January 11?
The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 3: Transcontinental America, 1850-1915, D.W. Meinig (1998).

I was well into my 20s before I discovered there is such a thing as U.S. history. Of course I had taken a few classes in it in school ... but not till 11th grade, strangely enough. Prior to high school, no class was ever called "history". Instead, there was this strange hodgepodge called "social studies". Is that normal, or was it just a fashion of the liberal '70s, like the "open" school I attended in 5th and 6th grades?

The best thing I learned in any "social studies" class came in the 8th grade. The teacher was a guy named Duane Johnson, who had taken over partway into the year when the previous teacher had to drop out. I don't remember any of the class material, but one day he happened to be talking about college education, and he let slip his opinion that the way to get the most out of college is to skip all the classes, go to the library every day, and just read all the books yourself. (I later discovered that you could do this without actually enrolling....) Mr Johnson was not rehired at our school the next year. It was probably just a coincidence, but I don't think he was what the school system thinks of as a good teacher.

Like most studies, history is something I discovered outside of school. My favorite topics were ones distant from those that got attention in school. Although I have no objection to learning facts and figures and series of events, they are only the raw data of history. The real study is in making sense of them to understand how a nation came to be what it is. For me that was the best part of history. For every nation, there was something that came before it, and that something shaped what it became. The people had ancestors who came from somewhere. The place had earlier inhabitants who had been assimilated or defeated. The land had patterns of transportation and economic development which were inherited or altered. Like children, nations defined themselves both in what they accepted from their parents and what they rejected.

It seems comical now, but I distinctly remember thinking how sad it was that my own nation, the United States of America, was the one nation that had no history. We, after all, were a nation of immigrants who had broken all ties from their past and created a new nation in an empty land that was a blank slate. Or so I had been taught. The realization that that is a lie came to me all of a sudden. I was reading a history of Canada, and in the course of it America was mentioned as if it were just another nation whose history could be studied. I had read plenty of books on U.S. history by then, but none of them had ever discussed America like that. America wasn't just another country. It was America.

As I've mentioned here before, my favorite historian is Fernand Braudel. Like Braudel (and like Napoleon) I tend to look for a nation's history in its geography. D.W. Meinig's Shaping of America had been on my read list for quite a while before I got around to choosing it from the library. I had seen it several times before in footnote citations, and from the nature of the references and the subtitle of the book, I had a pretty good idea that it was the sort of book I'd like. The subtitle does not disappoint; the work is indeed a "geographical perspective" on American history. Recognizing that there is more to history than just geography, it doesn't pretend to tell the entire history itself, but by reviewing that history from a geographical perspective, it illuminates a lot of things that the standard histories miss.

In noting this title from earlier references, I somehow managed to miss the fact that it is a multi-volume series. The King County Library's online data base didn't help much, truncating the title before it gets to any volume number. I noticed that the book showed up three separate times in the catalog, but plenty of other books do that, thanks to multiple editions or just plain clumsy data entry. Even reading the entire description doesn't solve the problem -- all three entries say "v. <1>" under "Description". It wasn't until much later that I discovered the real distinction is to be found in the call numbers.

But no matter, I'm happy to start with volume three. Following a brief overview, there are four sections. The first discusses the history of the idea of a government-funded transcontinental railroad. Like so many things, this was deadlocked in Congress until the Southern states left. (One of the leading proponents of a southern route was Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis.) The second discusses the West generally, with a chapter on each of the distinct settlement areas (almost, but not quite, corresponding to the Western states). The third goes back to the Eastern half of the country and discusses the changes in geographic patterns (mostly in the South) following the Civil War. This was least interesting to me, perhaps because I hadn't read the earlier volumes. The last discusses America's relations with its overseas possessions (including Alaska and Hawaii), a nice tie-in to the books I've been reading on America's empire.

