Now is the time to begin planning for the AAG annual meeting, one of the largest venues in the world for sharing and communicating the broad range of contributions by geographers to basic and applied knowledge and to problem solving. The 2014 annual meeting will be held April 8-12 in Tampa, Florida. This is the first annual meeting to be held in the southeastern United States in over a decade and the first ever in Tampa. The excitement of a new venue, coupled with the intellectual stimulation that we all expect of an AAG annual meeting, promise to make the 2014 AAG annual meeting particularly noteworthy.
The AAG annual meeting traditionally has a number of featured themes that help to provide some structure to this diverse and rich meeting. Some of the featured themes emerge organically as the Local Arrangements Committee and the AAG meeting staff organize the thousands of abstracts and hundreds of special sessions submitted for the conference. Other themes are provided directly by AAG members, and I invite all of you to suggest provocative and engaging themes for the Tampa meeting. The setting of the meeting itself suggests numerous potential themes including environmental hazards, emigration, the aging of America, among others. There are many other current issues and developments that merit consideration as a featured theme, and I encourage you to submit suggestions.
In addition, the AAG Executive Committee and Executive Director have developed three overarching, “core” themes for the Tampa meeting that we believe are of sufficient interest to engage all meeting participants, that are of themselves interconnected and cross the human, physical and methods dimensions of the discipline, and that, most importantly, are of such weight and significance that collective focused attention is warranted. These themes are “Geographies of Climate Change,” “Racism and Violence in America: Fifty Years since the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” and “GIScience, GIS, and Public Policy.”
Climate change is one of a myriad of environmental concerns facing humankind today and is representative of the inherent scientific complexity and uncertainty of these concerns, their political and policy contextualization, the challenges of formulating adaptation and mitigation strategies, and the importance of effective communication. The “Geographies of Climate Change” theme was selected to highlight the complex scale interactions of climate change including the observed and anticipated spatial differentiation in potential impacts and vulnerability. The Presidential Plenary session on the opening day of the conference will “kick off” this theme. Presenters include: Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and currently Professor of Climate and Culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, and author of Why We Disagree about Climate Change; Linda Mearns, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Science Program, and project leader of the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) which is providing high-resolution climate change projections for the impacts community; Susanne Moser, an independent researcher and consultant on adaptation, science-policy interactions, decision support, and climate change communication; and J. Marshall Shepherd, the current president of the American Meteorological Society and a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia, whose research focuses on urban influences on climate. Numerous other sessions on the “Geographies of Climate Change” will be held throughout the annual meeting, and I urge you to keep this theme in mind as you submit an abstract and/or propose sessions.
I am writing this column on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Fifty years have passed since that landmark event, and many of the commemorative addresses acknowledge the considerable progress that has been made with respect to civil rights over the past half century. However, Florida is the location of a harsh and sorrowful reminder of the continuing pervasiveness of racism and violence in the United States. We would be remiss, while in Tampa, to not collectively consider the broader implications of the death of Trayvon Martin and the complex and disturbing trial that followed, and to explore our potential contributions to a path forward. Hence, a core theme of the meeting is “Racism and Violence in America: Fifty Years since the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.“ Fifty years ago the March participants sought comprehensive civil rights legislation, desegregation of public schools, greater access to employment for all groups, and an increased minimum wage. The featured theme for the AAG annual meeting provides an opportunity for us to explore past, current, and potential future contributions of geographical research to understanding and addressing progress in these and related areas. It will also enable all of us to reflect on our personal actions and commitment to reducing racism and violence. AAG Past-President Audrey Kobayashi and Professor Joe Darden from Michigan State University are leading the planning effort for a collection of plenary and special sessions and public events around this featured theme, and they request your input and suggestions.
The potential for GIScience to contribute to the formation of public policy has been demonstrated, but not fully realized. The third core theme, “GIScience, GIS, and Public Policy” will explore the expanding role of GIScience in the public policy arena, both generally and also with respect to climate change and racism and violence. This theme also encompasses another dimension, that of federal and state policy-making regarding GIS itself. In particular, the roles of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) and the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) in developing a new strategic plan for the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) will be highlighted during several special sessions. Again, your assistance in contributing papers and posters, and organizing special sessions around the featured theme of “GIScience, GIS, and Public Policy,” is requested.
As noted above, the featured themes attempt to provide some structure to a large, exciting, highly attended meeting. But, as always, the AAG annual meeting is an open meeting, and I look forward to your contribution to the meeting and to being submerged in the diverse set of paper and poster topics that we all expect at our annual meeting. Instructions for submitting abstracts and special sessions are found at http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting. Keep in mind that the “early bird” registration discount ends October 23.
Part 1: Congo Square, Atlantic Exchange, and the Emergence of Jazz
New Orleans is a meeting ground. Situated at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, the city connects North America’s most expansive riverine network with the vast Atlantic basin. Its strategic location has long attracted diverse peoples and ideas, whose collaborations have forged extraordinary cultural, economic, and ecological innovations. Prominent among those novel expressions, music remains central to New Orleans’ sense of place. This essay, offered in two parts, surveys the cultural and historical geographies of music in New Orleans. It outlines a rough chronology of the innovative musical cultures that coalesced and continue to proliferate in New Orleans, emphasizing both the singularity of the city’s cultural production, as well as its fundamental connections with the French, Hispanic, and Black Atlantics.[1] This geographical treatment will, I hope, prime attendees of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting to indulge in New Orleans’ rich musical (and other performative) cultures on display at countless clubs, bars, restaurants, parties, parades, and street corners, as well as the French Quarter Music Festival. Overlapping with the AAG conference and free of charge (!), the lively outdoor fête showcases some of the region’s most celebrated acts and styles. In this first of two parts, I treat the city from its founding in the early-eighteenth century through the emergence of jazz in the early-twentieth century, providing historical-geographical context for the distinct and diverse musical cultures emanating from New Orleans.
