Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a universal state will on some future morrow prove the panacea for the Time of Troubles
now afflicting northern Mexico and the American Southwest in the border region.
It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of such a monumental shift in the concep-
tion of national myth and sovereignty, even as it occurs as we speak in what, by the stand-
ards of the media, is geological time. When I hitchhiked across the United States in 1970, I
palpably experienced how no other continent has been as well suited to nation building as
the temperate zone of North America. The Appalachians had provided a western boundary
for a nascent community of states through the end of the eighteenth century, but river val-
leys cutting through these mountains, such as the Mohawk and the Ohio, allowed for pen-
etration of the West by settlers. Beyond the Appalachians the settlers found a flat panel of
rich farmland without geographical impediments where, in the nineteenth century, wealth
could be created and human differences ground down to form a distinctive American cul-
ture. The Greater Mississippi basin together with the Intercoastal Waterway has more miles
of navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined, and it overlays the world's largest
contiguous piece of arable earth. By the time westering pioneers reached a truly daunt-
ing barrier—the Great American Desert, both east and west of the Rocky Mountains—the
ports than the rest of the Western Hemisphere combined … the Americans are not im-
portant because of who they are, but because of where they live,” notes a Stratfor doc-
1849, before the Civil War and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, he regarded it
along with Europe and Asia as one of the “continental cores” that were destined to control
the world. But he believed back then that America would lead the way over the other two
cores. The reasons: America was protected behind a “screen of ocean” on two sides that,
nevertheless, allowed it to interact with Eurasia; and its development was assured by the
ited States,” writes James Fairgrieve in 1917,
taking its place in the circle of lands, a new
orbis terrarium;
and yet outside
the [Eurasian] system which has hitherto mattered, compact and coherent, with
enormous stores of energy, facing Atlantic and Pacific, having relations with east
and west of Euro-Asia, preparing by a fortified Panama Canal to fling her one
fleet into either ocean.
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That continental majesty, framed by two oceans, is still there. But another conceptual
geography is beginning to overlap with it, that of Coronado's 1540-1542 journey of explor-
ation from central-western Mexico north through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma,