Early in the book, Meinig mentions a publication which he says was particularly influential in forming Americans' perception of the West. In addition to the more technical surveys of projected railroad routes,

The map is reproduced in the book, and indeed the bisection is quite visible. The map shows six degrees of population density, depicted in six shades of gray (or at least it's gray in the reproduction here; perhaps it is colored in the original). More vivid than the varying darknesses in the east is the contrast between the mixed gray on the right half of the map and the almost complete blankness on the left. The dividing line is close to vertical, starting with the western border of Minnesota on the top and going straight down, to include the far eastern fractions of Nebraska, Kansas and Texas on the dark side.

Two pages later, Meinig mentions something which is also apparent in the caption on the map. The population density which the map means to display is specifically "constitutional population". That's natural enough, given that it is based on census data. The original purpose of the census, remember, was to determine representation in the House of Representatives.

Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution originally stated:

The last sentence there is the basis of the census. The first sentence was superseded by the 14th Amendment, which was ratified only two years before the publication of Walker's Statistical Atlas. The 14th Amendment famously erased the formula by which slaves are enumerated at a 60% rate. (Not just black slaves, I notice; I wonder how much enslavement of non-blacks was legal when the Constitution was written.) Less well-known is that under the original census formula, "Indians not taxed" were not enumerated at all. A moment's contemplation illustrates how impractical the census would have been otherwise, at least in the early years.

Meinig explains this, but he doesn't linger to contemplate the implications. Pictures communicate more strongly than words. As the dark areas of the map depict population density, so do the light areas communicate the idea of emptiness. In fact, they are empty only because the map is documenting only a certain type of population, which happens to exclude most native Americans. If it is true, as Meinig says, that this series of maps was influential in shaping Americans' perception of the West, doesn't that go a long way toward explaining the belief that Americans' westward expansion was a matter of settling uninhabited lands?

Even when I was in school, this was a persistent myth. In my mind it was always associated with Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier" theory of America -- the idea that America's unique culture developed as it did largely because, unlike other nations, it was not hemmed in by neighbors. Rather, there was always more empty territory to the west, and any American who chose to could pack up and start anew on the frontier. I always had a low opinion of Turner on account of that theory, but scattered references to him in this book now suggest to me that he gets a bad rap. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a scholar gets tagged with a distorted caricature of an idea when his actual writings are much more reasonable. Meinig mentions parenthetically that he has "already" given a thorough treatment of Turner's "frontier thesis" in volume 2, so I look forward to reading that and giving poor Mr Turner a second chance.

Of the chapters on regions of the American West, most interesting to me by far was the one on Utah. Upon reading it, I realized that I've never really seen a serious treatment of how the Mormons fit into the history of the United States. Accounts devoted specifically to the Mormons tend to carry the religion's bias. I don't mean just pro-Mormon whitewashings designed to make them always look like the good guys; even unflattering accounts tend to presuppose the Mormon perspective that they are a unique people, with a story that is easily separable from the country that produced and later persecuted them.

Perhaps it's an extension of our inclination to view America itself as a special nation, immune to the messy and ambiguous business of spawning sub-nations which are neither quite "us" nor quite "other". From my studies of early Christian Europe, Byzantium, early Islam, etc, I'm quite accustomed to contemplating heresies which are on the one hand revolts against the national orthodoxy but at the same time profoundly nativist sentiments characteristic of the home culture.

This raised the issue of what sort of relation the Mormon nation would have with the United States of America. When Brigham Young led his people to the Great Salt Lake, it was outside of American borders, but seven months later the land became U.S. territory as a result of the Mexican War.

The parallels are not exact, but comparison to Jewish Zionism is unavoidable, not least because the Mormons themselves insisted on using similar language (though it's interesting to note that the Mormons used most of the terms first). The two Zionist movements diverged in their historical paths, but they began with similar goals. Both were religious pariahs who wanted more than anything to simply be left to themselves. Both sought out unwanted and relatively empty lands on the fringes of an underpopulated state. Curiously, both ended up near an inland sea in a desert region where they were obliged to learn irrigation agriculture foreign to their traditions. And although the Mormons didn't have a dead language to revive as the Israelis did with Hebrew, Brigham Young did attempt to express his nation's independence orthographically by tirelessly promoting the Deseret alphabet, a 38-letter system designed for the phonetic representation of English.