New Orleans and its musical cultures are perhaps best understood through the city’s complex connections to the African diaspora, its experiences within the French and Spanish Colonial Empires, and its relations to fluvial networks and ports throughout the mainland Americas and the Caribbean. After founding the city in 1718, France ceded New Orleans to Spain in 1762. The city spent four formative decades under Spanish control, undergoing significant demographic, urban, and economic growth. Napoleonic France briefly regained control of the city in 1803 before selling it to the United States just three weeks later in the Louisiana Purchase. As the colony changed hands over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a steady flow of enslaved Africans continually replenished profound African influence in New Orleans and its environs. Those fundamental influences continue to manifest in the city’s rich cultural and economic development, especially by way of its music.[2]
The historical-geographical hearth of musical culture in New Orleans (and, it could be said, of the US as a whole) is Congo Square—the first and only sanctioned gathering place for enslaved people in the antebellum United States—beginning as early as the 1740s (Figure 1). Located just outside of the original city walls, near the grounds of the Tremé Planation, Congo Square originated as a Sunday market where enslaved Afro-descendants and indigenous people gathered to trade in goods they themselves had grown, gathered, and hunted. The weekly gatherings soon became an extraordinary venue for cultural exchange where hundreds of people mingled, cooked, drummed, worshipped, danced, and sang. Spirituality was fundamental in those musical and rhythmic expressions, as drumming remains essential in the syncretic religions that developed among Afro-descendants in the New World, among them Vodun in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, and Voodoo and Hoodoo in New Orleans.[3]
Beginning in the French period, Congo Square and its weekly assemblies survived and evolved through Spanish control and later the city’s integration into the United States. By the early nineteenth century, visitors documented crowds numbering more than 500 practicing distinct forms of African drumming, singing, and dancing. The humble outdoor market became a historic nexus crucial for the preservation of African cultural forms, as well as the eventual creation of novel hybrids mixing, as just one example, Senegambian-style banjos with drumming from the Kongo. Congo Square thus remains an important site of African-American cultural and economic resistance where enslaved people of African descent, despite the horrific brutalities of slavery, laid the rhythmic foundations for what eventually became blues, ragtime, jazz, country, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, hip hop, and countless other American musical genres. As prominent New Orleans jazz musician, educator, and advocate Wynton Marsalis proclaimed, “The bloodlines of all important modern American music can be traced to Congo Square.”[4]
A plaque commemorating Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park where the French Quarter and Tremé neighborhoods meet at Rampart and Orleans Streets (Photo credit: K.D. Burns, 2012).
While many New Orleans traditions trace their beginnings to Congo Square, the various groups collectively known as Mardi Gras Indians maintain a particularly firm link to the traditions forged there. Melding West African, Indigenous American, and European Catholic traditions, the Mardi Gras Indians celebrate the pre-Lenten Carnival (and a few other dates) by creating, costuming, and parading in lavish handmade regalia adorned with thousands of sequins, beads, and feathers (see Figure 2). Keepers of extravagant musical and material traditions traceable to Yoruba and Haitian Afro-creole antecedents, the Indians remain influential community leaders in many neighborhoods of New Orleans. (See Part II of this essay for more on the Indians’ musical influence).[5]
New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians “masking” in the Lower Ninth Ward. Image courtesy of House of Dance and Feathers, a local museum (consider visiting and supporting them).
New Orleans’ distinct musical traditions began to coalesce during the Spanish period (1763-1803) when colonial trade and administrative networks linked the city with Vera Cruz, Tampico, and especially Havana, then the seat of the Spanish American colonies. Military-style marching bands provided the basic instrumentation and arrangements for the region’s music, as well as public spectacles. When Spanish Governor Miro received a delegation of Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian chiefs in 1787, he wooed them with a ballroom dance and an extravagant military parade.[6]
The following decade, refugees fleeing the Haitian (Saint Domingan) Revolution—roughly equal thirds White creole, enslaved, and free people of color—began streaming into New Orleans. Bringing with them African-inspired spiritual and musical traditions forged in the French Atlantic, the refugees doubled the city’s size by 1810. To keep up with the abrupt population growth, New Orleans quickly expanded its footprint north of the original city into former lands of the Tremé plantation, creating the faubourg (neighborhood) of the same name, where many Haitians and other émigrés eventually settled.[7]
Born in New Orleans, antebellum piano prodigy Louis Moreau Gottschalk grew up studying music with his grandmother Bruslé and her enslaved nurse Sally, both natives of Saint Domingue, before travelling widely in the Caribbean and Latin America. His piano composition “Bamboula, Danse des Nègres” (1848) drew on African-inspired folk traditions from the Antilles, and melded seamlessly with the rhythms of Congo Square. Written in Martinique in 1859, his “Ojos Criollos, Danse Cubaine” (Creole Eyes, Cuban Dance) blended Afro-Cuban rhythms with European melodies to foreshadow ragtime by three decades. By the mid-19th century, many widely popular musical styles—from minstrel show tunes, ragtime, and cakewalks to Cuban habanera, rumba, and son clave—all shared syncopated two-hand piano riffs made popular by Gottschalk. Those rhythms served as a foundation for later styles, including jazz, and live on not only in New Orleans’ second line parades and Mardi Gras Indian gatherings, but also the comparsa and conga processions of Cuban Carnival.[8]
Essential to the city’s musical traditions, brass bands were already integral to public life in New Orleans by the early nineteenth century. In 1838 the daily Picayune proclaimed a “mania in this city for horn and trumpet playing” derived from military bands and processions. Following the Civil War, that instrumentation combined with African-inspired funeral celebrations to lay the groundwork for New Orleans jazz funerals and second lines. Adding to the mix were post-abolition waves of African-American workers who migrated to the city in search of economic opportunities, bringing along their canon of work songs, spirituals, and blues from the Mississippi Delta. There the sacred call-and-response musical aesthetic of the Plantation South encountered the widely popular dance craze known as ragtime, and together began filtering through New Orleans’ traditional brass instrumentation and syncopated African rhythms.[9]
