The most cited articles published since 2009, extracted from Scopus
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 279-296
Diana M. Liverman
Climate change has emerged as one of the key issues of the early years of the twenty-first century, bringing together concerns about human relations to nature, the responsibility of rich nations to poorer, the links from local activities to global conditions, and the obligations of present to future generations. This paper focuses on three key 'narratives' that are enshrined in international climate policy - asserting that 'dangerous climate change' is to be avoided; that the responsibility for climate change is common but differentiated; and that the market (in the form of carbon trading) is the best way to reduce the danger. The goal of the paper is to analyse the origins of these narratives, the power relations they reflect and promote, and some of the concepts and images used to support them, including those of climate determinism, climate stabilisation, 'burning embers', 'tipping points', Global Warming Potentials, targets and timetables, and carbon credits. I argue that by choosing the market solution of trading carbon we have created a new and surreal commodity, unfairly allocated pollution rights to nation states based on 1990 emission levels, and established a new set north-south relations and carbon transactions in the name of sustainable development. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 256-278
Michael T. Bravo
This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically 'at risk'. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 237-255
This paper seeks to uncover narratives of climate change shaped within two distinct but related research communities in glaciology and meteorology, both institutionally located at the Stockholm Högskola, later Stockholm University, and with widespread collaborative networks in the Nordic countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. During the 1930s, Stockholm glaciology under Hans W:son Ahlmann provided an early theory of 'polar warming', based on solid field data from the North Atlantic and Arctic realm, but remained resistant to ideas of human climate forcing and thus lost a lot of its emerging policy influence. Stockholm meteorology under Carl-Gustaf Rossby followed a different trajectory. Based on geophysical theory and computer science experimentation funded by military sources on both sides of the Atlantic, the Rossby school established an early institutional acceptance of greenhouse explanations of climate change with strong links to policy. This account of divergent research agendas, differential extra-scientific conditions, and contradictory representations of the direction and causes of climate change should caution against viewing the history of climate science and policy as a cumulative affair based on ever more precise and better knowledge. The narratives presented here highlight, on the contrary, the importance of broad science politics as well as local and disciplinary methods, traditions, and institutional trajectories in shaping attitudes among scientists to climate change. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 90-101
Derek H. Alderman
There are growing calls from some African Americans, particularly in the U.S. South, to create sites of counter-memory that recognize the often forgotten historical struggles and contributions of the enslaved. Commemoration of slavery is not only a contentious issue for whites but also African Americans, who differ with each other over how best (or even whether) to narrate these difficult memories. Few geographers have explored the politics of remembering slavery among African Americans and how these struggles shape the commemorative landscape. I explore the efforts of Abigail Jordan to establish a monument to the enslaved in Savannah, Georgia (USA) and the ensuing public debate that took place over the appropriateness of inscribing the monument with a description of the inhumanity found on slave ships during the Middle Passage. Led by two outspoken black officials, Savannah's city council refused to give final approval for the monument until the inscription was revised to end on a more optimistic note. An analysis of public comments made about the Savannah monument reveals that the inscription debate served as an arena for multiple ideas about how best to represent African Americans as victims of slavery, the legacy of racism and slavery in contemporary America, as well as conflicting personal and political visions within the black community. In interpreting the Savannah case, I suggest that the politics of remembering slavery be examined in terms of surrogation, the search for a suitable commemorative stand in for the enslaved, and textual politics, the recognition that the words used to represent slavery are at the heart of the struggle to remember (or forget) the trauma of enslavement. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 215-222
Stephen J. Daniels | Georgina H. Endfield
This paper introduces a special feature on narratives of climate change, containing papers by Richard Hamblyn, Sverker Sörlin, Michael Bravo and Diana Liverman. The feature reflects the rising cultural profile of climate change in the public sphere, as represented, for example, by Al Gore's documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, and art exhibitions devoted to the subject. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 4, October 2009, Pages 668-689
Jamie Lorimer | Sarah J. Whatmore
This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from 'more-than-human' and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these 'seeing men' of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 223-236