What set Mormons apart from other excluded Americans -- indigenous peoples, blacks, even the rebellious South -- is that it was so difficult to cast them as foreigners. Mormonism springs from the very heart of America. Their values -- thrift, family, fear of God, and yes, even theocracy -- are unmistakable legacies of the Puritan nations of pre-Revolutionary New England. As a result of their exodus, we tend to associate Mormonism with the West, but the hill on which Joseph Smith met the angel Moroni was in upstate New York. Both Smith and Brigham Young were born in Vermont.

That Vermont is a most peculiar state has become more evident in today's political context of "red states" and "blue states". We tend to expect rural areas and the South to be "red", while urban areas and the northeast are blue. Vermont breaks the mold. The only non-coastal state of New England, it is one of the most rural states in the nation, with demographics and values more reminiscent of Idaho than of Maryland. Yet at the same time it is as blue a state as can be. The same state which provides single-payer health care and civil unions for same-sex couples is the state with a longer history of protecting the right to bear arms than Texas.

Vermont is the original home of the independent religious rural Yankee, and that is the soil that gave birth to Mormonism. It's the same land that spawned the Green Mountain Boys with their biblical-sounding Christian names (again, almost Jewish-like). Between the famous Ethan and his almost-famous younger brother Ira, the Allens (Mary and Joseph!) raised four more brothers, named Heman, Heber, Levi, and Zimri. "Heber" was also the Christian name of the Mormon church's number-three leader, Heber C Kimball, also born in Vermont. One of the earliest Mormon settlements in Utah is Heber City, named for him.

The divide between English-settled and Spanish-settled lands in North America is not just a coincidence of who landed where. The two peoples had different goals in seeking new land. Spain is for the most part drier and more mountainous than northern Europe. The Spaniards who settled America came from a tradition strong in stock-raising on large ranches and in mining, but not so much in small farming on moist and fertile land. Unlike English settlers who preferred a plot to themselves, Spanish landowners were accustomed to exploiting settled populations; Spanish expansion tended to follow the native population rather than seek out empty land (or make land empty by killing or expelling the previous inhabitants).

The Spanish-American tradition of commerce was simple, little more than sending large loads of goods back to the home country. Although there were classes within Spain with more of a maritime-mercantile tradition, these were not the Spaniards who crossed the Atlantic. Consequently, New Spain had little in the way of ports or regional trade. Spanish America was overwhelmingly a land-based empire, which the other North American colonies were not. Spain had virtually no shipping along the Pacific Coast, with even the fine harbor of the San Francisco Bay left almost entirely neglected.

In 1848, only 27 years after Mexico became independent from Spain, the United States annexed a large piece of northern Mexico. That piece didn't suddenly become geographically American; much of the land was still Mexican, not just in population but in geography. The standard histories I read in school give the impression of two distinct states with a nice, clear border between. Despite the mentions of Texas settlement or Pancho Villa's raid, one doesn't really get a sense of how blurry the distinction really was.

The history of the Mexican part of the United States is best viewed in the context of the history of Mexico proper. The dominant figure of the era was Porfirio Díaz, whose party ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1910 (a period known as "el Porfiriato"). In the 20th century we've learned to be suspicious of taking political party names literally, but in the case of Díaz's slogan of "order and progress", it's a pretty fair indication of what his regime was about. After a long period of civil disorder and the economic decline that accompanies it, Díaz managed to assert control over all branches of government to impose a rule of law and order. This in turn facilitated the necessary investment in infrastructure, education and technology to bring a measure of prosperity back to the country.

