This book deserves careful attention... Lemon is a professional geographer, but historians will read his book as an imaginative approach to social history... A distinguished and important book." -- American Historical Review

"Matthew P. Dziennik has written a compelling account of the Scottish Highland soldier and his service in Great Britain's American colonies during the French and Indian War and America's Revolutionary War. In the middle to the late decades of the eighteenth century, the British state recruited more than twelve thousand soldiers from the Highlands of Scotland for the purpose of expanding and defending Britain's American empire, thereby transforming the most maligned region of the British Isles into a key sustainer of British imperialism. Dziennik's fascinating history corrects the mythologized image of the Highland soldier as a noble savage, a primitive if courageous relic of clanship, revealing instead how the Gaels used their military service to further their own interests in terms of material security and social status. Using both English and Gaelic sources, the author re-creates the experiences and the mindset of the Highland soldier in the New World and demonstrates in the process how a periphery of the British Isles became a center of the British Empire." -- [Tiré de la jaquette].

During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.

The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent’s physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

Geography is a wide-ranging discipline and the number of information sources available is truly enormous. These include printed books and journal articles, maps, satellite photographs, archives, statistical information, and much else. One particular problem facing geographers is that when one studies a foreign country, information may be available only in the foreign country and difficult to obtain. This book discusses the information sources available to geographers.