The Shaping Of America: A Geographical Perspective On 500 Years Of History

This landmark book, the concluding volume of D. W. Meinig’s magisterial series The Shaping of America, presents the story of America’s interwoven history and geography from 1915 to 2000. The author describes decades of enormous national growth and change in his characteristic engaging style, and through more than seventy original maps he ingeniously depicts diverse twentieth-century trends and developments.
The book addresses the expanding nation’s progress in terms of the automotive revolution; neotechnic evolution; access to air travel; growth of instantaneous forms of communication, including telephones, television, and the Internet; and such political events as World War II. Meinig relates these developments to social and geographic trends, among them patterns of urban migration, regionalism, metropolitanization, the beginnings of the urban megalopolis, shifts in ethnic and religious populations, and, on a more global scale, transformations in America’s connections with Europe, Asia, and Latin America. A masterful synthesis of twentieth-century history and geography, this book offers unprecedented insights into the shaping and reshaping of the United States over the past century.

D. W. Meinig is Maxwell Research Professor of Geography at Syracuse University.