By century’s end, changes in the city’s legal frameworks would unwittingly galvanize the music scene in New Orleans, and provide the final ingredients for the musical gumbo that would coalesce as jazz. After the landmark Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson codified racial segregation into a strict binary, mixed race creole musicians found themselves officially classified as Blacks. An unforeseen consequence of that terrible ruling was the integration of the city’s brass bands, unifying creole musicians and their classical training with the more freewheeling styles of the city’s Black blues musicians. The following year, in 1897, the New Orleans city council created the city’s red light district where prostitution, drugs, and gambling were regulated and confined. The rough-and-tumble Storyville district provided steady gigs for brass bands and piano players at the end of the nineteenth century. Located in the Faubourg Tremé just two blocks from the site of Congo Square, the district became ground zero for a revolution in American music (Figure 3).[10]
Postcard showing view of Storyville; New Orleans: C. B. Mason, [1904–8]; The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1979.362.16
Emanating from New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century, the novel improvisational styles that would collectively become known as jazz emerged from essential connections with the Mississippi Delta, Latin America, and the Caribbean. First visiting the city as part of the New Orleans World’s Fair of 1884–85, several Mexican bands and musicians became legendary for their lasting effects on the city’s musical cultures, including the introduction of the saxophone, bass plucking, and original compositions. Members of the Onward Brass Band, then among New Orleans’ most prominent marching bands, traveled to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Among them were trombonist Willie Cornish and alto horn player John Baptiste Delisle, musicians that also played with Charles “Buddy” Bolden, a (the?) forerunning jazz musician. By the turn of the 20th century, jazz pioneers Bolden, Joe “King” Oliver, and Jack “Papa” Laine were collaborating with musicians with strong ties to Cuba, such as Manuel Pérez and Manuel Mello.[11]
The second generation of New Orleans jazz musicians could still discern the Afro-Latin influences fundamental to the jazz sound. Citing what he called “little tinges of Spanish,” New Orleans pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, himself a descendant of creole Haitian émigrés, credited habanera rhythms as essential elements in New Orleans jazz. Another member of the second generation, the great Louis Armstrong, got his start in Storyville where he played in bands led by Kid Ory and King Oliver. Their repertoire included “New Orleans Stomp,” a popular dance tune steeped in complex Afro-Caribbean rhythms and time signatures.[12]
Jazz thus emerged in New Orleans as a delicious gumbo of ragtime, Delta blues, and the diasporic rhythms of the Afro-Caribbean. Despite continuous growth and innovation, most New Orleans music still derives from fluid blends of syncopated rhythms celebrated in Congo square and countless Afro-Caribbean communities with Eurasian instrumentation and melodic forms. The genius of New Orleans’ music springs not from the spontaneous epiphanies of a few talented individuals, but instead crystallizes from the city’s fluid connections to other places. At the confluence of the French, Spanish, and Black Atlantic Worlds, New Orleans has long provided an inclusive venue for the integration of diverse cultural forms.
New Orleans will forever be associated with jazz, yet the soundtrack of the contemporary city is more complex. While people of all ages continue to enjoy an ever-expanding array of expressions falling under the jazz umbrella (e.g. Dixieland, trad jazz, Latin jazz, avant-garde jazz, jazz-funk, and various fusion sounds), New Orleans remains devoted to a grand diversity of musical genres and styles, such as brass bands, R&B, soul, funk, rock and roll, heavy metal, hip hop, bounce, and even zydeco—an upbeat Afro-French creole dance music from west of the Atchafalaya. In part two of this essay (coming early 2018) I discuss several of those musical traditions as they emerged in New Orleans since the twentieth century, with special emphasis on the artists and styles on display at the 2018 French Quarter Music Festival (Figure 4) that overlaps with the AAG annual meeting.
New Orleans blues guitarist Little Freddie King jams with Big Chief Juan Pardo of The Golden Comanche Mardi Gras Indians at the French Quarter Festival near Woldenberg Riverfront Park, 2015. Photo credit: Zack Smith, courtesy of French Quarter Festival.
Further reading and listening: To begin your preparations for New Orleans, be sure to live stream WWOZ, New Orleans community radio and self-proclaimed “Guardians of the Groove.” For more on New Orleans music, see the works referenced in the notes below and the following resources: recordings posted online by the Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, a YouTube playlist of recordings of Mardi Gras Indians compiled by the Alan Lomax archive; and a YouTube playlist of New Orleans music compiled by the author. Finally, I cannot recommend enough A Closer Walk, an interactive website, map, and series of guided tours of the geographies of New Orleans music, sponsored by WWOZ and others.
[4] References in note 3. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818-1820, ed. Samuel Wilson Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951). Quote on the jacket for Evans, Congo Square.
[6] Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Vol. 3 (New York: Redfield, 1885). William Schafer, Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
[7] Sublette, The World that Made New Orleans. Crutcher, Tremé.
[8] S. Frederick Starr, Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Jack Stewart, “Cuban Influences on New Orleans Music,” Jazz Archivist 13 (1999): 14–23. Turner, Jazz Religion. Sublette, The World that Made New Orleans.
[10] Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974). Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). City leaders demolished Storyville in 1940 to make way for the New Deal era Iberville Housing Projects, which are currently being redeveloped as mixed-income apartments.
[11] Jack Stewart, “Cuban Influences on New Orleans Music.” Jack Stewart, “The Mexican Band Legend: Myth, Reality, and Musical Impact; A Preliminary Investigation,” Jazz Archivist 6, no. 2 (1991): 1–14. Jack Stewart, “The Mexican Band Legend–Part II,” Jazz Archivist 9, no. 1 (1994): 1–17. John McCusker, “The Onward Brass Band in the Spanish American War,” Jazz Archivist 13 (1998-1999): 24-35. Schafer, Brass bands.
[12] Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Music CD (Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records, 2005): Disc 6, Tracks 8 and 9. Stewart, “Cuban Influences.” Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986).
Obama Nominates Córdova to Lead NSF; Gutmann Departs SBE Post
On July 31, President Obama nominated astrophysicist Frances Córdova to serve a six-year term as Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Córdova is President Emerita of Perdue University and led the school from 2007-2012. She is also a former Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. Córdova holds a BA from Stanford and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology. The previous NSF Director, Subra Suresh, left the agency this spring to assume the presidency at Carnegie Mellon. Córdova must be confirmed by the Senate before she can take office.
