D.W. Meinig. The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 2 Continental America, 1800-1867. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
This is the second of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 2 turns from the Atlantic focus of the first volume towards a more continental viewpoint, in line with the demographic and geographic shift in the early Republic towards westward development. A consistent theme develops--the United States expanded rapidly, at an almost feverish pace during this era. That growth outstripped whatever efforts there were to create a robust national infrastructure or even a comprehensive national plan, so that sectional divisions spread and further west even as the industrial economy of the North and the cotton economy of the Deep South created increasingly incongruent societies. Once those two societies began "running into each other" in Missouri, latent sectional divergences began to morph into increasingly strident sectional opposition.
Interestingly, Meinig closes his perioidization in 1867. With the Civil War already over and Reconstruction just beginning, he looks beyond the theater of war to the Western frontier and the broader North American region; Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. This is a appropriate for the transcontinental theme of Volume 3.
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