Díaz's agenda was partially inherited from Benito Juárez, the central figure of Mexican history's previous era. Juárez was a progressive reformer with whom Díaz was aligned in the early days, when the slogan was "liberty, order and progress". The subtracted word is also significant, for that was the price exacted for the other two. Díaz maintained the democratic system, at least superficially, and he even kept repression light enough that the regime remained relatively popular for much of its duration. Nevertheless, his control of the government was total, and opposition and dissent were forcefully squashed. Many of the dissidents ended up as exiles in the United States.

After a few decades the Porfiriato outlived its usefulness. The economic policy had a side-effect (primary effect for the interested classes, I suppose) of promoting imbalance of wealth, so that a small class of rich capitalists -- including many foreigners, American and European -- came to own most of Mexico. A new generation of Mexicans grew up with no memory of the chaos and backwardness that the Porfiriato had corrected. Díaz was an old man out of touch with the populace. Although he still never became the sort of über-tyrant the world saw so much of later in the 20th century, Díaz did not relinquish power tidily. In 1910 his regime collapsed, and he fled. The Mexican Revolution which followed was a lengthy and complicated affair with several phases and factions, and its repercussions spilled over the border.

Development of Southern California reached its apex in 1887 when the Santa Fe Railroad connected to Los Angeles, sparking a boom of investment in the newly enabled region. From the perspective of Mexico, Baja California is a distant province in the far northwest. It is nearer to Kansas City than to Mexico City; geographically it is a natural extension of the Los Angeles Basin. The "order and progress" government in Mexico encouraged foreign investment, so after the Los Angeles boom collapsed, the same capitalists who financed L.A. moved their investments to nearby regions like the Imperial Valley and the (bilingually oxymoronic) Upper Baja.

In the minds of Californians, geographic links were stronger than political boundaries, and it was widely assumed that Upper Baja would before long become part of the United States, one way or another. After all, California and Texas had been annexed only a generation earlier, and Ambassador Gadsden had later purchased that extra bit of Sonora for the Southern Pacific Railroad. There was no particular reason to believe American expansion had reached its limit.

I don't think there's been any time in California's history when one part or another hasn't had a political movement to split off from the rest of the state. In the late 1880s there was a strong sentiment that Southern California ought to separate from the San Francisco-dominated whole, and that ideal frequently was coupled with a goal of expanding southward. Meinig quotes a resolution by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in 1888 proposing "that the United States should purchase the peninsula of Lower California from Mexico, annex it to Southern California, and create a new state."

The opportunity came in 1911 with the Mexican Revolution. An irregular force of American expansionists in Los Angeles teamed up with some anarchist Mexican exiles and invaded Baja, quickly capturing all the border towns. (In Tijuana, the force in control charged a 50-cent admission fee to American tourists who came to participate in the looting.) The Californians' plan was to have Baja revolt against the central government in Mexico City and then be proclaimed an independent republic, which would soon thereafter choose to join the United States. This was not an original scheme. The same strategy had been tried, with varying success, in northern California, Texas, West Florida, and Hawaii. In Baja, the scheme failed. A Mexican force from Ensenada came north and chased the ragtag rebels across the border. Back in the United States, the ringleaders were arrested but never convicted.

But not all American invasions of Mexico during this period were uninvited. American-owned corporations operated copper mines on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border. In 1906, the workers in one of the Mexican towns, Cananea, went on strike. At the request of the Mexican governor, a militia from Arizona was brought in to put down the strike.

Four years after Californian filibusters' attempt to annex Baja, some Mexicans tried a similar trick in South Texas. Of all the Mexican territory annexed by the United States, this region was most Mexican in character. When Texas was an administrative unit of Mexico, the southern border was not the Rio Grande at all but the Nueces River (as is illustrated on an 1835 map reprinted in Meinig's 2nd volume). This division makes more geographic sense; the area between the rivers was open, ranch-friendly territory of the sort preferred by settlers of the Spanish tradition. Eastern and Southcentral Texas was a piney forest region of the sort preferred by Anglo-Americans, which is what inspired the logic of inviting Americans like Stephen Austin to settle it.