Also at the Foundation, Myron Gutmann’s final day as Assistant NSF Director and head of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate was August 16. Joanne Tornow, Deputy Assistant Director for SBE, will lead the Directorate in an acting capacity until Gutmann’s replacement is hired.
House Passes ESEA Reauthorization Bill Without Including New Geography Programs
On July 19, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 5, the Student Success Act, which would serve to re-write the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The ESEA, which is currently known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), is the major federal law governing K-12 education and hasn’t been reauthorized since January 2002. The law technically expired in 2007, but it remains in effect pending a new enactment.
The party-line vote in favor of H.R. 5 was 221-207. Most House Republicans supported the bill, but 12 GOP members joined a united Democratic caucus in opposing the legislation. Rep. John Kline (R-MN), Chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, proclaimed, “The Student Success Act will tear down barriers to progress and grant states and districts the freedom and flexibility they need to think bigger, innovate, and take whatever steps are necessary to raise the bar in our schools.”
The Committee’s Democratic staff countered with a statement decrying the partisan nature of the vote. “We can’t shortchange our nation’s future by shortchanging our kids — we need to pass a better education bill in Washington,” Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) said in the statement. “The majority’s ESEA bill lacks the funding and accountability that America’s youth need to get a world-class education and compete in a global economy.”
Similar to NCLB and previous versions of the ESEA, the Student Success Act does list geography as a “core academic subject” for K-12, but the bill does not include any new programs to support the teaching of geography. Due to the partisan nature of the vote, H.R. 5 is unlikely to find favor in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), who chairs the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, has introduced an ESEA reauthorization bill of his own: The Strengthening America’s School Act of 2013 (S. 1094). Harkin’s legislation also fails to authorize any new geography education programs, but the proposal must still go through HELP hearings and actions, in addition to time on the Senate floor before it could be voted on.
Even if the Senate does pass some version of S. 1094, the two Houses of Congress would have to reach agreement on a compromise bill. Given the gridlock that has gripped Capitol Hill throughout the year, prospects appear dim. Several outside observers have indicated that the ESEA reauthorization may be pushed back again, possibly even until 2015. We will keep you apprised of any key developments.
FedEx, Three Governors Endorse AAG Resolution
In related news, the “AAG Resolution Supporting K-12 Geography Education” has garnered some additional high-profile endorsements in recent weeks. The document explains the value and importance of geography education and urges federal policymakers to include funding for geography as part of a reauthorization of the ESEA; to include geography and geospatial education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) proposals; and to enhance geography teacher training. In recent weeks, the resolution has been endorsed by:
FedEx Corporation is the world’s largest express transportation company and has over 300,000 employees worldwide. A mainstay in the Fortune 100, FedEx was founded in 1971 and serves more than 220 countries and territories.
Governor Steve Bullock (Montana) took office in January, having served previously as Montana’s Attorney General. He campaigned on the importance of job creation and told the AAG in a letter that he was endorsing the resolution in part because of the needs for geographic skills in a wide range of employment categories in his state.
Governor Alejandro García Padilla (Puerto Rico) was elected as the Commonwealth’s chief executive in 2012. He has also held office in the Senate of Puerto Rico and as the island’s Secretary of Consumer Affairs.
Governor Maggie Hassan (New Hampshire) has led the Granite State since January. She served in the New Hampshire Senate for six years, including a two-year period as Majority Leader. Her husband, Thomas, is principal of the highly-regarded Phillips Exeter Academy.
Also of interest, another endorser of the resolution, retired Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, was confirmed on August 1 as President Obama’s pick to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and Environment. McGinn had been president of the American Council On Renewable Energy prior to his nomination. We appreciate the support of FedEx and the three Governors and we wish Admiral McGinn the best as he returns to public life.
John Wertman
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New Books for Geographers
New Books: August 2013
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
August 2013
A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America. Stievermann, Jan and Oliver Scheiding, eds. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press 2013. $69.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-271-05949-5).
Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity. Bennett, Andy and Paul Hodkinson, eds. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $35.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-8478-8835-8).
Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790–1940. Browman, David L., and Stephen Williams. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press 2013. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-87365-913-0).
Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. Clarke, Robert C., and Mark D. Merlin. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2013. $95.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-520-27048-0).
The Democratic Transition of Post-Communist Europe. Petrovic. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013. $85.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-230-35431-9).
Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity. Whitney, Meredith. New York, NY: Penguin Books 2013. $27.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1-59184-570-6).
Houses Without Names: Architectural Nomenclature and the Classification of America’s Common Houses. Thomas C. Hubka. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press 2013. $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-57233-947-7).
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Huber, Matthew T. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2013. $25 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-7785-6).
Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing. Smil, Vaclav. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2013. $27.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-262-01938-5).
Making Sense of Nature. Castree, Noel. New York, NY: Routledge 2013. $49.99 paper (ISBN 978-0-415-54550-1).
Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200–1600. Clarke, Catherine A.M. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2013. $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-7083-2652-7).
Multilateral Development Cooperation in a Changing Global Order. Besada, Hany and Shannon Kindornay, eds. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013. $95.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-137-29775-4).
The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife. Dehler, Gregory J. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press 2013. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8139-3410-5).
Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns. Moore, Adam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2013. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5199-7).
Postcards from the Río Bravo Border: Picturing the Place, Placing the Picture, 1900–1950s. Arreola, Daniel D. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press 2013. $40.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-292-75280-1).
Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Turner, Sarah. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbria Press 2013. $95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-7748-2494-1).
Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map. Nigg, Joseph. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2013. $40 cloth (ISBN 978-0-226-92516-5).
Second Home Tourism in Europe-Lifestyle Issues and Policy Responses. Roca, Zoran. Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2013. $121.46 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4094-5071-9).
Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual. Coodley, Lauren. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2013. $28.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8032-4382-8).
Why Europe Matters: The Case for the European Union. McCormick, John. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013. $25.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-137-01687-4).
