone to the south. Moreover, Maine comprises a land between competing cultural ecologies developed to sustain habitation. In that regard, it has always been a contested borderland: a frontier in the real sense of the term, both environmentally and culturally. The atlas well documents the intersections of this contested borderland: ecological (water−land interfaces, different climate, soil and vegetation zones); territorial (among and between native peoples and EuropeanAmericans, French and English, English and American, and Irish or Franco immigrants); in economic and landuse terms (rival demands from fishing, forestry and agriculture, from shipbuilding and paper making, and urban versus rural, increasingly summarized in the concept of ‘two Maines’). This story of ecological and cultural between-ness echoes thematically throughout the work and provides an intellectual thread for understanding both the history represented and the cartographic design employed. Much of the design and organization of plates is also intended to show process—a historical unfolding. By example, Part 3, Plates 36, ‘Mercantile Portland’, and 45, ‘Industrial Portland’, explain morphogenetic development of the city conceptually in the context of Martyn Bowden’s otherwise too little known notion of themercantile triangle. Plates in other sections link the distribution of native peoples to the geological setting, show the playing out of European wars, tie immigration to industrial development, whether pulp and paper, leather and shoes, or sardine or corn canneries, and in turn relate these to geomorphology and riverine or tidal features. One of my favourites is Plate 57, ‘Thoreau’s Maine’, which maps Thoreau’s travels through the region from 1846 to 1857, ensuring a humanistic sense of place in the work at the same time as helping to explain the rise of summer cottages following the Civil War. Plates for the modern period document the demographic and economic shift from traditional resource-based industries to a more diversified light industrial and service economy, and a rise of Maine’s nascent creative economy. As the editors note in their introduction, and as is evident throughout, the scholarship in this work places it between the narrative-rich three-volume Historical Atlas of Canada (1987‒1993) and the highly visual National Geographic Society’s Historical Atlas of the United States (1988). In the Historical Atlas of Maine, the editors and cartographic designer have succeeded in providing a visually rich approach with optimal narration to capture most effectively the historicalgeographical unfolding they wish to represent. Readers from many disciplines, as the editors hope, will find something new or newly represented and conceptualized in the book. The atlas is a scholarly achievement encased in a superb package of high-quality production, already in a second printing. In a word, it is a tour de force.

VIETNAMESE AMERICAN PLACE MAKING IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA

Sidewalk City is an artistically produced contribution to urban planning that works to blend sensitivity to place with digital technical expertise, or, as Annette Miae Kim notes, create a humanistic visualization approach. The author is exceedingly familiar with sidewalks of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC or, as many who live there simply call it, Saigon), and she imbues the book with cultural understanding that can only come from intensive fieldwork. Kim’s argument is simple: Without visualizing actual sidewalk spatial practices and legitimizing these through cartography, planners will fail to see how valuable sidewalks are to ensuring urban vibrancy, and, unfortunately, dismiss sidewalks as important to authentic planning for enlivening the urban landscape. The resulting book exhibits Kim’s experiment in trying to counter the modernization narrative about congested sidewalks and offers important insights for understanding place and enhancing use of place in planning. In aggregate space terms, sidewalks comprise the most pedestrian-friendly open space in a city. Sidewalks are democratizing space where people engage socially with one another, but sidewalks are also contested space for much the same reason. Recently, HCMC officials have moved to encourage modern entrepreneurship and reduce congestion and improve public health by restricting activities that have commonly taken place on sidewalks for generations. Planners, Kim argues in effect, need to counter the design discourse of sidewalk congestion as problematic, informed by how humans live and relate to one another in their use of sidewalk space. To do so, she develops the concept of “spatial ethnography” to wed social science research into peoples’ practices with physical spatial analysis, essentially through digital mapping to produce, as the author notes, “a new kind of map that will unveil rather than obscure sidewalk life” (p. 84). The work unfolds as a textbook for design and planning students, each chapter able to stand alone and starting with fascinatingly different histories of sidewalk use in French Saigon and in its former Chinese twin, Cholon, that together comprise contemporary HCMC, and how culturally developed and embedded the sidewalk is in the face of efforts to modernize HCMC. Kim then critiques conventional (or, as she notes, positivist and thus inescapably political) cartography for its inability to capture the flow and pattern of daily use in this behaviorally determined sidewalk culture. Following Denis Wood, John Pickles, and Jeremy Crampton, among others, she offers a critical cartographic primer to reveal the power dynamics and alternative claims to sidewalks