"H" Historical Geographers
Matt Hannah
My interests lie in a fuzzy border region encompassing aspects of the historical geography of the U. S., critical social theory, and more recently, aspects of the history of American geographical thought. My dissertation (Penn State, 1992) was an attempt to bring Foucault's thinking on modern social control to bear upon the U.S. government's campaign to "domesticate" the Oglala Lakota during the 1870s. The basic questions were: (1) how did the gov't assemble a rudimentary system of administrative control based on visibility, and make it at least minimally effective, when the population it was trying to control was so mobile?; and (2) what does the episode tell us about the way disciplinary social control works in the lives of "modern" citizens like ourselves? A distillation of the historical research appears in the Journal of Historical Geography (1993).
Over the last two years, I have become more interested in programs of social control at the scale of Gilded Age American society as a whole: how does the "body politic" first come to occupy the thinking of government elites and the nascent social sciences?; how and to what extent should society be regulated?; what is the role of geography (both as a "way of thinking" and as something more like a social science) in the diagnosis of problems and the formulation of policies?
I came onto these questions through a growing fascination with the life-work of Francis A. Walker, Director of the Ninth and Tenth U.S. Censuses, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1871-2), longtime president of both the American Statistical Association and the American Economic Association, and President of MIT for 16 years until his death in 1897. He was one of those people who just seemed to be everywhere, to do everything, and to have an opinion on everything, and thus is a very convenient focus for exploring the issues noted above.
In the process of working out Walker's elaborate theory of political economy, and with the encouragement and example of Anne Mosher, Don Mitchell, Anne Knowles and others, I have most recently become fascinated with the historical geography of labor in North America. To begin my initiation into that field, I just read David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor... what a wonderful book!
Perhaps the best way to close this already lengthy introduction is to solicit suggestions for follow-up readings: specifically, can anyone out there recommend a history (or historical geography) of labor near the turn of the century that focuses on the significance of racial and ethnic divisions within the working class? I've read Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, and would love to see a sort of "East Coast" equivalent.
Susan Hardwick
I am a Professor of Geography at California State University, Chico (Ph.D, University of California, Davis '86) and Co-Coordinator of the CSUC Literacy and Learning Program. I teach an upper division course in the Historical Geography of North America, grad seminars on migration and settlement, a regional course on Russia, Geographic Education, and a wide variety of other courses in Human Geography. If you are interested in accessing my own personal web site (along with a rather bizarre photo, "Historical Geographer in Red Square" the day Yeltsin was reelected last summer), click here
My colleague here at Chico, Don Holtgrieve, and I currently are involved in a CSU systemwide project involving our team-taught Historical Geography course. More about our efforts to integrate collaborative student-centered instruction and technology into this class may be viewed at this site
My research interests lie in two areas: geographic education and the historical geography of North America and the Russian Federation. I am particularly interested in the Russian immigrant experience in western North America. My scholarly book on this topic, Russian Refuge: Religion, Migration, and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993. More recent work (co-authored with Don Holtgrieve) is our book on the historical geography of the local region Valley for Dreams: Life and Landscape in the Sacramento Valley (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1996). I am currently buried in final editing and clean up work for a forthcoming book, a text on the geography of the Russian Federation (part of George Demko and Stan Brunn's "Regional Geographies for the New Centuries series). If all goes as planned, this publication should see the light of day and be available in early 1997.
Richard G. Harris
Most of my research in recent years has concerned housing and suburban development in North America in the first half of this century. I have written about trends in home ownership, owner-building, and their relation to the changing social geography of city and suburban areas. A book about Toronto, entitled Unplanned Suburbs. Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900-1950 was published in 1996 by Johns Hopkins. A collection, co-edited with Peter Larkham, entitled Changing Suburbs was published in mid-1999. I am currently planning a book on the history of owner-building in Canada, the United States, and Australia, focussing on the period immediately after World War II.
I have just embarked on a comparative study of the homebuilding industry and housing policy in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and selected British colonies, 1945-1960. Among the colonies I will probably be looking at Kenya, the Gold Coast, Singapore (or Hong Kong) and the British West Indies. I am interested in tracing the way in which, in this period, prevailing assumptions about the proper 'modernisation' of the homebuilding industry were adapted in different technological, economic, and cultural settings. In this connection I am especially interested in the evolution of policy with respect to aided self-help housing, a decidedly 'unmodern' method of construction.
For further details regarding my research and publications please consult my webpage, or the Community of Science database
John Heppen
I am the co-author of the Historical US County Boundary files with Carville Earle (my advisor). I graduated in August and I now have a tenure track position at Stephen F. Austin State University as the resident political/historical geographer.
Heppen, John. 1998. Alabama Atlas of Historical Counties, Indiana Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, and Pennsylvania Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. Edited by John H. Long. Geographical Analysis. July 1998, pp. 274-277.
Barbara Hildebrant
I am an archaeologist, trying to complete my Ph.D. dissertation in historical geography...topic revolves around 19th century farming communities in Sussex County New Jersey, 1850-1870, particularly the change from butter to fluid milk production with an emphasis on women who owned and operated a number of farms during that time. It is a frustrating task at times, as I work full time as Principal Investigator for Hunter Research, Inc. and am responsible for projects between New Jersey and Vermont. I am also a member of the adjunct faculty at Raritan Valley Community College where I teach geography and anthropology. I dream of completing the dissertation and landing a teaching position, meanwhile, I just keep digging...through the archives and in the ground! On the side: I was very interested in Craig Colten's view in Past Place...it is so true...academic types seem to think those of us who work outside the university environment are out of touch. Not true --most of us struggle desperately to keep up...but it sure isn't easy! Enough said.