Wide Open Fairways: A Journey across the Landscapes of Modern Golf. Klein, Bradley S. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2013. $24.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8032-4037-7).
Wine and Culture: Vineyard to Glass. Black, Rachel E., and Robert C. Ulin, eds. New York, NY: Bloomsbury 2013. $42.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-85785-401-8).
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Annual Meeting
A Lesser Known Florida
Looking out the window flying into Tampa, Florida, a visitor will see small towns along the coast, perhaps a glimpse of sprawling Orlando, and plenty of green spaces in between. Tampa Bay appears and you have arrived in the Sunshine State. As you deplane you are welcomed by warm, tropical air. Florida has long occupied space in the popular imagination as a destination for retirees, snowbirds, and tourists who visit to enjoy her beaches, warm ocean water, and amusement parks from Orlando’s Disneyworld and Magic Kingdom to Miami’s Seaquarium.
Yet there is another side to Florida that few visitors or even residents are aware of, one rarely visited but hinted at when taking vitamins and herbal supplements while enjoying fresh Florida orange juice. Florida is the second largest producer of vegetables and fruits in the country, producing grapefruit, oranges, sugarcane, bell peppers, and more, with export values worth $3.1 billion in 2011. Florida tomato farms produce 45 percent of the nation’s tomato crop and are the country’s primary source of winter tomatoes (FDACS 2012).
Travel less than 20 minutes east of Tampa on I-4 and you will arrive in Plant City, a source of winter strawberries. Continue northeast and you will pass many farms and cattle ranches as well as swamps, state parks, wilderness and wildlife areas. You will know you are near Orlando when you suddenly come upon the town of Celebration, a master-planned community of about 7,000 developed in the early 1990s by the Walt Disney Company in Kissimmee, complete with a post office designed by the architect Michael Graves. Continue northeast through Orlando and you again enter rural Florida.
Apopka is a small town that calls itself “The Indoor Foliage Capital of the World” where local citrus and vegetable industries have transformed to provide landscape, foliage and ornamental plants to homeowners across the nation. Apopka is also host to the headquarters of the Farmworker Association of Florida (FWAF), an organization representing farmworkers throughout Central and South Florida for over 25 years, dedicated to collectively “challenging the systems which keep farmworkers and the rural poor in situations of poverty, exploitation, and powerlessness” locally, statewide, and at the federal level.
Just as in California and other vegetable and fruit producing states, orchards and farms rely primarily on migrant Latino labor to farm and harvest these crops. Latino migrant farm workers earn low wages, averaging between $5,000 and $10,000 annually, but undocumented workers make less, between $2,500 and $5,000 a year (USDL 2012). This is a less sunny side of Florida seldom seen by visitors, but one that the state’s economy depends on. Beyond advocating for worker justice, the FWAF addresses pesticide exposure, immigration rights, health education, disaster response and more.
On this journey along I-4 you have passed through habitats such as bayhead wetlands, lakeshore marshes or swamps, pine flatwoods, sandhill uplands, scrub, and even the rare mixed mesophytic forest, all places where the ubiquitous saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) is found but often overlooked. It is common throughout Florida and the southeast United States, and is a sturdy, shrubby, low-growing and clumpy palm with woody trunks that “creep along the ground,” so common it was considered a nuisance weed. Research centered on how best to eradicate it until the mid-1990s when it’s berries exploded in popularity as an herbal supplement, marketed to men as helpful for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Recognizing its growing value to industry and landowners, the state designated it an agricultural crop in 1997.
Saw palmetto plant along a road.
The saw palmetto berry industry, centered in south Florida around the small, agricultural town of Immokalee, has grown in value to $700 million annually (Moerck 2012). The major berry processing companies reported processing 2,648,000 pounds, or 1,324 tons, of dried berries in 2008 (AHPA 2011). Most of these are exported to Europe where the dried berries are processed, standardized, and used as a pharmaceutical drug for the treatment of BPH, a use not FDA approved in the United States (AHPA 2011), yet many are processed into herbal supplements found in drug stores and supermarkets. It has become one of the highest earning commercial medicinal plants in the United States as well as the second most popular herbal supplement in the country as of 2010 (ABC).
Aside from its value to local industry, it is particularly valuable to Latino and other farmworkers and migrants who are often out of work at the same time the berry is fruiting – about mid-July through October. The berries are picked throughout the southeast, from Florida to Georgia, from rangeland, state forests and parks, backyards, even highway medians. They can be worth between 10 cents and $1 a pound, though during the ‘berry boom’ of 1995 buyers paid upwards of $3 a pound for a brief period. Hundreds of pounds a day are brought to rural roadside stands throughout south and central Florida then transported to Immokalee, about an hour south of Tampa, where an informal berry market thrives from mid-July through October. Visit Immokalee and you can miss it in the blink of an eye, but during berry season cars and trucks of all sizes descend on this town daily, converging at the seemingly chaotic, informal market where buyers and sellers negotiate cash prices.
Berry pickers can make upwards of $100 a day in cash – a much welcome income that not only supplements poor wages from agriculture work but also serves to meet basic needs at a time that little work or other income earning opportunities exist. This income provides an opportunity to shore up savings or purchase needed household items. The boom in the popularity of saw palmetto berries continues to benefit some of the most marginalized of Florida residents: its farmworkers. The largest community of farmworkers in Florida is found in Immokalee, also home to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), established in 1993 and representing over 5,000 Latino, Mayan Indian, and Haitian immigrants, many who work in agriculture. The CIW is best known for its Campaign for Fair Food and Anti-Slavery Campaign, advocating for farmworker wages and human rights throughout the country.
It is these lesser known places, people, and industries just outside the Florida of the popular imagination that make it possible for many to enjoy winter tomatoes, Florida orange juice, and saw palmetto berry supplements. The space between Florida’s east and west coast is rarely noticed but is rich in diverse habitats and landscapes, and livelihood practices. Cattle ranches, commercial farms and orchards, and other traditional uses of the land rely on Latino and other farmworkers and migrants to succeed and some farmworkers in turn, rely on the wild saw palmetto plant to enhance their own livelihoods. The landscapes between Florida’s east and west coasts are host to a diversity and complexity of people and practices belied by both the view from above and the conceptualization of Florida as sunshine, beaches, and vacation destinations.