This paper is concerned with the historical dimension of the current debates on climate change, and argues that the history of the understanding of climate change has itself become part of the rhetorical account. Key historic moments of disclosure and revelation have become central to the ways in which climate change is presented as a persuasive narrative today. This paper takes a discursive approach to exploring the background of these signal moments in climate change history, and aims to show how they have helped to shape the terms of the current debate. © 2008.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 297-310
Chunchang Huang | Hongxia Su
In Chinese history, the development of the Zhou tribes and the dynasties that succeeded them between 3550 and 2200 BP in the middle reaches of the Yellow River is known as the period of 'Five Relocations'. Most of these relocations appear to have been forced by the pressure of nomadic invasions and occupations from the northern steppe. Historians simply attributed these relocations to political and military causes. However, palaeoclimatic studies show that the Zhou tribes and their successor dynasties developed at the demise of the Holocene Climatic Optimum when regional climate became highly variable and unstable. An integrated analysis of environmental change over the Loess Plateau and the Mongolian steppe facilitates a credible understanding of the linkage between climatic events and these relocations. It indicates that the relocations caused an expansion or contraction of the settled regions over the drought-prone semi-arid lands. During climatic amelioration, dry farming societies pushed upward to the Loess Plateau where increased precipitation and soil moisture allowed cereals to be cultivated. When hit by droughts and the associated disasters, both the dry farming societies and the nomadic tribes had to move southward to find an environment suitable for their food production. Migration and relocation were, therefore, basic strategies to secure the resources necessary to sustain an agricultural economy. The settled frontier was pulled back as dry farming societies from the upland plateau retreated to the lowland riverbanks of the Guanzhong Basin. Even though there were political and military intentions, climatic events played an essential role in the relocations of the Zhou tribes and the successive dynasties. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 3-25
This article offers a critical reassessment of Immanuel Kant's lectures on Physische Geographie and his contribution to geographical thought more generally. There are a number of reasons why this reassessment is needed: the lectures are finally about to be published in English translation; careful philological work in German has exposed how corrupted the standard text of the lectures is; and philosophers are finally beginning to critically integrate an understanding of the Geography into their overall assessment of Kant's work. English speaking geographers will therefore soon have access to the lectures in a way that they have not done before, but they need to be aware both of the problems of the edition being translated and the work philosophers have undertaken on their situation in Kant's work and their impact. More broadly, the reassessment requires us to reconsider the position Kant occupies in the discipline of geography as a whole. The article examines the history of the lectures and their publication in some detail; discusses Kant's purpose in giving them; and looks at the way in which he structured geographical knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. In terms of the broader focus particular attention is given to the topics of race and space. While these lectures are undoubtedly of largely historical interest, it is for precisely that reason that an examination of them and Kant's thought more generally is of relevance today to the history of the discipline of geography. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 43-56
Robert Andrew McLeman | Sam Herold | Zoran Reljic | Michael Sawada | Daniel W. McKenney
This article describes the development of a GIS-based model of historical drought and population change in western Canada, designed to support qualitative field research into drought adaptation and migration. The model combines digitized census data and recently available modeled historical climate data at a 10 km2 grid cell scale and can be used to generate maps of 'hotspots' where historical declines in rural populations may be associated with extended periods of heat and lack of precipitation. The results suggest a promising avenue for expanding and refining GIS-based modeling of historical human-climate interactions to support qualitative research and to potentially serve as a stepping stone toward forecasting future risk areas of drought-related migration in continental dryland areas. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 121-131
Isobel Jane Tomlinson | Clive A. Potter