Ken Hillis
I recently received my Ph. D. in Human Geography from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, but for many years "in my previous life" I worked as a community organizer and planner. In the early '80s, I helped organize a citizens' coalition whose mission was to educate rural communities about the pros and cons of a twin 765kv power transmission corridor then proposed by Ontario Hydro to run from the Darlington Nuclear station east of Toronto to Ottawa, Ontario. I subsequently moved to Ottawa and there I worked with two inner-city community organizations on a wide range of issues. Heritage preservation, amendments to the Province's Heritage Act, ongoing revisions to the Province's Planning Act, working to promote alternatives to a widening of a cross-town freeway from 6 to 12 lanes, noise abatement -- the jumble of issues ranged from the petty to the profound. I was encouraged by many people to return to university and get a degree in planning, and indeed I thought at the time I did so that I'd become an advocate planner, working proactively for communities against unwarranted and ill-considered planning-related proposals.
While at York University (Toronto) studying for my Masters in Environmental Studies (Planning), I was encouraged by several of the planning professors there to pursue the Ph. D. And I have to admit that years of fighting against proposals had left me feeling somewhat emptied intellectually, in the sense that one is always in the position of reacting to something 'bad.' Even when proposing what seems a more sensible alternative, there still remains the sense of working against. Be that as it may, nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my immersion into academia, and decided to go for the doctorate. I did the degree at Madison, Wisconsin, and though it may seem a long road to have travelled from community organization, I focused on information technologies and immersive environments. Though I'd always been aware of planners as 'soft cops,' in the sense of their carrying out a state agenda, I'd remained intrigued during my time working with community groups as to how planners come to 'naturalize' their understanding of space. Now that I'm more able to put this understanding 'into discourse,' I'd say that planners implicitly owe a debt to Euclid and Newton, and hold a sense of space whose power and clarity (at the best of times) lies in its image or ability to see things as 'world pictures.' People living in neighborhoods, however, have something more akin to an Aristotelean sense of space...the world is a place and people see the world as a set of places operating, more or less, in a variety of hierarchical ways.
I'm interested in ways that people use information technologies, and also how these devices and practices in turn affect the self-perception and identities of users. I find the immersive 'cyberspace' of virtual reality particuarly interesting, in the ways that it operationalizes a variety of historically-contingent and separate spatial concepts. I'm more than a bit concerned about how the hype surrounding all things virtual helps position access to these technologies as a key component of a new form of privilege. It seems as if a new binary of halves and halve-nots may be in the process of developing.
Apart from information technologies I have a long-standing interest in the history of urbanism. The first academic paper I was successful in publishing looked at the history of planning (or the lack thereof) in Ottawa. Without wishing to seem too essentializing, I'm interested in how subtly and not so subtly encoded differences in the built forms of Toronto and Montreal reflect the differing socio-cultural aspirations of the two nations with the single Canadian state. Ottawa (and Hull), the artificial capital, in its/their physical form, reflect the uneasy tensions and adhesions pulling apart/holding together the federal enterprise.
Right now, while looking for a job, I'm teaching critical thinking through critical writing at the University of Colorado - Boulder
Deryck Holdsworth
For full details see my homepage at: http://www.geog.psu.edu/faculty/deryckH.html
Donald Holtgrieve
Hello, By way of introduction to the group, I came into historical geography by way of an undergrad degree in history and graduate work in geography. My regional area of study is the United States with particular interest in environmental change and urbanization. In addition to teaching courses in historical geography at California State University, Chico I have done quite a bit of consulting on environmental issues dealing with historic landscapes and resources. Those of you with an interest in the American West may care to know that my colleague, Susan Hardwick, and I have just finished a regional historical geography of California's Sacramento Valley. It is called Valley For Dreams: Life and Landscape in the Sacramento Valley and is available from Rowman and Littlefield.
With help from a modest reseach grant, I am presenty working on a set of historical maps that can be included in our web site and course syllabus but can also be viewed by our television audience in our distance learning program. I have discovered that a single "product" viewed on paper, computer screen and TV can look quite different and have varying degrees of usefullness. I would love to hear from others who have had successsful experiences with historical maps on TV.
Ted Hull
My name is Ted Hull and I am an archives specialist in the Center for Electronic Records of the National Archives. My background is in geography (cartography, urban and regional analysis, industrial geography), with a BA from SUNY Buffalo and MA from the U of Washington. In case anyone is wondering, I got into the data business as a grad student at UW. However I have an interest in historical geography especially how the records at the National Archives may be of use to your research projects.
Although I do not have a research agenda as such, the nature of my job allows me an opportunity to become familiar with the wide range of historical records available at the National Archives. I spent a month on 'rotation' in our Cartographic and Architectural Branch. For those not familiar with their holdings, they have a wonderful collection of historical maps, architectural drawings, and aerial photography. Most recently they've obtained recently declassified CORONA aerial film and anticipate a huge growth in available materials. You can inquire about their holdings at carto@nara.gov.
The Center for Electronic Records holdings encompass the permanently valuable electronic records of the Federal government; those data files determined to have long-term historical value. Some of our earliest data are from the World War II era including the Data from Form 26 of the War Relocation Authority (the Japanese_American Internment Camps) and Survey data of American Soldiers in WWII. However, most of our holdings date from the 1960's - 1980's and include some unique 'operational' files collected by the US military during the Vietnam conflict. For further information about our holdings and services, please visit our homepage at http://www.nara.gov/nara/electronic. We receive inquiries about our holdings and services at cer@nara.gov.
Please contact me if you think I might be of assistance.
Ted Hull, Center for Electronic Records, National Archives and Records Administration, (301) 713-6645, ext. 253.
