Karl B. Raitz

A Note About Information Sources for Preferred Recreational Environments

People employ a wide variety of information sources to establish activity. A survey of 999 college-age people revealed differences in the importance of various formal and informal information types. College students place more value on informationfrom peers than from family members. Television advertising and programs are the most used formal information types. For selected information sources, rankings increased with increasing age of respondent.

Cognitive Maps of Appalachia

OGNITIVE maps influence the geographical relationships between persons and places. Individuals constantly interact with an environment that is too complex to comprehend or understand fully. Cultural values, needs, and experiences provide a context in which persons observe their environment and order or eliminate the information that they may garner from it. The sorted cognitive information is functional because it becomes the basis for certain types of geographical behavior in relation to the environment. Roger M. Downs and David Stea suggested that individuals use three methods to order their geographical experiences.l By concentrating on the similarities among places or objects in the environment, individuals classify their environment in sets of characteristics that describe different parts of it. Simplified information from the environment is classified according to geographical relationships in order to produce cognitive images of places. Individuals may categorize information regionally. This process involves simplification of information to stereotypes of people and landscapes that may or may not be accurate. But individuals behave as if the images were correct, and consequently geographical behavior is molded or modified by these images.2 Another issue is how groups of individuals process environmental information. Members of a group share knowledge, experiences, and beliefs about places, including stereotypes that range from reality through myth to valuebased emotional distortions.3 When members of a particular group are asked to portray their cognitive images in the form of a graphic map, the results tend to exhibit a consistent set of characteristics. The principle of proximity influences the number of characteristics that are recognized and the range of the geographical content in which the characteristics are placed.4 In a graphic portrayal of cognitive images, the places that are closest to the observer are usually the best known and the easiest to recall in detail. Graphic representations of nearby environments are generally abundant in details in comparison with maps of distant environments or places that were not observed or experienced firsthand. A qualification of this generalization is that highly publicized events in some distant area might provide information about the place that would

Recreational choices and environmental preference

Abstract This paper addresses questions concerning a college-age cohorts preferences for specific physical environment types for high quality recreational experience. A sample of college students ranked seashore and mountains as most preferred and second most preferred, and plains and desert as second least and least preferred, respectively. The length of time one resides in an environment appears related to higher ranking of that environment for recreational opportunity. People in this age cohort have different reasons for preferring one environment over another. Respondents preferred seashores because of the qualities of their physical environment. Lake environments, on the other hand, were ranked high because of the variety of activities one could pursue; and mountain landscapes received high preference because of their appeal to the aesthetic senses.

THEMES IN THE CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPEAN ETHNIC GROUPS IN THE UNITED STATES

appeared in many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geographical books and journals, through contemporary studies that describe the mosaic of culture groups, the concept of ethnicity as a cause or correlate of human behavior patterns has been a continuing theme in American geography.1 Questions that geographers ask about ethnic groups change through the years and parallel the evolution of ethnic studies in the other social sciences. The changing focus of ethnic studies may be attributed in part to the changing nature and significance of ethnicity as an influence on human events and in part to a lack in the social sciences of a sufficiently broad paradigm of functioning pluralistic societies. If the social sciences have not yet evolved an appropriate paradigm for ethnic research, it is not from a lack of interest or effort, but rather it is because the subject is broad and multidimensional. This paper will review the evolution of several major research themes that form the core of the historical and cultural geography literature on ethnic groups. I will restrict this discussion to themes and examples that apply to European ethnic groups in the American context. This limitation seems appropriate not only because the large volume of literature requires selectivity, but also because studies of these groups begin in the I88os and span almost a century, and because the literature covers a broad range of topics. Few geographers have concerned themselves explicitly with the problem of defining ethnicity. A comparable situation exists in sociology and anthropology. In sixty-five studies dealing with various aspects of ethnicity, Wsevolod Isajiw found only thirteen that included some form of definition of ethnicity and the remaining fifty-two used no explicit definition at all.2 Ethnicity involves many aspects of human behavior. Intuitively we know that ethnics are custodians of distinct cultural traditions and that the organization of social interaction is often based on ethnicity. Ethnicity may be a basis for friendship and may sometimes be the key to business or political success. In periods of conflict or hardship that accompany immigration or radical political change, the ethnic finds his peers to be a source of stability and reassurance. Ethnicity may also reinforce distrust, suspicion, and exclusiveness, and it may serve as the ideal focus for intergroup friction.3 Whether ethnicity brings any positive contribution to the wider

Appalachian Vernacular Regions

The name Appalachia has wide recognition across America. It is associated with the upland sections of at least 13 eastern states and has become associated with coal mining, poverty, welfare programs and traditional social values. But do the people who live within the region recognize Appalachia as a place that fits the name? A survey of college students in and adjacent to the region revealed that residents use a variety of directional and topographical terms as vernacular regional names. The term Appalachia has limited use and is largely restricted to the central and southern highlands.

