James Michael Buckley, City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024). 

A deeply researched and well-written account of the connections between the lumber industry in northern California and the building of San Francisco. Drawing on cultural and economic geography, as well as architectural and environmental history, James Buckley traces the links between redwood lumber camps and sawmills to lumber yards on the docks of San Francisco and construction of wooden housing in the city. Throughout the book, the author embeds his analysis in the lives and landscapes of production and consumption: the types of ordinary, everyday spaces and places that had fascinated writer, artist, and founder of Landscape magazine J.B. Jackson, for whom this award is named. Beautifully illustrated with newly drawn maps at different scales and historic photographs, City of Wood is a magnificent achievement, reminding us that city building depended on the bounty of nature, capitalist enterprise, and prodigious labor. The book informs and shapes our understanding of the construction of towns and cities across North America and beyond.

Yolonda Youngs, Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024). 

Based on an extraordinary amount of research in vast collections of postcards, Youngs shows how the visual image of the Grand Canyon has been shaped and remade in the public mind. She draws on cultural geography and landscape analysis to make her case, demonstrating her field knowledge of the dramatic physical geography of the Grand Canyon. Appropriately, her book is beautifully illustrated with many postcard views and historic images, as well as clearly drawn maps of viewpoints. In using postcards as evidence, the committee felt, Youngs reflected J.B. Jackson’s love of American popular culture. Framing Nature makes a substantive, informed, and novel contribution to cultural landscape analysis, and informs our understanding of the transformation of one of the world’s greatest natural landscapes into a national and environmental icon.   

Border Witness: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Through Film by Michael Dear (University of California Press, 2023) is a masterfully written book that uses film to narrate the human and landscape geographies of the US-Mexico border region. It convinces the reader to consider “border film” a vibrant genre and reviews a century of film to illuminate the communities, spaces, and identities that emerge in a dynamic geographical zone. Both academics and non-academics will appreciate Dear’s thorough research, insights on timely issues, nice illustrations, and wonderful prose. This is a book that is only possible when decades of research and fieldwork slowly marinate into a rich, deep study.

Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest by Kevin Patrick (Rowman & Littlefield, Stackpole Books Division, 2023) creates a wonderfully informed, nuanced, and thoughtful meditation on a small patch of woods outside Indiana, PA. Inspired by Thoreau’s Walden, Patrick explores the relationship between people and place, weaving together natural history, cultural history, the seasons, and his own reflections. The book demonstrates that a good geographer can take the most unassuming landscape and spin a tale about it, offering deep insights about connections that transcend time and space. The book is presented in an easy and enjoyable prose style, and it is accompanied by beautiful and evocative color photographs.

Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022) provides a thoughtful and carefully crafted ode to landscapes that few of us stop to consider, even though we experience them daily. Ingram counsels the reader to rethink abandoned lots and other ignored slices of land, reconceptualizing them as “orphaned” spaces worthy of love and care. Clearly written and finely illustrated with numerous maps and color photographs, Loving Orphaned Space is structured around three case studies where art-science collaborations bring orphaned spaces to life.

Ingram uses each fascinating example — an abandoned gas station lot on Chicago’s South Side, a hidden and channelized reach of the Bronx River, and stormwater basins in Fargo, North Dakota — to illustrate a variety of themes in cultural geography. By attending to overlooked and disconnected spaces as containers for story and relationship, she offers gentle wisdom about the consequences and meanings of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and neglect. Further, by focusing on community collaborations that “reject the void” and create meaning in orphaned space, the book orients readers toward hope, action, and attention.

John Harner for Profiting from the Peak: Landscape and Liberty in Colorado Springs, (University Press of Colorado, 2021) triumphs as an accessibly written, wonderfully illustrated historical geography of a distinctive American place. Dedicated to Peirce Lewis, the book explores how Colorado Springs profited from its singular physical setting as well as its highly distinctive cultural evolution.

Adam Mandelman for The Place With No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta, Louisiana State University Press

Robert Lemon for The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City, University of Illinois Press

David Havlick for Bombs Away: Militarization, Conservation, and Ecological Restoration, University of Chicago Press

Stephen Hornsby for Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, University of Chicago Press

Terence Young for Heading Out: A HIstory of American Camping, Cornell University Press

Lisa Benton-Short for The National Mall: No Ordinary Public Space, University of Toronto Press

Andrew Sluyter, Case Watkins, James P. Chaney and Annie M. Gibson for Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the Eighteenth Century, Louisiana State University Press

Randall K. Wilson for America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond, Rowman & Littlefield

Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868, University of Chicago Press

James “Pete” Shortridge for Kansas City and How it Grew, 1822-2011, University Press of Kansas

Jan Nijman for Miami: Mistress of the Americas, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Paul F. Starrs and Peter Goin for Field Guide to California Agriculture, University of California Press.

Patrick McGreevy for Stairway to Empire: Lockport, the Erie Canal, and the Shaping of America, State University Press of New York (Albany).

Blake Gumprecht for The American College Town. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Arthur J. Krim for Route 66: Iconography of an American Highway, George Thompson Publishers.

Craig Colten for An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature, Louisiana State University Press.

Donald W. Meinig for Global America, 1915-2000. volume four of The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Yale University Press

Peirce F. Lewis for New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, Center for American Places in association with University of Virginia Press.

Daniel D. Arreola for Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province, University of Texas Press.

John A. Jakle for City Lights: Illuminating the American Night, Johns Hopkins University Press.

David B. Lowenthal for George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation, University of Washington Press.

Blake Gumprecht for The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Charles S. Aiken for The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kenneth E. Foote for Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, University of Texas Press.

Richard Francaviglia for Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image-Building in Small Town America, University of Iowa Press.

David J. Wishart for An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians, University of Nebraska Press.

Paul Groth for Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in The United States, University of California Press.

John B. Wright for Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West, University of Texas Press

Wilbur Zelinsky for Cultural Geography of the United States (Revised & Enlarged Edition), Prentice-Hall Publishers.

John Fraser Hart for The Land That Feeds Us, W.W. Norton Publishers.

David Buisseret for Historic Illinois from the Air, University of Chicago Press

2000 James R. Shortridge, Our Town on the Plains: J.J. Pennell’s Photographs of Junction City, Kansas 1893-1922 University of Kansas Press

James Paul Allen & Eugene James Turner for We the People: An Atlas of America’s Ethnic Diversity, Macmillan Press

Gary B. Peterson & Lowell C. Bennion for Sampete Scenes: A Guide to Utah’s Heart, Basin/Plateau Press.

John R. Borchert for America’s Northern Heartland, University of Minnesota Press

John A. Alwin for Between the Mountains: A Portrait of Eastern Washington, Northwest Panorama Publishing.

John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns, University of Minnesota Press.