The Dutch Elm Disease outbreak of the late 1960s and early 1970s was arguably one of the most dramatic environmental events to affect the British countryside in the last fifty years. The demise of over 28 million elms destroyed the much celebrated, and publicly valued, 'elmscapes' of lowland England and brought about extensive habitat loss. During the middle and later phases of the epidemic, the policy response from the UK Forestry Commission, Ministry of Agriculture and local government came to be seen as 'too little, too late'. Yet forty years after the outbreak it is still unclear whether the epidemic could have been better managed and how far any lessons can be drawn for the way present day disease risks to trees should be tackled. Drawing on the extensively documented (but hitherto unexplored) public record of the outbreak held at Forest Research and the National Archives, together with materials from retrospective interviews conducted by the authors with scientists and policymakers closely involved in the epidemic at the time, this paper presents a fresh analysis of Dutch Elm Disease in the UK. The paper seeks to explain the catastrophic outcome of the outbreak, not only in terms of the underlying (and highly malign) pathology of the disease itself, but also because of an initially inaccurate scientific assessment of the nature of the threat constructed within a small but influential community of forest pathologists and policy officials. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 35, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 44-65
By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778-1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write 'the historical geography of geography'. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many 'arm-chair' geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was 'taken captive by the mystery of the Great River' carries a dark double-meaning, because 'captive' knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a 'historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery' and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which 'captivates' and those held 'captive'. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 3, July 2009, Pages 568-591
Vanessa Taylor | Heather Chappells | Wíll Medd | Frank Trentmann
Water stress is becoming a permanent feature of life in Britain and other developed societies, and attempts to change 'consumer behaviour' are at the forefront of strategies for sustainability. This paper combines historical, geographical and sociological perspectives on the evolution of drought and water demand in modern England and Wales. Droughts have natural properties but their course, size and distribution is also the result of an interplay between governance, social norms and everyday practices. Focusing on seven significant droughts between 1893 and 2006, this article traces changing understandings of 'normal' water consumption and 'rational' demand and relates them to the evolving socio-technical management of water and identities of 'the consumer'. We challenge the idea of a watershed between private supply (associated with passive 'customers') and public ownership (associated with active 'citizens'). While private systems facilitated self-organised civic action more easily than public supply, the ideal of a citizen-contract blinded systems of public provision to the problem of expanding water use. An interdisciplinary analysis of droughts in the past offers lessons for the debate about sustainable consumption today. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 36, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 453-465
Michael Gentile | Örjan Sjöberg;
Throughout much of the Soviet period, access to housing was a major consideration, both for individual citizens and employers intent on increasing their number of employees. Because of the heavy emphasis on industry, and despite the progress made within the area since the late 1950s, Soviet urban residential provision never managed to fully recover from the acute housing shortage that characterized the Stalin years. In this paper, we address the quantitative side of housing construction during the socialist era. Using the mid-sized diversified industrial town of Daugavpils (Latvia) as a case study, we set out to investigate the extent to which employers were involved in decisions concerning housing provision. To do this, we consult a large volume of archival records, our focus being on documents tracing entries indicating that new living quarters were ready and could be allocated to employees of sponsoring organizations and enterprises. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 350-375
Peter Merriman | Rhys A. Jones
In this paper we provide a critical evaluation of the campaign for bilingual road traffic signs in late 1960s and 1970s Wales, examining how Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) came to see English language road signs as mundane, ubiquitous and oppressive symbols of anglicisation and of British/English government authority in Wales. We suggest a rethinking of Michael Billig's concept of 'banal nationalism', arguing that while English language road signs may appear as banal symbols and technologies of government authority and control, their banality is only ever experienced from particular perspectives by partial constituencies. For Welsh language campaigners, English language road signs were experienced and criticised as eruptive and disruptive symbols of oppression, rule and colonisation, and in the paper we trace the genesis of the bilingual road signs campaign, British government reactions to proposals for bilingual signs, and the shift in policy which followed the very public support of hundreds of respectable Welsh professionals for the campaign from December 1970. We conclude the paper by examining the work of the Welsh Office's Committee of Inquiry into Bilingual Traffic Signs (the Bowen Committee), and the subsequent disagreements between language campaigners, government scientists and politicians on the issue of language order. Throughout the paper we suggest that it was the ubiquity, functionality and materiality of road signs which made this one of the most effective campaigns carried out by the Welsh Language Society. © 2008.
