The Books of My Life: North America

 

The edited collection North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, second edition, 2001) edited by Thomas McIlwraith and Edward Muller, is an exemplary geographical history of Canada and the United States. The book and its essays, written mostly by historical geographers with a historian and a sociologist thrown in, is a superb introduction to the economic, geographic, demographic, and, if to a much lesser extent, cultural and political histories of Canada and the United States from the colonial era to the early twenty-first century.

McIlwraith's and Muller's North America should be standard and fundamental reading in advanced introductory history, historical geography, historical sociology, and historical ethnography courses. Essays explore European imperialism and colonisation, adaptations to the environment and the remaking of the environment, the development of Canadian and American cities, the development of the Canadian and American wheat belts, corn belts, and cotton belts and the relation of these to labour needs and technological changes, and the development of industrial Canada and the United States, all essential information for the budding historian, historical geographer, historical sociologist, and ethnohistorian.

My only slight complaints about the book, beyond its limited attention to culture and politics, revolve around the fact that the historical geography of Canada is slighted in comparison to the historical geography of the United States as is explicit comparative analysis of both nation-states. I really would like to have seen more on the historical geography of the true North and the comparative history of these two British settler societies which share much not to mention more comparison with two other British settler societies, Australia and New Zealand, which also, for example, had frontiers, indigeneous peoples, gold rushes, industrialisation, modernity, and postmodernity. The one explicitly comparative essay in the book, Richard Harris's "Canadian Cities in a North American Context", is a superb exploration of the approaches to Canadian cities relative to US cities--the same, different, regionally similar, convergent. Such comparative analysis is essential if we are to understand the similarities and differences between modern and postmodern British settler societies. Highly recommended.