A. Geography as the Setting of American History
As the poet Robert Frost put it, "This land was ours before we were the land's." American history, among other things, is the evolving story of how the American people interacted with the North American continent -- how American Indians sought to live in harmony with it, how European settlers and their American descendants sought to populate and tame it -- and then to conserve it, and how the geographical facts of America shaped the Americans' understandings of themselves and their place in the world.
*First, the existence of a vast "new" continent suggested the inexhaustible richness of America -- in arable land, potable water, navigable rivers and streams, and organic (timber, animal furs) and mineral (gold, silver, iron, petroleum) wealth. The assumption that the riches of America were without practical limit drove the westward settlement of the continent (including colonization, settlement, development, wars of territorial acquisition) and shaped the many ways in which Americans used or wasted those resources. As noted below, not until Americans began to realize that the vast natural resources of America were limited did Americans also began to take seriously the obligation to care for the environment.
*Second, until the development of airplanes, rockets, and missiles, Americans believed that two vast oceans isolated the American continents from the great wars of Europe and Asia. This sense of geographic insulation fostered Americans' sense of their own nation as a haven of liberty -- a view that, for most of our history, encouraged Americans to welcome immigration (though, as always, with varying views of the immigrants based on their race and ethnic origins). Geographic insulation also promoted a sense of geographic invulnerability, and thus furthered an American attitude towards world affairs that oscillated between cool indifference and arrogant preaching. Americans' arrogance especially manifested itself in the ways that the American nation dealt with its neighbors in North, Central, and South America, in particular after President James Monroe promulgated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which warned European powers not to interfere in American concerns while providing a warrant (intended or not) for later American interference in the affairs of America's neighbors.
*Third, the sheer size of America dictated that there was, and could be, no comprehensive, all-embracing plan of settlement of the continent. The thirteen colonies were founded at different times, for different reasons, by different people, and the same pattern of diversity reasserts itself with respect to the founding, settling, and political development of the other thirty-seven states. Geography thus dictated that, throughout American history, American political development had to take account of a wide range of differing state and sectional interests, based on differing economies, ethnic origins, and cultural and religious values. Geography was thus a prime force behind the development of one of the key features of American politics -- federalism, the division of sovereignty (ultimate political power) among the federal government, the state governments, and the people.
*Fourth, Americans' belief in the seeming inexhaustibility of the nation's resources tended for many decades to prevent most Americans from paying attention to the effects they were having on the environment that they were taught to master. Only in the 1900s did Americans began to ask tough questions about the effects of industrialization, urbanization and suburbanization, and the development of the automobile and the airplane on the natural world. Geography, broadly conceived as a theme of American history, thus embraces the rise of a conservation movement, and then an environmental movement, pitting a new model of human beings as stewards of the natural world against the traditional model of human beings as masters of the natural world. In addition, until the late 1960s, the dominant view that the American continent existed to be developed and exploited by human beings warped white Americans' views of American Indians, relegating the continent's original inhabitants to the unenviable role of primitive savages. The growth of an environmental consciousness among more and more Americans gave new legitimacy to American Indians' criticisms of and opposition to development and exploitation of the land and its resources.