Annual Meeting

Stories of Change Hidden in Washington, D.C.’s Alleys

Washington, D.C. is known for its monuments, museums, and grand government buildings. It is associated with policy wonks, foreign dignitaries, and political controversy. But it is also a home town for thousands of people who live in its lively neighborhoods. How best to get a glimpse of everyday life for D.C.’s residents, those people living in places hidden from view on the National Mall? A tour of the city’s most hidden places of all: its urban alleys.

Like many American cities, D.C. has a system of alleys. Most of these narrow thoroughfares are used for municipal functions such as garbage collection, deliveries, and parking. You might also find more informal, but not unexpected, signs of use, like basketball hoops or folding chairs used by those who live, work, or spend time nearby. Yet a turn down the right alley in D.C. might surprise you. In D.C. alleys you’ll find clues about the city’s history of substandard housing for African American migrants following the Civil War, you’ll see evidence of the early roots of gentrification in the 1950s, you’ll glimpse a burgeoning public art scene, you’ll tread across new wastewater management projects, you’ll stumble upon a community garden, or you’ll even find yourself in a hip and expensive commercial enclave. D.C.’s alleys offer insight into how this city has dealt with its long history of strained race relations, how it is creatively managing urban space to sustainably support urban growth and density, and how it is attempting to stay true to its longtime African American and Latinx residents while attracting whiter, younger, and wealthier residents who have flooded the city in recent years.

Even prior to the Civil War, D.C.’s alleys told a unique story. As the city’s population increased in the 1850s, alleys were cut from the city’s large blocks to provide access to residential space in block interiors. These new alleys often formed I or H shapes, with only narrow outlets to main streets, and they were called “hidden” or “blind” alleys because the activities inside could not be seen from front streets. As sites of makeshift wood-framed housing, these alleys were where black and white residents found inexpensive places to live downtown. As opposed to other Southern cities that had alley housing, in which a servant or slave house along the alley would share a lot with the main house, to which it would be oriented, the residents of D.C.’s blind alleys were disconnected from the residents of the front streets; their homes were on separate lots and they were oriented to the back alley. In fact, alley-facing lots and front street-facing lots were often separated by other narrow alleys or by fences. D.C.’s alley residents were legally and socially removed from life on front streets.

During and immediately following the Civil War, the city faced a severe housing shortage as the population nearly doubled. Growth of the African American population was particularly profound as freed people flooded the city. Between 1860 and 1870, the black population more than tripled from 14,000 to 43,000. In a pedestrian city without mass transportation, these migrants were forced to live close to employment downtown. As historian James Borchert has detailed, many individuals and families found shelter in the makeshift housing, and later brick row houses, constructed in the blind alleys, which became increasingly overcrowded. The lack of adequate sewerage systems, clean water, and waste disposal also caused high rates of disease and death. Crucially, the overcrowding was not just due to an increase in population. Absentee owners of alley properties recognized the high demand for shelter and increased rents. This in turn led to more density as families were forced to double up in order to pay rent.

An African American family sits outside of their alley dwelling, 1941. Photograph by Edwin Rosskam, 1941. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-012828-D. Public domain. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017764780/

D.C.’s alleys were racially segregated, and whereas the majority were all-white before the Civil War, by 1897, 93% of alley dwellers were African American. Borchert argues extensively that through the first decades of the twentieth century, despite the real dangers of disease, death, and poverty, African American alley residents in D.C. valued their communities. Many were newly adjusting to urban life from being enslaved on Southern plantations, and they created incredibly close-knit, alley-based communities rooted in extended kinship networks and communal help. They treated the alley itself as communal property where children could play, adults could socialize and exchange goods, and neighbors could warn one another about outsiders—particularly white outsiders like police or social reformers—who might enter the alley. Alleys also had exceptionally high retention rates given high population turnover in other cities at the time, and especially because alley dwellers did not own their own homes. In alleys, African Americans made claims to the city. 

For those living in alleys, they were places of African American identity and belonging, where necessity reinforced strong communities based on kinship and mutual aid. White Progressive-Era reformers and elites also understood alleys as African American urban space, but for them this had only negative connotations. They published studies reporting on the high rates of disease, death, poverty, and crime in alley dwelling communities, and they generally concluded that the isolated built environment of blind alleys fostered immorality. Findings like these ignored or were oblivious to the positive associations of community or mutual aid that were so central to life for alley residents. Instead, they popularized perceptions of alleys as African American slums.

Restored alley dwellings line Pomander Walk in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2016.