Field trips to Apopka or Immokalee and all places in between can be arranged if there is interest.
Christine Mitchell Ph. D. Candidate, Geosciences Department
Florida Atlantic University
Strengthening the AAG Through Cross-Disciplinary Outreach
Who belongs to the AAG? Who attends AAG annual meetings? Who reads and publishes in AAG journals? Hopefully, the AAG is the scholarly society of choice for professional geographers. Certainly that is the goal toward which the AAG must continue to strive, and recent substantial increases in AAG membership and annual meeting attendance point to strong progress toward this goal. But what about scholars and practitioners from other disciplines whose professional interests overlap with those of geographers? While many, if not most, geographers actively participate in more than one disciplinary society, my impression is that it is less often the case that those in other disciplines participate in the AAG. Is the AAG equally as attractive to scholars and practitioners from other disciplines as their scholarly societies are to geographers? Do non-geographers participate in AAG annual and regional meetings, read AAG journals, or submit quality manuscripts to the AAG journal suite at the level that geographers contribute to other disciplinary societies?
The AAG has been presented with a unique opportunity to experiment with modes of outreach to members of other disciplinary societies. J. Marshall Shepherd, Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia and an active AAG member, is currently the President of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), an organization for which I have served in several volunteer governance positions including Commissioner for Education and Human Resources and, more recently, Planning Commissioner. This mutual familiarity with organizational structure and culture provides a comfortable environment for both organizations to explore cross-disciplinary outreach. For the AAG, this is an opportunity to more broadly reach out to members of a scholarly society in which there is already considerable presence by geographers and in an area (physical science) where greater involvement from non-geographers could be highly beneficial to the AAG. Likewise, geography is an obvious choice for the AMS to broaden its cross-disciplinary interactions given the already large membership in the AMS by climatologists within geography, the increasing use of GIS methods and models in atmospheric science, and the relatively recent recognition of the importance of greater participation by social scientists in the weather and climate enterprise.
Credit for initiating this joint outreach effort goes to the AMS, and to date most activities have taken place at AAG annual meetings. At the 2012 annual meeting in New York City, Louis Uccellini, AMS president at that time and currently director of the U.S. National Weather Service, moderated two panel discussions that were organized by a small committee composed of atmospheric scientists and geographers. The first session highlighted the opportunities and challenges faced by younger scientists when communicating across disciplinary boundaries, whereas the second session included chairs from several of the AAG specialty groups as panelists and focused on potential linkages between geography and the atmospheric sciences. At the 2013 AAG annual meeting in Los Angeles, Marshall kicked off his AMS presidential year with a special session on extreme weather-climate and the built environment, the theme of the upcoming 2014 AMS annual meeting over which Marshall is presiding. Many of you may also remember the AMS booth in the exhibit hall at the AAG Los Angles meeting. This focus on the AAG annual meeting has been appropriate, in my mind, given the relatively greater presence of geographers, although primarily physical geographers, at past AMS annual meetings compared to that of atmospheric scientists at past AAG annual meetings.
The close proximity, both temporally and spatially, of the 2014 AMS (Atlanta, February 2-6) and AAG (Tampa, April 8-12) annual meetings, overlapping themes for the two meetings, and society presidents who are grounded in both organizations make this year a particularly opportune time to further strengthen linkages at the membership level between the AAG and AMS. With this in mind, the AAG will have a formal presence at the upcoming 2014 AMS annual meeting. Although plans are still being formulated, a major activity will be an AAG booth in the lively, well-visited exhibit hall at the AMS annual meeting. The booth will prominently display information on AAG publications, the upcoming Tampa meeting and future annual meetings, AAG K-12 educational outreach activities, and more generally on the diversity and breath of geography. Meeting attendees will have an opportunity to speak with AAG members and staff, and hopefully will be inspired to become more familiar with AAG publications, participate in future AAG meetings, and even become AAG members. Membership application forms will, of course, be available. In addition to the AAG booth, a “Meet the Presidents” session has been scheduled where Marshall and I will informally engage with meeting attendees on improved linkages between atmospheric science and geography and the benefits that the AAG and AMS can provide for both disciplines. The overall goal of these activities is to enhance the visibility of the AAG within the atmospheric science community.
This type of outreach is a relatively new endeavor for the AAG. In the past, AAG interactions with other disciplinary societies have primarily occurred at the executive director level through multiple-society advocacy organizations such as the Consortium of Social Science Associations or the American Geosciences Institute. In contrast, the outreach activities described above are explicitly directed at the members of scholarly societies. Clearly, this initial effort focuses on a single disciplinary society, although one with potential for interactions across the breadth of geography. The upcoming AMS annual meeting presents an opportunity to experiment with outreach strategies, evaluate their effectiveness, and potentially develop a model for outreach to a broad range of disciplinary societies. The AAG’s first and foremost obligation will always be serving the needs of geographers, but its reputation and long-term viability also depend on the how the AAG is viewed from outside the discipline. The AAG needs to be highly visible to, and well regarded by, scholars and practitioners across a multitude of disciplines, and active outreach is one means to promote greater visibility. I welcome your thoughts on potential outreach opportunities for the AAG to other disciplinary societies and look forward to hearing from you.
Professor Kashi Nath Singh, the luminous figure of Indian Geography, passed away on Thursday July 18, 2013. He was born in a village in Bhojpur district of Bihar on January 1, 1932. After high school he moved to Varanasi and joined Banaras Hindu University, from where earned his bachelor’s degree, M.A. (1956), and Ph.D. (1963).
In September 1957, Prof. Singh joined the Department of Geography, Banaras Hindu University as Lecturer, and was promoted to Reader in 1968. He was also professor and head, department of geography at Patna University (Bihar). In 1978 returned as Professor of Integrated Area Development in the department of geography at Banaras Hindu University, which he cherished till 1993. During 1991-93 (two terms), he had served as member of the Board of Directors, U.S. Educational Foundation in India (U.S.E.F.I.), New Delhi.