The main part of Texas had already been assimilated to Anglo-American culture by force of population even before it was formally annexed, but the southern strip had not. For the next 70 years it was like occupied territory, with all the chaos and ugliness that goes with such an occupation. (In 1950, my grandfather published a short narrative biography of José Cortina, a sort of Mexican "Robin Hood" who operated in that region during the 1850s.) In 1915, a group of Mexicans associated with revolutionary leader Zapata declared an independent republic in South Texas, with the idea of joining the Mexican union once the Zapatistas prevailed. But Zapata was defeated, and the plan fizzled.

U.S. foreign policy during the Mexican Revolution was as muddled and disunited as the revolution itself. Direct military invention was advocated by many Americans, including the Democratic governor of Texas and Republican leaders in the Senate. Intervention was also advocated by the U.S. ambassador in Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, who meddled and schemed in Mexican politics in defiance of President Taft's official policy of neutral non-intervention. Ambassador Wilson was later recalled by Taft's successor, President Woodrow Wilson, after it was revealed that he was complicit in the coup that brought Gen Huerta to power. Pres Wilson opposed Huerta, on the grounds that he was not democratically elected, but Huerta was supported by American business interests and by British foreign policy.

Rumors abounded about Japan or Germany gaining a military foothold in Mexico, further fueling interventionist sentiment. Some in America called for a wholesale annexation of Northern Mexico, on the scale of the annexation in 1848 -- an idea which Sen Borah hailed as "the beginning of the march of the United States to the Panama Canal". (Around the same time, Pres Wilson characterized the Canal itself as "avenging Columbus" -- slicing the continent in two in retaliation for its barring Columbus's ships from the Indies, I suppose.) Huerta responded by threatening to declare war on the United States, a statement largely calculated to help him unite opposing Mexican factions against a common foreign enemy.

As he did in Europe, Wilson gave in to the bellicosity he professed to deplore. Minor forces were sent over the border, while the U.S. Navy seized and occupied Mexico's primary port city, Veracruz. Ostensibly, the force was in opposition to Pres Huerta, to prevent him from receiving foreign arms, but Huerta welcomed the intervention for political reasons, and all but one of his opponents denounced it. (Pres Wilson had a knack for deploying forces without an obvious mission; a few years later he did the same thing in Siberia.) The one exception was Pancho Villa, who at that time was America's candidate to take over. Later, America abandoned him in favor of another leader, whereupon Villa launched the raids into American territory that made him famous.

I have a long vocabulary list for this book. None of the words on it are completely unfamiliar, but some are used in interesting and unexpected ways.

Eccentric is twice used in its original sense. Where Meinig writes of "Cheyenne's eccentric position", he's not suggesting quirky habits of the Wyoming state government, only that the state capital is located far from the center of the state. Later he turns the concept around, noting that the two Dakotas chose capital cities which were geographically centered but "eccentric to the most populous districts".

He takes the opposite tack with surficial, meaning "related to the surface". Originally, superficial means the same thing, but the older sense is being crowded out by more recent connotations.

Equipoise has been discussed in Benzene twice before (here and here), but it still tickles me to see it. In this case, Meinig is quoting a Congressman who predicts that San Francisco will be the "equipoise" to New York.

I think I've tried areal in Scrabble or Boggle, but I don't recall seeing it used in a sentence before now. Lapsing into geographers' jargon, Meinig refers to "areal complexes of a common character".

Also from word games, I know that piny can be spelled with or without the e. Meinig chooses the more attractive spelling, discussing piney forests on several occasions. At one point, he even mentions "the depleted Great Lakes pinery", but he obviously doesn't mean the definition offered by the Scrabble dictionary ("a place where pineapples are grown").