By the 1950s, young professionals, nearly all whom were white, were moving to Washington, D.C. to work for the growing federal government, and these new Washingtonians wanted to live near their workplaces. It was in the 1950s that developers set out to transform downtown Washington, D.C. neighborhoods—those with alley dwellings—into elite white enclaves. In the Southwest neighborhood, this process occurred with federal urban renewal funds, and Southwest’s many alley dwellings were the first to be demolished in the now-notorious clearance of Southwest, which resulted in the displacement of 23,000 of its residents. In neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, Georgetown, and Foggy Bottom, small-scale developers bought alley dwellings, evicted African American tenants, rehabilitated the homes, and sold them to young white professionals, facilitating the transition of these D.C. neighborhoods from mixed-race and mixed-income to nearly entirely upper-middle-class and white. Not called gentrification at the time, the process of displacement, rehabilitation, and resale foreshadowed demographic change that would sweep entire neighborhoods in the 1970s and again in the present day. By the end of the 1950s, alley dwellings were no longer classified as slums, and these low-rent African American communities disappeared from D.C.’s landscape. Yet the built environment persists; turn down alleys such as Snow’s Court in Foggy Bottom, Pomander Walk in Georgetown, or Brown’s Court in Capitol Hill (to name just a few) and you’ll find the narrow nearly-million-dollar rehabilitated rowhouses that once housed the city’s poorest African American residents.

As Washington D.C.’s alley dwellings disappeared due to demolition and rehabilitation in the 1950s, so did the public perception of inner-city alleys as African American community and residential space. By the 1960s, as in the rest of the country, D.C.’s alleys were primarily known as service corridors whose formal functions included vehicle storage and waste collection. In this period of postwar white flight and urban disinvestment, however, alleys also filled with garbage and teemed with rats. By the 1980s, alleys were too often associated with the drug trade and horrific gun and sexual violence. Alleys became symbols of decline in America’s cities, which, compared to growing suburbs, were disproportionately African American, underfunded, and underserviced.

One of D.C.’s “green alleys,” located in a residential neighborhood in the upper northwest part of the city. The alleys are designed by the D.C. government’s Department of Transportation to mitigate storm water runoff. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2016.

Today, as many U.S. cities have seen the reversal of white flight as investment and young professionals have flooded downtown neighborhoods, some cities, including D.C., are turning again to their alleys. These overlooked and long-neglected public spaces seem to be the solution for the myriad puzzles facing growing cities. D.C.’s Department of Transportation, for example, has instituted a Green Alleys program to combat wastewater runoff; walk down an alley in the residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city and you’ll find new permeable paving. The city’s 2016 zoning rewrite now allows for dwelling units to be built along alleys in certain residential zones in an attempt to add density and more affordable housing to the city’s downtown; walk through some back alleys in Capitol Hill and you’ll see new construction of alley-facing houses (this move to put residences back in alleys would have Progressive-Era reformers stunned).

The entrance to The Dabney, a high-end restaurant located in D.C.’s Blagden Alley. The restaurant is accessible only through the alley. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2018.

Alleys even provide an antidote for D.C. residents now frustrated by the effects of recent investment. Those disillusioned by the ubiquity of glass-paneled luxury apartment buildings and mixed-use developments can turn down alleys for a seemingly more authentic city scale. Alleys promise a labyrinth space where one can wander and discover. They remain in people’s imaginations the edgy, dirty, and potentially dangerous parts of a newly glitzy city. And of course, this edginess and “frontier” quality can be capitalized upon as well. Enter Blagden Alley in the Shaw neighborhood, and you’ll find high-end restaurants, a boutique coffee shop, and design firms, accessible only through the alley. Even if you confirm the locations on Google Maps before you go, you’ll still have to trust your sense of direction as you pass a surface parking lot, dumpsters, delivery trucks, and strewn garbage on your way to the center of one of the city’s last remaining nineteenth-century “blind alleys.” In Blagden Alley you’ll also find the “D.C. Alley Museum,” an officially christened collection of alley murals (alley murals, not part of the “museum,” abound in the Shaw/U Street area). While these murals don’t have the defiance of graffiti tags—they are in fact funded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities—they still give the illusion of artists appropriating the surfaces of private property. Blagden Alley offers a partially curated aesthetic that serves as an antithesis to the large-scale development that now swaths the downtown core.

“Let Go,” a mural by Rose Jaffe, is part of the “DC Alley Museum” located in Blagden Alley. The murals are funded in part by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Photograph by Rebecca Summer, 2017.

D.C.’s alleys have, at the moment, found a tenuous balance between longtime uses and new investment: in Blagden Alley and nearby Naylor Court, garbage trucks trundle past professionals eating at high-end restaurants; rats scurry beneath Instagram-ready murals; and prostitution and drug use take over the alleys by night, while families living in restored alley dwellings set up block parties by day. You might lament the late gentrification of these alleys, the last holdouts in a larger area that’s already thoroughly gentrified. Or, you might enjoy an urban space that manages to attract racially and economically diverse groups of people. At least for now, you would be right to think so either way. Alleys offer a glimpse of life in this city in transition.

Rebecca Summer is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of geography. Learn more at www.rebeccasummer.net. She can be reached at rsummer [at] wisc [dot] edu.

The research reported in this article was supported by an award from the National Science Foundation, BCS-1656997.

 

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0041

Recommended reading:

Ammon, Francesca Russello, “Commemoration Amid Criticism: The Mixed Legacy of Urban Renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.” Journal of Planning History 8 no. 3 (2009): 175–220.

Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

District Department of Transportation, “Green Alley Projects,” https://ddot.dc.gov/GreenAlleys

Mark Jenkins, “Murals and mosaics enliven an already bustling Blagden Alley,” The Washington Post, December 29, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/museums/murals-and-mosaics-enliven-an-already-bustling-blagden-alley/2015/12/29/6a9917f4-a991-11e5-9b92-dea7cd4b1a4d_story.html?utm_term=.70994c52ee3f

Kathleen M. Lesko, Valerie Babb and Carroll R. Gibbs, Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of its Black Community from the Founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present Day (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016).

Dan Reed, “Even D.C.’s Alleys Are Thriving,” The Washingtonian, March 9, 2017, https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/03/09/even-dcs-alleys-thriving/

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Member News

Discovering Geography – The International Geography Youth Summit

Three long-time AAG members met up recently at the 4th International Geography Youth Summit (IGYS) in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), India. The IGYS was developed as part of The Institute of Geographical Studies (TIGS) in Bengaluru. Both are the brainchilds of AAG member, Dr. Chandra Shekhar Balachandran, who founded TIGS in 2000. Together with collaborators and partners in India and the US, TIGS organizes year-round workshops with teachers, parents and students in Indian urban and rural schools to introduce geography as culturally relevant and meaningful. This kind of geography challenges traditional textbook approaches and extends learning beyond the classroom.

Dr. Balachandran developed the IGYS to encourage students to develop their own geographical research on locally relevant social and environmental issues and then present their work in an academic setting. This year, more than 160 students, aged 11-17 years old, convened at the Vidyanjali Academy for Learning in Bengaluru, to share their findings at IGYS-2018.

Students wrote and submitted abstracts online beforehand, and presentations were organized into concurrent thematic sessions, modeled after the AAG annual meeting format, with plenty of time for Q and A. For many students, some of whom are from rural and under-resourced schools and who are supported by a local NGO partner, this is their first time doing their own research, and making a pubic presentation. Dr. Heidi J. Nast, Professor of Geography and International Studies at DePaul University, has fund-raised for TIGS in the US for the past eight years and has attended the past two Summits. As she observes “the student enthusiasm at the Summit is infectious. The topics the students raise and the concerns they have are helping us to think about Indian geography in entirely new ways.”

This year, Dr. Sue Roberts from the University of Kentucky attended IGYS for the first time and gave the Keynote address. She says, “What impressed me most was the way the students took geographical concepts and ran with them. They generated truly fresh ways of approaching complex problems that we adults and professionals can sometimes make rather boring” and she added “the students had no problem connecting their research findings to practical action.”

One team of students, for example, tackled the issue of proliferating potholes in their streets. After examining the geographical prevalence of potholes and thinking through their many spatial effects on social and economic well-being, the students met with local officials who responded with more urgency than had been shown previously. The students additionally filled two potholes on their own, committed themselves to filling two more each month, and they created a website to report and repair potholes.

Three young girls gave the plenary paper, “taboo geographies of menstruation,” based on work they had presented at the IGYS 2017. They questioned why menstruating women are seen as polluting and placed at spatial distance from others, and suggested culturally sensitive ways for changing this.

These are but two examples of how children are taking their geography research work to interventions in the world around them.

There is much AAG members around the world can learn from the work of TIGS to generate awareness of geography and to support geographical research in schools. To find out more about this exciting initiative in India, please visit www.tigs.in . A growing number of AAG members are giving financial support to the work of TIGS through its partner organization in the US: Dharani USA Inc. (a non-profit 401-3c organization). Information on how to donate is on the website.

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Newsletters

Newsletter – July 2018

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Toddlers and Tears on the Texas Border

By Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach

Sheryl-col1-illo-sq-290x290This column begins with special thanks and recognition of our outgoing President Dr. Derek Alderman, and outgoing Past President Dr. Glen MacDonald. Please join me in recognizing their leadership in moving the association forward on so many important fronts, ranging from civil rights to environmental security. We must carry this momentum forward from the strong foundations they established, and I am honored to take up the baton as your new AAG president… In my first presidential column, I address a matter of human rights and global understanding, to which geographers have much to contribute.

Continue Reading.

 

ANNUAL MEETING

Registration Opening Soon for #aagDC

washington dc Take-a-stroll-along-the-Tidal-Basin-in-the-spring-to-catch-a-glimpse-of-the-Jefferson-Memorial-and-the-iconic-Cherry-Blossom-trees-courtesy-of-washington.org_The 2019 AAG Annual Meeting takes place from April 3-7, 2019. Participants and attendees can start to register for the meeting at the end of July. Please check your email in the coming days for an important announcement regarding the 2019 Annual Meeting fee structure. And remember, register early for the best rates!

Learn more about the 2019 Annual Meeting.

Annual Meeting Hotel Discount Rates Now Available

The official #aagDC conference hotels are now open for reservations. As you prepare to travel to Washington, DC, explore the Marriott Wardman Park and the Omni Shoreham – the co-headquarters for the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting. The Marriott and Omni are conveniently located directly across the street from each other in DC’s Woodley Park neighborhood. #aagDC will overlap with DC’s renowned Cherry Blossom Festival, which attracts more than a million tourists each year. Because of this, AAG has reserved a block of discounted rooms for Annual Meeting attendees.

