European Settlement and Development in North America

Andrew Hill Clark (1911-1975) was responsible for much of the recent rise of historical geography in North America. The focus on his research was the opening of New World lands by European peoples, and this North American experience is the subject of this collection of essays written by eight of Clark's students. They examine the role of a new physical and economic environment – particularly abundant and cheap land – in the settlement of New France, the cultural and physical problems that conditioned Russian America, the transformation of cultural regionalism in the eastern United States between the late colonial seaboard and the early republican interior, the changing economic geography of rice farming on the antebellum Southern seaboard, the interrelationships of the European and Indian economies in the pre-conquest fur trade of Canada, differential acculturation and ethnic territoriality among three immigrant groups in Kansas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the development in England and the United States of similar social geographic images of the Victorian city, and the erosion of a sense of place and community by possessive individualism in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

The essays are preceded by an appreciation of Clark as an historical geographer written by D.W. Meinig and are brought together in an epilogue by John Warkentin. The work is an unusually consistent Festchrift which should appeal to all interested in the patterns of North American settlement.