Isohyet is another word I first encountered in a Scrabble context, when it turned up on a list of anagrammed bingos. You've probably seen a topographical map representing altitudes. If you follow one of those curvy lines, you are following a line of points which are all at some identical altitude. The generic name for such a line is isogram, from Greek iso-, meaning "the same". A similar mapping scheme can be used for qualities other than altitude, and the various types of isograms produced on many such maps have their own iso- names, depending on the quality being measured. Points of equal depth (on the water part of that topographic map) define an isobath; points of equal temperature (borders between colored regions on a weatherman's map) define an isotherm, and so forth. For a map that measures average rainfall, the name of the isogram is isohyet, (pronounced in four syllables, like "iso-high-et"). The concept of the line of equal values exists even in the absence of the map. Discussing the complex nature of the geographic border between the "East" and the "West", Meinig remarks that it doesn't correspond exactly to any simple measurement, like a meridian or an isohyet.

Another great geographer word is lacustrine, pertaining to lakes, as in "the lacustrine levels of North Dakota" (referring to the soil, I assume). It sounds suspiciously like a two-dollar word, but I'm not sure what the 25-cent synonym would be. This is one of those words I've never heard spoken aloud, and my dictionary tells me the emphasis is on the middle syllable, not the two outer ones as I would have guessed.

Paleotechnic is a two-dollar word Meinig uses on several occasions to refer to the early Industrial Age. From Google searches I gather there isn't strong agreement on what years are properly classified as such -- but then again, you could say the same for a well-established word like medieval

Meinig tells me that José Martí's Cuban Revolutionary party was formed "at conclaves in New York and Key West". As it turns out, a conclave is nothing like an enclave (a territory which is completely surrounded geographically by another); it is simply a secret meeting. The etymological common thread is that either one is locked up, from clave = key.

I've seen plenty of prerequisites, but I don't recall ever seeing a plain requisite (not as a noun, anyway) before this bit of bloviation by Secretary of State Thomas F Bayard:

The "pacific train" is nice, too. He's speaking of Mexico, by the way.

In discussing Northerners who came South during the Reconstruction hoping to buy property but settling for a lease, Meinig calls the newcomer the leasee. That's logical enough, but in all the contracts I've seen, the word is lessee. In fact, even the Scrabble dictionary will reject leasee. Perhaps it's a typo.

Typos are rare in this book, though I did notice a few. In a discussion of foreign influence in China, Qingdao comes out correct in the main text but is misspelled "Quingdao" on the map. Elsewhere, certain towns are said to have a population of about "100,0000". On two occasions, the Allegheny Mountains are called "Alleghanies", but both are in quoted passages. I wonder if that's an older spelling.

The name "Golden Gate" is indeed a translation from a foreign language, but not from Spanish. (The Spanish settlers weren't maritime-minded, remember.) Rather, it comes from classical Greek. John C Fremont rhapsodically deemed the strait Chrysopylae, in conscious imitation of Byzantium's Chrysoceras, aka "Golden Horn".

The Anglo settlers who founded the city of Phoenix, Arizona, named their settlement in conscious recognition that they were rebuilding on a site where an earlier Native American city had been destroyed (as evidenced by the still discernible canals and other altered geographic features).

A minor episode in the story of the trans-Canada railroad was the desire by some Westerners to avoid the vast wasteland of northern Ontario and instead build their railroad to Churchill Harbor on Hudson Bay, thus bypassing Eastern Canada altogether and shipping Western Canada's wheat to Europe by the old Hudson's Bay Company's route. Seeing that this was proposed in 1890, it occurred to me that Churchill must not have been named for Sir Winston, as I had always assumed. Checking my encyclopedia, I see it was named for an early governor of Hudson's Bay Company. Churchill eventually got its rail link in 1930 (but no road for automobiles), and it is now a tourist town marketed as "the polar bear capital of the world".

Manitoba's other old settlement on Hudson Bay was once called Fort Nelson. It's currently known as "York Factory" (and is little more than a historical monument), but the river which empties there is still the Nelson River. I haven't been able to determine whether it was named for Admiral Horatio Nelson. The fort certain predates the admiral, but it may have started with a different name. I know that the French captured it and renamed it, so perhaps the British renamed it after a recent hero upon its recapture.