Lock in your rate.

“Focus on Washington, DC and the Mid Atlantic” is an ongoing series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of Washington, DC and the greater Mid Atlantic region in preparation for the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting.

American Indians of Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake

Become familiar with the Washington, DC and Mid Atlantic region of the US before you visit for the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting with monthly articles in “Focus on Washington, DC and the Mid Atlantic.” This month, hear from Doug Herman, senior geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian. Herman reflects on the cultures indigenous to the geographic area surrounding the Chesapeake and explains the political policies that have shaped their historical and contemporary geographies.

Read more.

 

ASSOCIATION NEWS

Meet the Editors of AAG Journals: David Butler and Nik Heynen

Published six times a year since 1911, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers is one of the world’s foremost geography journals. The articles in the journal are divided into four theme sections that reflect the various scholarship throughout the geographic discipline: Geographic Methods; Human Geography; Nature and Society; and Physical Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. There are editors responsible for each of the four themes. This month, meet two of the Annals editors – David Butler and Nik Heynen.

Find out more about the AAG Journals editors.

AAG Welcomes Three Summer Interns

2018-Summer-InternsThe AAG is pleased to have three interns join the AAG staff this summer. Alex Lafler, a junior at Michigan State University, is pursuing a BS in Geographic Information Science and a BA in Human Geography (along with a Minor in Environment and Health), Christian Meoli, a senior at the University of Mary Washington, is double majoring in Geography and Environmental Science with a certificate in GIS, and Jenny Roepe, a senior at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is pursuing a B.A. in geography with a minor in geographical information systems and urban and public issues.

Meet the 2018 summer interns.

 

RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES

Geographers on Film Series Available through Library of Congress

GOF-artThe AAG is excited to announce that the first 30 of 308 films in the Geographers on Film series have been digitized and are now available online from the Library of Congress. Geographers on Film is a collection of recorded video interviews conducted with hundreds of geographers between August 1970 and the mid-1980s, including scholars who have shaped the discipline such as Carl Sauer, Richard Hartshorne, Wilbur Zelinsky, Richard Chorley, Mildred Berman, Harold Rose, Jan Monk, Yi-Fu Tuan and Rickie Sanders. The late Maynard Weston Dow (1929 – 2011), Professor Emeritus at Plymouth State College, and Nancy Dow largely produced the series over 40 years.

View the archive.

Ask a Geographer Program Update: Volunteers Needed

The AAG is currently updating the Ask a Geographer program, an AAG outreach project that offers the media, government agencies, teachers, and students links to experts in various fields of geography. Are you looking for a fun service opportunity to support geography by helping others learn more about it? No matter your career status, consider volunteering for the AAG Ask a Geographer program!

Volunteer to promote geography today.

AAG Seeks Editor for ‘The Professional Geographer’

The American Association of Geographers seeks applications for the position of Editor of The Professional Geographer. The new editor, whose responsibilities include overseeing the solicitation, review, and publication of scholarly articles for the journal, will be appointed for a four-year editorial term beginning July 1, 2019.

Learn more about the editor position.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Read the July 2018 Issue of the ‘Annals of the AAG’

The Annals of the American Association of Geographers is published six times a year. Issue 4 of Volume 108 is now available to read online as part of the AAG membership benefits. This issue features an editors’ choice article on the racial nature of gerrymandering in the US.

Full article listing available.

Volume 4, Issue 1 of ‘GeoHumanities’ Online Now

GeoHumanities Cover FlatGeoHumanities features articles that span conceptual and methodological debates in geography and the humanities; critical reflections on analog and digital artistic productions; and new scholarly interactions occurring at the intersections of geography and multiple humanities disciplines. There are full length scholarly articles in the Articles section and shorter creative pieces that cross over between the academy and creative practice in the Practices and Curations section.

View the manuscripts.

New Books in Geography — May 2018 Available

New-books1-1

Keep up with the latest publications in geography and related disciplines with the New Books in Geography List, published monthly. The May 2018 list, which features books on topics such as health, geopolitics, environmentalism, and postcolonial analysis, is now available to view.

Browse the list of new books.

May 2018 Issue of the ‘Professional Geographer’ Published

The Professional Geographer Cover Flat

The Professional Geographer, Volume 70, Issue 2, has been published. Of note to geographers interested in the Public Engagement theme for #AAG2018, the focus section in this issue is Out in the World: Geography’s Complex Relationship with Civic Engagement. The issue also includes short articles in academic or applied geography, emphasizing empirical studies and methodologies.

See the newest issue.

Spring 2018 Issue of ‘The AAG Review of Books’ Now Available

AAG Review of Books Spring cover Volume 6 Issue 2Volume 6, Issue 2 of the quarterly The AAG Review of Books has now been published online. In addition to scholarly reviews of recent books related to geography, public policy and international affairs, this issue features longer book review fora of Refugees in Extended Exile: Living on the Edge, The Rise of the Hybrid Domain: Collaborative Governance for Social Innovation, and The Great Baseball Revolt: The Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players League.