He published 6 textbooks, 11 co-edited volumes, and over 70 research articles. His visits abroad included East Africa, Anglo-America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Bali, U.K. and U.S.A. He was also an Executive Member of the Commonwealth Geographical Bureau, London (1968-1972 and 1976-80); Asst. Secretary, NGSI, and was Life Member of national bodies like NGSI, NAGI, NEGS, IIG, CIG, and UBBP. He was honoured to be the President, National Association of Geographers India (NAGI), 1985-86, and Institute of Indian Geographers (IIG), 1991-92. During November 1993 – June 2008, he was Professor of Geography in the College of Social Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. After returning from Ethiopia, he lived in Varanasi and sometimes passed his holidays with his doctor son and his family in the campus of Banaras Hindu University.
During 1964-66 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Rutgers University of New Jersey; and in 1965-66 he served as Associate Professor at East Stroudsburg State College/ University, East Stroudsburg PA. In this period he studied and collaborated with Prof. John E. Brush (1919-2007), who was already influenced by the researches of Prof. Singh as an external examiner of his PhD thesis on “Rural Market and Rurban Centres in Eastern Uttar Pradesh (India).”
Professor K.N. Singh specialised in the studies of rural settlements, historical geography and planning, economic geography, and social geography. He was one of the two India-based geographers to have published in the Annals, Association of American Geographers (vol. 58, no. 2, 1968: pp. 203-220), entitled “Territorial basis of Town and village settlement in Eastern U.P., India.” David E. Sopher in his essay, “Towards a Rediscovery of India: Thoughts on some neglected geography,” in, Marvin W. Mikesell, ed. Geographers Abroad (University of Chicago, Chicago, 1973: pp. 110-133) appraised Prof. Singh’s contribution (p. 123) as representative of the Varanasi school in rural settlement and urban morphology. Anthropologist Richard G. Fox, in his book, Urban India: Society, Space and Image (1970, Duke University) wrote about his classical paper (AAAG, 58, no. 2, 1968): “Our papers have different emphases and in several places in the text some criticism is made of K.N. Singh’s interpretation. However, these differing viewpoints and interpretations in no way remove my intellectual debt to Dr. Singh, right only for the paper cited above, but for his [other] original paper on the subject.” Fox in another of his book, Kin, Clan, Raja, and Rule (UCP, Berkeley, & OUP Delhi, 1971), writes: “Recent work by Bernard Cohn, K.N. Singh, M.C. Pradhan, etc. has indicated the important role played by unilineal kin groups of locally dominant Kshatriya ‘Castes’ in the lower level political organisation of traditional North India.” Some of his papers were prescribed in the graduate courses in Hiroshima University, and are highlighted by famous Japanese scholar Prof. Hiroshi Ishida in his book, A Cultural Geography of the Great Plains of India (Univ. of Hiroshima Press, 1972).
The absence of Prof. Singh will be always felt by Indian geography, and we will miss him for many years to come; however his message, insights and visions are always with us.
Rana P.B. Singh Department of Geography
Faculty of Science
Banaras Hindu University
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
August 2013
A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America. Stievermann, Jan and Oliver Scheiding, eds. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press 2013. $69.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-271-05949-5).
Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity. Bennett, Andy and Paul Hodkinson, eds. New York, NY: Berg 2012. $35.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-8478-8835-8).
Anthropology at Harvard: A Biographical History, 1790–1940. Browman, David L., and Stephen Williams. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press 2013. $65.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-87365-913-0).
Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. Clarke, Robert C., and Mark D. Merlin. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2013. $95.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-520-27048-0).
The Democratic Transition of Post-Communist Europe. Petrovic. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013. $85.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-230-35431-9).
Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity. Whitney, Meredith. New York, NY: Penguin Books 2013. $27.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1-59184-570-6).
Houses Without Names: Architectural Nomenclature and the Classification of America’s Common Houses. Thomas C. Hubka. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press 2013. $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-57233-947-7).
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Huber, Matthew T. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2013. $25 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-7785-6).
Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing. Smil, Vaclav. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2013. $27.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-262-01938-5).
Making Sense of Nature. Castree, Noel. New York, NY: Routledge 2013. $49.99 paper (ISBN 978-0-415-54550-1).
Mapping the Medieval City: Space, Place and Identity in Chester c. 1200–1600. Clarke, Catherine A.M. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2013. $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-7083-2652-7).
Multilateral Development Cooperation in a Changing Global Order. Besada, Hany and Shannon Kindornay, eds. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013. $95.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-137-29775-4).
The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife. Dehler, Gregory J. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press 2013. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8139-3410-5).
Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns. Moore, Adam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2013. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8014-5199-7).
Postcards from the Río Bravo Border: Picturing the Place, Placing the Picture, 1900–1950s. Arreola, Daniel D. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press 2013. $40.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-292-75280-1).
Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Turner, Sarah. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbria Press 2013. $95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-7748-2494-1).
Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map. Nigg, Joseph. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2013. $40 cloth (ISBN 978-0-226-92516-5).
Second Home Tourism in Europe-Lifestyle Issues and Policy Responses. Roca, Zoran. Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2013. $121.46 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4094-5071-9).
Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual. Coodley, Lauren. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2013. $28.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8032-4382-8).
Why Europe Matters: The Case for the European Union. McCormick, John. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan 2013. $25.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-137-01687-4).
Wide Open Fairways: A Journey across the Landscapes of Modern Golf. Klein, Bradley S. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press 2013. $24.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8032-4037-7).
Wine and Culture: Vineyard to Glass. Black, Rachel E., and Robert C. Ulin, eds. New York, NY: Bloomsbury 2013. $42.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-85785-401-8).
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Bertha Becker
Bertha Becker, a pioneering Brazilian geographer, died on July 13, 2013. She was 82.