A few stray bits that didn't find a logical place in my narrative flow:

Mormon leader Joseph Smith declared himself a candidate for President of the United States for the 1844 election, but was murdered later that year.

An interesting consequence of the transfer of properties in the American South after the Civil War is that the freed slaves, although they were eager to continue farming, showed very little interest in growing cotton. Given the relative lack of processing factories in the South, cotton was purely a cash crop, to be exported to the North or overseas. Whether one calls it commercial ignorance or distrust of the capitalist system, the black farmers preferred to grow crops which could either feed their families directly or be sold locally. Because of this, added to the many large-scale effects of the American Civil War was a noticeable shift in the South from an export economy toward a local economy, forcing an equivalent adjustment in the North. A market force to counteract this was part of what drew Northern speculators south, to exploit the neglected economic opportunity and reassert the growth of cotton.

The book's jacket cover shows an 1893 map of Union Pacific railway routes. All of the 48 contiguous states are visible, though a couple of them are still territories (and the Dakotas are still united as one). The map is imperfect, so many of the borders are slightly distorted, but only barely. Just one spot jumps out as wrong-looking: Something is definitely fishy in the Texas-Oklahoma border, at the southwest corner of (non-Panhandle) Oklahoma.

After this had been nagging at me for weeks, I finally got out my atlas and compared the tiny map on the jacket to a larger, modern map of the same area. This led to a discovery of the curious story of Greer County. Way back in 1819, when Texas still belonged to Spain, a treaty settling the border between Texas and the United States specified that it should run along the Red River until the 100th meridian and then turn north. Because of an inaccurate survey, no one noticed that there is a fork in the Red River about 30 miles east of the 100th meridian. When Texas settlers expanded into this area, they naturally chose the northernmost fork of the river as the boundary, establishing Greer County in the region between the northern fork, the main fork, and the 100th meridian.

The area to the north of the river was then Indian Territory, administered from Washington DC. There followed a boundary dispute between Texas and the federal government, the latter making the case for the more southerly fork. The dispute lingered in the courts for decades until in 1896 the Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of the federal government. Greer County was dissolved, and the land later became part of Oklahoma. The map on the cover of Meinig's book shows Greer County as part of Texas, which is why it looked so odd to me.

I haven't done much reading the past few weeks. With the King County Library's new catalog system, I can't label my holds inactive, so when I get in line to reserve a popular new title, I can only guess when it'll come to me. If I'm not ready, that's tough luck. Having guessed wrong, I've now got more books out than I'll have time to read.

Holding my attention the most is volume 2 of Shaping of America, which I checked out shortly after finishing volume 3, more than a month ago now. I intended to get volume 1, but I hadn't figured out the catalog by then. I've read quite a bit of this already, and much of the Texas discussion above is more from volume 2 than volume 3. Another is Niall Ferguson's Colossus, which I've also had out for quite a while. I've read some of that, too, but mostly in small bits too intermittent for it to really sink in. The other two are new releases which arrived before I was ready, The Private Life of Abraham Lincoln and Jared Diamond's Collapse.

The Lincoln book is the one that makes the case that Lincoln was gay, or at least whatever the 19th century equivalent of gay is. As you might expect, there is plenty of controversy surrounding the idea. I expect to read it skeptically but with an open mind. As I've discussed here before, I'm satisfied that James Buchanan was gay (or its 19th century equivalent), but the situation is a bit different with Lincoln. Buchanan had an intimate long-term relationship with a man and no documented relationship of any sort with a woman. Lincoln, on the other hand, was married and had children. Of course that doesn't prove he wasn't gay, but I think it sets the bar quite a bit higher for proving he was.

Collapse is the new book by the same guy who wrote the widely (and justifiably) praised Guns, Germs and Steel. I put a hold on it based on nothing more than the author's name.

I won't be able to renew any of these four, since two I've renewed once already and the other two have more holds in line behind me. It's unlikely that I'll finish more than two of them before they have to go back, but it remains to be seen which ones.

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