Read the reviews.

 

OF NOTE

Africa Specialty Group congratulates Dr. Padraig Carmody, recipient of the 2018 Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang Distinguished African Scholar Award

Carmody Padraig

Dr. Carmody teaches Geography at Trinity College, the University of Dublin, where he did his undergraduate and masters work and is a visiting associate professor at the University of Johannesburg. His Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota in the United States. He also taught briefly at the University of Vermont after his graduation from Minnesota. At TCD, he currently directs the Masters in Development Practice. His research centres on the political economy of globalisation in Africa and he has published in journals such as European Journal of Development Research, Review of African Political Economy, Economic Geography and World Development. He has also published seven books, including The New Scramble for Africa (Polity, 2011), the Rise of the BRICS in Africa (Zed, 2013) and as part of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers’ book series with Professor James T. Murphy, Africa’s Information Revolution: Technical Regimes and Production Networks in South Africa and Tanzania (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). He has won research grants from the United States National Science Foundation, European Commission and Irish Research Council. His current research examines the impacts of large scale land acquisitions in Africa. He sits on the board of Political Geography and African Geographical Review and is a former editor-in-chief of Geoforum (Elsevier) and is a Fellow of Trinity College. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2018.

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President's Column

Toddlers and Tears on the Texas Border

his column begins with special thanks and recognition of our outgoing President Dr. Derek Alderman, and outgoing Past President Dr. Glen MacDonald. Please join me in recognizing their leadership in moving the association forward on so many important fronts, ranging from civil rights to environmental security. We must carry this momentum forward from the strong foundations they established, and I am honored to take up the baton as your new AAG president. I offer many thanks to the AAG staff, and to current and outgoing council members, as well for their hard work on difficult issues, and welcome new AAG officers, councilors and committee members. It takes dedicated volunteers to make our association a community that makes a difference, and I thank all of you for serving, especially our first cohort of AAG Fellows. Finally, I ask us to thank and recognize the dedicated work and many accomplishments of AAG Executive Director Dr. Douglas Richardson, who announced his countdown to retirement at the New Orleans AAG meetings. There is much work to do to ensure a smooth transition and AAG’s continued positive trajectory, contributions, and influence. In my first presidential column, I address a matter of human rights and global understanding, to which geographers have much to contribute.

I began writing this column in the back country of the Petén, Guatemala, having journeyed by bus and 4WD pickup truck through lively Guatemalan towns and villages, on muddy track roads to the field camp of El Zotz. In Belize the week before, and also at El Zotz, our team was field validating some of the latest findings in airborne LiDAR mapping: fabulous stone structures, temples, settlements, waterworks, and agricultural features of the ancient Maya Civilization, more numerous than ever imagined. Our research questions are about resilience and collapse, long-term environmental change, and about population, landesque capital, technology, agriculture, and sustainability, all in a changing and challenging environment. Meanwhile, on our way from the modern world to this ancient world emerging from the Petén jungle, we passed a busy market square where, since my last visit, motorized tuk tuks spewing exhaust have replaced three wheeled bicycles for local transport on narrow streets. As the day turned to dusk and then into night on our journey towards field camp, glimpses of modern Central American life continued to pass by, people gathered for discussions and cold drinks in LED-lit tiendas, in church halls softly illuminated by candlelight and song, and families cooking dinner at home, some over smoky cookfires in outdoor kitchens, together with their children. Which family will have enough to eat? Enough clean water? Mosquito nets? Pencils and notebooks for school? And, which child could be the next Sally Ride? The next Albert Einstein? So much potential, and so much poverty. How do we extend the opportunities we Americans have to the next generation, and across borders, to understand and move our global society and environment forward, together?

After our field research ended, I took another bumpy, muddy, and dusty truck ride out of El Zotz, and a bus from Flores, Guatemala to Belize to fly home to Austin, Texas, with no trouble crossing the borders and no visa required. I recall an earlier Belize-Mexico border crossing and the Mexican Green Guardians who kindly helped us with a flat tire; and recall the many kindnesses our Central American hosts have bestowed over the years. Back home in Texas, a dead-serious drama is currently playing out on the border of my adopted home state as I continue this column for the publication deadline. Central American families seeking asylum from deplorable conditions, threats, and abuses, and seeking better lives for their children, are being arrested under a U.S. government zero-tolerance policy for illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Children, some too young to even write or know their parents’ formal names, are being separated from their mothers and fathers and placed into caged warehouses, with no clear reunification plan. Those families have names and dreams, and they have deep care for and hope for their children. I have seen the hope and optimism with which parents escort their children to school in small villages in Mexico. Are former big box store warehouses the best America can offer to our tired, poor, and huddled masses? America offered far more to my immigrant Czech great-grandparents. But our American tolerance and generosity seem to come in waves: despite the welcome my Czech family received in California, WWII saw internment camps arise and imprison their Japanese-American neighbors. How can 21st century America slip so easily back into an “us vs. them” mindset? Not all hope is lost, airlines and local governments are beginning to publicly resist complicity in related federal actions. As of press time, the U.S. President has signed an executive order, after repeatedly blaming others and denying the ability to do so, to suspend the family separation orders for families arrested crossing the border. This order solves few problems, because there is no clear plan in place for the thousands of children who remain separated from their parents. As Glen MacDonald’s past president’s address called us to action on the environment, and Past President Derek Alderman called us to action on civil rights, I call us to action now on human rights, which encompasses both, and takes positive steps towards solving long term environmental and social crises driving migrants from their homes.