Volume 37, Issue 4, October 2011, Pages 470-482
Kyle T. Evered | Emine Ønhan Evered
In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population - in terms both numerical and medical - provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic's anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 35, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 330-349
Some significant problems remain in understanding the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the Caribbean and North America, especially regarding the role of blacks in that process. Research to date has identified the Greater Antilles, especially Spanish Cuba and British Jamaica, as the sole Caribbean sources of settlers who established the herding systems of, respectively, Mexico and South Carolina. Yet an open-range cattle herding system also occurred in the British Lesser Antilles, which provided many of the settlers for the South Carolina colony. Archival and field research in Antigua and Barbuda provide the basis for comprehensive reconstruction of that system's material culture and herding ecology, demonstration of the role of blacks in its operation, and comparison with other relevant systems to consider whether the British Lesser Antilles might also have been involved in the process through which open-range cattle herders established themselves in South Carolina during the late seventeenth century. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 37, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 40-54
Despite its centrality to the production of knowledge in the early modern period, the ship remains a rather marginal site in the work of historians of science. Accounts of 'floating universities' and 'laboratories at sea' abound, but little is said of the countless other ships, and their crews, involved in the production of knowledge through maritime exploration and travel. The central concern of the paper is the life and work of William Dampier (1651-1715), a seventeenth-century mariner who sailed as a pirate and authored genre-defining and well received scientific travel narratives. The thesis presented here is that the 'way of life' encouraged among the crews of the pirate ships aboard which Dampier travelled rendered him well-placed to gather the 'useful' knowledge and experiences which made his scientific name. Understanding this juxtaposition requires a focus which moves beyond the materiality of the ship, and which ultimately brings into view some of the social and epistemic geographies which took shape in and beyond the ship. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2010, Pages 143-156
The first years of World War II were marked by a series of battles in and over the fields of California. Workers struggled with growers, growers struggled with the state, and federal and California bureaucrats struggled to gain control over the anarchic labor conditions that marked California agriculture. The introduction of a guest worker program - the bracero program - that brought farmworkers from Mexico to the harvests of California and other states, brought these battles to a head as growers ought to secure their traditional access to 'cheap labor' and their presumed right to control the farm labor process in the state. This paper examines these battles to show how growers fought - and managed - to preserve a landscape of great power and profit. The paper argues that the agricultural landscape extant at the beginning of the war shaped the nature of these multifaceted struggles, even as it was an object of those struggles. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 4, October 2010, Pages 377-387
At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain's settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 38, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 69-80
During the early Cold War, no part of the Arctic was as important to the United States' strategic interests as Greenland: situated on the shortest straight-line route between the industrial centers of the two superpowers, Greenland was integral to North American continental security. The US desire to control Greenland, however, was complicated by the island's isolated geography, harsh climate and barren landscape. Between 1948 and 1966, US forces in Greenland were entrenched in the 'other cold war': the struggle with the ice sheet environment which threatened to impede American capabilities in the region. This paper explores the 'other cold war' through two case studies: US scientific efforts to understand and cope with polar whiteouts and the plastic deformation of ice. These case studies illuminate a struggle between two philosophical approaches to nature: a brash, aggressive approach which aimed to conquer the Greenland environment, and a more nuanced approach which aimed to collaborate with that environment. I show that the second approach won out as Greenland's exceptional geography and environment forced the US military to reassess its relationship with nature: rather than striving for control over the island space, US military personnel ultimately chose strategic cooperation with that space. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 38, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 181-191
Mark A. Carey | Adam French | Elliott O'Brien
Climate change adaptation measures can generate long-term unintended consequences, as this paper demonstrates through an empirical case study of water conflicts at Lake Parón in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range. This decade-long struggle culminated in 2008 when a coalition of local groups (stakeholders) from the Cruz de Mayo and Caraz communities in the Callejón de Huaylas seized control of the Lake Parón reservoir from a private multinational corporation, Duke Energy. This clash over Parón's water in the Llullán and Santa River watersheds emerged much earlier than climatic-hydrologic models had predicted, and it occurred, this paper argues, largely because of previously successful climate adaptation measures. The drainage tunnel and floodgates originally installed at Parón in the 1980s to prevent a climate-related outburst flood led to unintended or perverse outcomes because these technological artifacts subsequently allowed a diversity of stakeholders-including rural subsistence farmers, urban residents, national park officials, tourism promoters, the state energy company Electroperú, and Duke Energy-to manage water differently depending on their priorities and the existing governance structures. Neoliberal reforms that altered state-society-environment relations in Peru played a key role in these changing stakeholder power dynamics that were reflected in the management of water infrastructure at Parón. Examining this water conflict that emerged from the unintended effects of climate adaptation demonstrates not only how technology and society are mutually constitutive, but also why the politics of technologies must be considered more carefully in the analysis of social-ecological systems, hydro-social cycles, and climate change adaptation. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.
Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 1-18
Noam Levin | Ruth Kark | Emir Galilee
Historical maps of the Negev Desert which comprises half of the total land area of Palestine can be viewed from several intersecting perspectives relating to aspects such as their contribution to tracing patterns of settlement and agricultural history, imperialism and mapping, and legal geography of land ownership and indigenous people. Here we focus mainly on the first theme, incorporate new methods and demonstrate their application to studies in historical geography. Since the end of the 18th century the Negev has attracted considerable attention due to its strategic location straddling three continents, its history, and its archeology. After the European powers recognized the geopolitical importance of this area in the mid 19th century, numerous surveys and mapping efforts were conducted. In this study we reviewed 375 historical maps covering parts or all of the Negev between 1799 and 1948. These historical maps are crucial to the understanding of colonial developments, as well as landscape and settlement processes and the sedentarization of the Bedouin population. We scanned and rectified these maps using geographic information systems (GIS) to enable quantitative analysis of their accuracy, and to reveal new insights into settlement and sedentarization processes. Whereas the median error of maps that were based on explorers notes during most of the 19th century were at the order of several kilometers, the various Palestine Exploration Fund surveys (1872-1890) reduced these errors to the order of several hundred meters, and later maps produced by the British during World War I and by British Mandatory Survey of Palestine obtained errors well below 100 m. Careful analysis of these maps allows us to delineate the boundary between cultivated land and the desert, to follow the establishment of new settlements, and to quantify the sedentarization process of the nomadic Bedouin population. We conclude that analyzing historical maps with GIS provides a tool to determine their accuracy and hence potential usefulness for the study of topics such as settlement processes and legal disputes over land ownership. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 3, July 2009, Pages 545-567
Andrew D. Cliff | Peter Haggett | Matthew R. Smallman-Raynor
Iceland's centuries-long history of epidemics with its unusually complete disease records has attracted study from several disciplines. But detailed spatial data of particular interest to historical geographers date only from 1895 and were consistently maintained for about a century thereafter. Within this period, this paper concentrates on morbidity records of reported cases of infectious diseases for an 87-year window which was open between 1902 and 1988. In this time slice, spatially detailed data for seven demographically important infectious diseases allow the geography of 131 discrete epidemic waves with a recorded total of 529,000 cases to be tracked. Changes in the behaviour of the seven diseases over the period are analyzed and related to both epidemiological theory and to the changing historical geography of the island. The paper complements earlier Icelandic work by the authors on the historical geography of single diseases (measles, influenza and poliomyelitis) by extending the range of diseases, and by considering their common spatial behaviour and their interrelationships. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Volume 35, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 87-103
In the aftermath of the war of expansion against Mexico, the United States undertook a lengthy adjudication process of Spanish and Mexican property claims throughout the newly acquired territory. In New Mexico, nearly all Spanish and Mexican community land grants were either rejected by U.S. courts or were acquired by commercial interests during a period of intense land speculation. In addition to legal explanations of dispossession, most historical land grant research has emphasized the role of commercial speculators in the dispossession of land grants. The Santa Fe Ring, a loose affiliation of lawyers, politicians, federal and territorial officials and commercial investors, became a potent political and economic force in New Mexico during the 19th century. This article explores the adjudication and speculation histories of two Mexican property claims: the Petaca and Town of Vallecito de Lovato. The dearth of historical knowledge of the practices and tactics of land dispossession in specific New Mexico land grants continues to obscure the full story of U.S. territorial expansion and the history of the transformation in property relations. This article sheds new light on the extent and intensity of commercial speculation and the contribution of those efforts to undermine legitimate claims. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.