Rock Fences and Preadaptation

Few nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States went to the South. Some enclaves of immigrant settlement did emerge, often as the product of recruitment by church leaders or plantation owners in search of a labor force. Examples include Italians in Lake Village, Arkansas; German-Swiss in Franklin County, Tennessee; Germans in Cullman County, Alabama; and several groups in eastern and south-central Texas. Roman Catholic Irish immigrants, who differed markedly from the Protestant or Ulster Irish migrants to the upland South during the eighteenth century, also went to the South before the Civil War, but their numbers were seldom large enough to be described as ethnic islands (Kollmorgen 1943). They were often itinerant, listed in a county as laborers in one federal decennial census but gone by the next (Murray-Wooley and Raitz 1992, 86). Although Irish immigrants may have been pushed to the United States by the raw need to survive, they also perceived emigration as involuntary exile - having been forced from their homeland by British and landlord oppression (Miller 1985, 103). Because of that social context, the movement of Roman Catholic Irish to the South, with its biases and slave labor, seems incongruous and begs the question of what attracted them and how they made a living (Belissary 1948; Berthoff 1951; Dunlevy 1982). Were they simply willing to work for wages low enough to allow them to compete with slave labor, or did the Irish bring craft skills or knowledge that preadapted them to enter successfully the antebellum economic and social system (Jordan 1989, 494)? THE REGIONAL CONTEXT Two areas of the South, the Kentucky Bluegrass and the Nashville Basin, attracted nineteenth-century Irish immigrants (Vedder and Gallaway 1972). These areas share several geomorphological and settlement characteristics and are the case study of the cultural and environmental context that attracted the Irish. Both areas lie in states whose traditional cultural institutions and heritage are generally regarded as southern and so provide the opportunity to assess whether the Irish cultural heritage preadapted the immigrants to be successful as temporary or permanent residents and to evaluate the contextual circumstances that extended their choice of destination on arrival in the United States. During the eighteenth century southerners from Maryland to the Carolinas knew the Bluegrass and Nashville basins by reputation - an Elysian country with fertile, limestone-floored lowlands that became the locus of early trans-Appalachian pioneer travel routes. The basin is part of the Cincinnati Arch, a low anticline whose axis trends from Michigan south and west to middle Tennessee. Each basin is the product of streams eroding geologic domes that make up the archs southern reach (Thornbury 1965, 185-187). As the Kentucky and Licking rivers and their tributaries removed the top portion of the northern or Jessamine Dome, the effect was rather like slicing the top third from a Cyclopean onion. A small-scale geologic map of the Bluegrass basin shows layers of Ordovician-age limestone exposed at the surface, the differing strata arranged in three concentric rings, each in turn comprised of individual beds dipping outward from the center [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The rock in the center was the oldest and, as early settlers found, yielded the most fertile soils. This area would become known as the Inner Bluegrass. The second ring contained shale interbedded with limestone and siltstone. Streams sliced this surface into steeply sloped hills - it is sometimes called the Eden Shale Hills - and the shales weathered and synthesized into tight, infertile, ocherous clay soils. The outer ring, the Outer Bluegrass, girdles the basin with a belt of young Ordovician limestone on which soils of moderate fertility have formed. The entire Bluegrass basin is set off from the surrounding country by an encircling escarpment of Mississippian and Pennsylvanian rocks on the west, south, and east. …

Negro Hamlets and Agricultural Estates in Kentucky's Inner Bluegrass

rT nOURISTS, artists, and agriculturists alike have proclaimed Kentuckys Inner Bluegrass region to be one of the loveliest of all rural landscapes.1 Long, wooded lanes reach back from ornamental wrought-iron gates mounted on limestone posts. Stylish wooden fences bound the beautiful bluegrass paddocks, white ducks float leisurely in the ponds and creeks, thoroughbred horses and blooded cattle grace the fields, and stately, pillared mansions symbolize gracious living. Here is the major concentration of large agricultural estates and gentlemen farms in the United States.2

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTION OF LOCAL-SCALE ROADS IN KENTUCKY'S BLUEGRASS

In the nineteenth century, local‐scale roads in central Kentucky were built subject to local knowledge and cultural tradition but within the context of legal authority and folk‐ or science‐based engineering precepts. This study demonstrates how legal and engineering standards‐though conceived as transcendent and objective‐were in fact contingent on the regions physical attributes as well as its cultural traditions and character. Thus local road alignment and construction have been influenced by and contingent on local knowledge, dialogue, and debate since frontier times.

The City Hotel as Landscape Artifact and Community Symbol

Hotels, or their precursor, the tavern, were cornerstones of urban development on Americas settlement frontier. As a landscape artifact the hotel marked the early business and social core of cities; it also symbolized community progress and achievement, as well as investment opportunity. The hotel evolved from a democratic social institution into a grand central-city palace that showcased technological innovation while gradually yielding its democratic character to entrepreneurial expedience. The modern convention hotel mirrors some aspects of the 19th century hotels, but it has not recaptured its democratic connection to the local community.

Ethnic Settlements on Topographic Maps.

Abstract The large scale topographic map can be a valuable medium for the pedagogic study of cultural geography, as a documentary source for research, or as a supplement to field work. Ethnic settlements, by way of illustration, are distinct cultural features on the landscape and can be located on topographic maps through the compilation of settlement form interpretation keys or place-name indexes, and the study of ethnic history. With this information as a base, it is possible to develop an interpretation logic that will allow the location and identification of ethnic groups on topographic maps.