Make a Difference with a Focus on Human Rights

This leads us to one of the major themes for my presidential year, and that is Science, Geography and Human Rights. We too, the American Association of Geographers, are 12,000 individuals who can, will, and do make a difference. Under the bold leadership of outgoing President Derek Alderman, we have strengthened our commitment to civil rights, to saying no to bullying, violence, harassment and discrimination. Under the inspiring leadership of Past President Dr. Glen MacDonald, we have recommitted ourselves to protecting and cherishing science and our environment, culminating in his tour de force 2018 past presidential address calling us to action on the grand challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. I call upon us now to broaden our scope to human rights, where on the world stage science, society and the environment can all benefit from the expertise and unique global and spatial perspectives that geographers bring to bear. It is the moment where “we, too” can change the world.

A specific area for geographers to take action is within the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition, by becoming involved as an independent scholar. AAG, under the leadership of Executive Director Doug Richardson, was a founding member organization for this coalition in 2009, and has participated ever since on multiple projects, working groups and biannual meetings on a variety of human rights themes. A quick way to become involved is through the AAAS On-call Scientists, to target assistance where it is needed the most, by sharing your respective regional and systematic expertise in geography. Many universities may also have human rights and law centers seeking volunteers or affiliates. Imagine 12,000 geographers working together to solve the most difficult global challenges.

Recognize Those Who Make a Difference, and Stay Involved

I close this column with a reminder that there are numerous committees and awards for which to nominate AAG Members. Please honor those who work hard to make a difference by nominating someone today. Also, begin plans for your active participation in sessions, papers, posters, and field trips at the AAG Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. April 3-7, 2019. The AAG meeting themes for 2019 will include Geography Science and Human Rights, among others including Geography, Sustainability, and GIScience. Let’s make this our biggest annual meeting yet: we look forward to seeing you in Washington, D.C. Come home to Meridian Place!

Please share your ideas with me via email: slbeach [at] austin [dot] utexas [dot] edu

— Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach
Professor and Chair, Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin
President, American Association of Geographers

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0037

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New Books for Geographers

New Books: June 2018

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.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

June 2018

Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City circa 1968 by Mark Shiel (ed.) (Temple University Press 2018)

The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein (Haymarket Books 2018)

Climate Change and Human Mobility: Global Challenges to the Social Sciences by Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog Olwig (eds.) (Cambridge University Press 2017)

Communications/Media/Geographies by Paul C. Adams, Julie Cupples, Kevin Glynn, André Jansson, and Shaun Moores (Routledge 2017)

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour (Polity Books 2018)

An East Asian Challenge to Western Neoliberalism: Critical Perspectives on the ‘China Model’by Niv Horesh and Kean Fan Lim (Routledge 2018)

Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader by Christopher W. Wells (ed.) (University of Washington Press 2018)

The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative by Robert A. Voeks (Univeristy of Chicago Press 2018)

Food and Animal Welfareby Henry Buller and Emma Roe (Bloomsbury Academic 2018)

Franco-America in the Making: The Creole Nation Withinby Jonathan K. Gosnell (University of Nebraska Press 2018)

The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia by Natalie Koch (Cornell University Press 2018)

How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West by David Bernstein (University of Nebraska Press 2018)

Ice: Nature and Cultureby Klaus Dodds (Chicago University Press 2018)

Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change by Janelle S. Wong (Russell Sage Foundation 2018)

On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (Duke University Press 2018)

Popular Geopolitics: Plotting an Evolving Interdiscipline by Robert A. Saunders and Vlad Strukov (eds.) (Routledge 2018)

The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities by Clayton Nall (Cambridge University Press 2018)

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President's Column

As the Student Goes, So Goes Geography

This marks my last presidential column. Serving as President of the Association over the past year has been a true pleasure and honor. I have appreciated the opportunity to represent you and the discipline of geography. As someone who first began attending AAG meetings as a young graduate student, I never dreamed that one day I would be allowed to serve in this capacity. I would have never made it this far if not for the generous support of my academic programs, employers, mentors, and professional organizations. Thank you.

For my final remarks, I would like to come back to where it started for me and for so many of us—the student experience. Students are a large and important community within the AAG, constituting over 40% of membership. Recognizing this fact, the Association recently took the long overdue step of creating a Student Councilor position with full voting power on governance issues. Please join me in congratulating Sarah Stinard-Kiel of Temple University, who was just elected to serve in this role.