The professor emeritus at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro specialized in Amazonian issues. Her lifelong research, which focused on the political geography of Brazil, took Becker throughout every region of her native country. Extensive fieldwork shaped her findings and unique view of environmental conditions caused by human occupation and devastation.
Becker was a graduate of the University of Brazil, receiving her degree in geography and history in 1952. She completed her doctorate in 1970 at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where Becker became a long-time professor. She also conducted post-doctorial studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s urban studies and planning department.
During her career, Becker received a number of honors. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Lyon in France. She was presented the Carlos Chagas Filho Scientific Merit award. The American Geographical Society granted her the David Livingstone Centenary Medal.
Becker had more than 180 published works, including books, articles, papers and chapters. She was a member of the editorial boards of national and international publishers. She consulted for scientific institutions, including the National Research Council, and helped develop public policies for the Ministries of Science and Technology in Brazil.
She served as vice president for both the International Geographical Union (1996-2000) and the International Advisory Group of the Pilot for the Protection of Tropical Forests (1995-2005). She was also a panelist at the United Nations’ Rio + 20 conference.
“Bertha was one of a small cadre of social scientists who brought geography to prominence in Brazil in the late 1950s and ’60s. Her wise opinions will be missed,” noted David J. Robinson, professor of Latin American geography at Syracuse University.
Beer needs water and great beer needs great water. Tampa has an abundance of both and ample evidence is found in the burgeoning craft beer scene in the metropolitan area. The 2014 Annual Meeting affords geographers the opportunity to experience this craft beer culture first hand.
Freshwater has long been important to the inhabitants of the Tampa Bay area. Prior to European contact, the Tocobaga people lived in close relationship to the interface between the large Floridan aquifer and the saltwater of Tampa Bay by subsisting on abundant shellfish (Marquardt 1986). Centuries later, major players in the national and global beer markets like Yuengling and Anheuser-Busch InBev, respectively, avail themselves of the clear freshwater flowing from the approximately 260,000 square kilometer aquifer to brew millions of barrels of beer (Ryder 1985).
The consumption of water by the beer industry is a cause for concern. Large players in the industry such as Anheuser-Busch InBev ship large quantities of water out of a local area in bottles, cans, and kegs (Olajire 2012). This consumption drains local supply, but also pollutes it with runoff from the brewing facility. At the scale of a large brewery, this usage can amount to millions of liters of water a year moving out of the local area. Local production and consumption have the potential to keep beer nearby in every sense by minimizing carbon footprints through lower transportation costs and by keeping the beer in the local water cycle. The old saw that “one only rents beer” takes on a different hue when related to local water use.
The past 25 years have seen local beer take off in Tampa “A city the size of Tampa can support a local brewing market,” says Justin Clark, vice-president of Cigar City Brewing. Craft brewing has carved out a special place on the landscape and a vibrant, competitive market has arisen in the metropolitan area. Clark remarks that the ethos among Tampa brewers is to brew the beers that the brewers like and hope that others will like them as well. Competition is welcome. Citing a good relationship with the national brewery Yuengling, Clark says that the local brewing scene welcomes new players in the market and benefits from new breweries opening.
The following breweries, brewpubs, and taprooms are just a sampling of what is out there in Tampa. April is a great time of the year to explore all that the Tampa Bay-St. Petersburg area has to offer with its craft beer culture.
No other brewery in the Tampa Bay area can touch the legendary status that has been acquired by Cigar City. Started in 2008, CCB is consistently rated one of the top breweries in the country. Their flagship is the Jai Alai IPA, perfect for Florida with its notes of mango and and floral hoppiness. In the summer, the big seasonal hit is the Cucumber Saison, taking the refreshing style and injecting a salad note. This may be odd to some palates, but it follows in the great tradition of Belgian saisons such as Foret to not limit ingredients in order to make a refreshing beer. CCB’s tasting room is pure minimalism, but with beer this good, you do not really care.
Located in the the oceanside town of Gulfport, just west of Tampa, Peg’s Cantina has been filling bellies with delicious food and tasty brews for almost a decade. The rustic, idyllic setting is the perfect place to take in all that Florida weather has to offer, while cooling off with pints of Freewheel Pale Ale, with its notes of sour pineapple and blood orange rind. Or take the adventurous route and try the Rare DOS, an Imperial Stout. This is also home to what many consider to be the first truly unique Florida style, the Berliner Weisse, a tart sour beer. They are set to open their offshoot brewery, Cycle Brewing, in St. Petersburg in late 2013.
Tampa Bay brewers do love to be near the water, and this is also true of the oldest continuously operating brewery in Florida, Dunedin Brewery. Named after the town it is located in, Dunedin Brewery has been turning out craft beers for 17 years. Though the town has a Scottish heritage (the name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland), the atmosphere in the tasting room is pure surfer/hippie, with jam and bluegrass bands entertaining the crowds almost nightly. From their Apricot Wheat Ale to their Nitro Stout, they have a range of beers for every palate. Right down the road is the newer 7venth Sun Brewing. While still a young gun, it may be giving Cigar City Brewing a run for its money as best brewery in the area.
Located in the heart of Ybor City, Tampa’s historic cigar rolling district, TBBC has been turning out great food and fantastic beers since 1996. What was once a two-story building used to house horses, TBBC is now a drink-and-eat mecca for vacationing families and late night revelers. Their Elephant Foot IPA is seen on taps all over Tampa Bay, and with good reason. It is a slightly peppery and pine resin thirst quencher. The Warthog Weizen is an authentic take on the classic German style – full of clove and lemon notes. Be sure to come hungry to TBBC as well.
For sheer selection and an apt name, The Pour House, located in downtown Tampa near the Channelside District, has you covered. With over 40 taps and hundreds of bottles, they have something for everyone. The room is big and spacious, with plenty of outdoor seating to enjoy the skyline.
This bus service shuttles beer fans around the Tampa area. Available for rentals and pick-up and drop-off, they promise the ultimate craft beer experience with great service and safety in mind.
AAG Members get exclusive access to publications, prominent journals, unique advocacy, grant, scholarship and professional opportunities with access to industry focus communities, and event discounts, including our annual meeting.
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