Our Association is increasingly interested in helping students take full advantage of their membership to reach their educational and professional aspirations. The recent New Orleans meeting saw career mentoring sessions, a networking happy hour, and other professional development discussions organized for students. These programs and the Student Councilor position signal a greater valuing of student voices and experiences than in the past, although there is still more that can and should be done.

In this column, I suggest that we might benefit from recognizing the capacity of students to be an important “compass” for assessing the current health and direction of geography and planning the future of the discipline and the AAG. The concept of compass, while a convenient and evocative metaphor for geographers, is also meant to capture the role that students already play and can play further in helping direct—rather than simply follow—the trajectory of the profession. There are a number of innovative student initiatives within geography that suggest that this leadership is already happening and that perhaps we need to rethink the traditional faculty-student divide in terms of disciplinary impact.

Foundational to my remarks is a firm belief that we need to create more opportunities to listen and respond to the views and concerns of our student members—building upon the strides underway in the AAG. This should be done at the level of individual programs, departments, and knowledge communities as well as the wider discipline and Association. As an early attempt at this process, I solicited feedback from undergraduate and graduate students within the AAG to several open-ended questions. It is impossible to do justice to the many wonderful responses received, but I wish to focus on a few key findings that might serve as points of intervention in the future.

I conclude this column with a “hail and farewell,” welcoming our new AAG President, paying tribute to our retiring Executive Director, and encouraging members to remain vigilant in supporting their colleagues and programs as we continue to move through an uncertain time.

Students decorated a whiteboard with their school logo at the International Reception held during the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans.

Student as Compass

It might strike some as strange to think of students as a compass. After all, it is the job and responsibility of faculty and other experienced practitioners to guide, mentor and facilitate the learning and preparation process for students and early career professionals. As I argued in my first president’s column, effective mentorship of those new to the field is crucial to the health and sustainability of geography. But, I also suggested in that same column that mentorship must be a two-way process between junior and senior colleagues; any and all of us can learn from others regardless of rank, reputation, and years in the game.

In my own experiences as a department head and faculty member and in my travels as AAG President, I have seen numerous instances of students being important mentors and leaders in geography. The classroom is an obvious place where our students have a major guiding influence. Graduate student instructors are often well versed in active learning strategies and they increasingly ask their departments and programs for more organized opportunities to hone these skills. It is not by accident that some of our best recruiters of undergraduate student majors and minors are graduate student teachers. Given this fact, it is strange that AAG teaching-related awards appear to be restricted—at least in practice—to faculty instructors.

Students play a compass role in contributing to and protecting the intellectual vitality of geography. They are at the forefront of discovery, collaborating with faculty rather than merely assisting them. And, in many instances, students guide and drive research innovation themselves. They are frequent participants at academic conferences. I would dare to say that some of our AAG Regional Division meetings would struggle to survive if not for student attendees. Students —including undergraduates—have led the organization of their own geography meetings. One of the most impressive of these efforts is the South Dakota State Geography Convention, which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2019. Student-led geography symposia are also found at Texas State University, University of Alberta, University College London, and my own University of Tennessee.

Students are also our compass in bringing key social and environmental problems and struggles to our attention and challenging us to do something about them. They are important voices of activism in a time when the stakes are high for effective science communication, evidence-based public debate, and social justice activism. The Youth Mappers Network is an impressive effort for cultivating student leaders who can leverage spatial data collection, analysis and visualization to support international development projects,crisis response, and public education about issues.

Students are proving to be passionate and determined advocates for the discipline. Students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently protested a proposal to eliminate the school’s Geography Program. I have been told that this show of geography student support, along with a letters written by alumni, made a real difference in convincing administrators of the need to take Nebraska Geography off the cut list.

Other students, such as Sarah Diamond, have advocated for fairness and consistency in the graduate student experience in geography. In 2015, Sarah proposed to the AAG Council a “best practices” document to guide departments in their relationships with graduate students. Although the guidelines went unapproved by the Council, they hold promise in encouraging geography programs to develop policies to ensure that students receive, among other things, objective progress evaluations, access to formal processes for handling harassment, and clearly defined expectations regarding authorship and ownership of intellectual property.

Sarah’s proposal suggested a best practice worthy of adoption across the discipline—namely that students should be treated as “professionals and junior colleagues.” To see students in this way disrupts the traditional social hierarchy within education that has long contributed to faculty elitism and made students to feel inferior or second class. Thinking of students—even undergraduates to some degree—as early professionals assists us in fully recognizing and realizing the contributions they make in shaping the field. The idea of “student as professional and junior colleague” also communicates the high expectations that we have for this community to take seriously their work and studies in geography—all of which has a direct bearing on the future of our discipline.

During small-group career mentoring sessions at the 2018 annual meeting in New Orleans students gathered to speak with experienced geography professionals and faculty members about creating resumes and cover letters, finding jobs using geography skills, choosing a graduate program and developing networks.

 

Creating Moments to Listen and Act

The idea of the student as a compass is meant to recognize the value of paying greater attention to the power of students to define agendas and advance conversations within geography, but it is also about being responsive to the personal and professional needs of students as we work with them to plan and build programs, workplaces, and associations. Students are important compass bearings for faculty, reminders of why we teach and the importance of keeping curriculum, technology, and policies current as we prepare and support the new generation of professional geographers.

The prominence and relevance of our discipline is ultimately tied to the personal, social, and career well-being of students. Recent research encourages “timely and ‘actionable’ dialogue around how to better support” this sense of well-being of students. Scholarship by geographers, in particular, highlights the need for departments to create “caring collectives” that move beyond a focus only on the “individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students.” Importantly, these collectives should address the non-academic as well as academic needs of students and mobilize a “distributed responsibility” for the care and support of students and wider disciplinary and academic communities.

One of the first ways of creating supportive and caring environments is to listen to students, using their feedback to think about where the discipline is going and where it needs to go in the future. I reached out several months ago to members of the AAG Graduate Student Affinity Group (GSAG) and the Undergraduate Student Affinity Group (USAG), asking them what anxieties they have about pursuing a career in geography, their perceptions about the effectiveness of their departments and the AAG as well as their ideas for new resources and tools to assist with their professional development. The comments of undergraduate and graduate students are collapsed because of space constraints, but clearly a full reporting would recognize that each group has its own unique perceptions and professional challenges. My hope is that even a brief summary of their comments might inform individual departments, the Council, and AAG staff as we support students and engage in further strategic planning and program development.

Perhaps expectedly, students expressed anxiety about landing employment after graduation, whether that is an academic position or one in another sector of the economy. In particular, among both undergraduate and graduate students, there is concern about finding non-academic employment, especially opportunities outside the area of GIS. There is also anxiety among students about geography being seen as less scientifically legitimate than other fields and hence hurting their employability. Graduate students especially worry about the neoliberal structure of universities, what they describe as a shrinking academic job market, and balancing the demands of work and life. Some students called for the creation of additional professional development seminars and workshops in their departments and at conferences to help them think through and strategize responses to these issues.

Students expressed satisfaction with and appreciation for their current programs and departments, but also note things that they would like to see improved. I used “departmental culture” in my initial prompt and students focused heavily on the things that compromise the culture in their programs. Problems identified include segregation and rivalries between sub-fields; a shortage of sufficient mentoring for students; a lack of engagement with the world outside academia; struggles to achieve gender diversity; and the difficulty in recruiting and retaining students and faculty of color. One respondent wanted her/his department to hold “town halls” in which students can air their concerns openly to faculty and administrators.

When asked about the effectiveness of the AAG, students gave high marks to the Association’s journals, annual meetings, public relations, policy involvement, free childcare at conferences, and networking opportunities. But respondents also had ideas about what needs to improve. Students would like to see AAG regional conferences more important and better attended. Several who provided feedback applauded the collective voice that Association has taken on political issues, but feel we can keep working in this area and make even stronger stands. Students appreciated the job resources provided by the AAG but they would also like to see a greater posting of non-academic jobs on its web site.

While students praised AAG’s ever expanding communication channels, they also asked that the Association use its organizational power to engage in more advertising of geography and getting geographers noticed by the public, other disciplines, and communities. A major concern among several students is the fact that geography remains a mostly white, male discipline. In the words of one respondent: “The AAG should find a way to productively engage this situation, including facilitating discussion on the degree to which it represents a problem, what the root causes are, and solutions.”

Finally, I asked undergraduate and graduate students about what additional resources, programs, or tools they would like to see developed by the AAG to assist them in their professional development and the overall health of geography. Their suggestions included: (1) periodic webinars on job searching, project management and consulting, and best practices in teaching, publishing, and writing grants; (2) podcast discussions with invited guests about timely research or the state of the discipline; (3) a regular column in the newsletter on career development for students and early-career professionals; (4) greater online job application materials, such as samples of cover letters and teaching philosophies specific to geography; (5) opportunities for conference attendees to get in touch with NGOs or other nonprofits in the city hosting the conference each year so that students can offer their services; and (6) more outreach to high schools and middle schools and greater pressure from AAG to have geography represented in state K-12 curriculum.

Many of the concerns identified by students mirror comments we receive from more senior colleagues, suggesting that students have a clear and quite sophisticated understanding of the challenges facing the discipline. Yet, students also identified concerns previously unknown to me. Importantly, they offered some “actionable” suggestions for supporting our student colleagues and improving the health of AAG and its geography programs.

Hail and Farewell

In July, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach of the University of Texas at Austin begins her term as AAG President. Sheryl will do a fantastic job. She brings a great deal of vision, energy, and leadership experience to the post. Sheryl has a highly engaged and conscientious set of Regional, National, and Student Councilors with whom to work. Our Council meeting in New Orleans was especially productive and marked by many hours of discussion, debate, and decision-making.

Like me, Sheryl will benefit from hearing directly from AAG members and learning about your successes, needs, and frustrations. Only by knowing these experiences can she guide the Council and the wider Association to identify and address the issues affecting geographers across a range of institutional and vocational settings. I encourage you to reach out not only to Sheryl but to all AAG Councilors with your views, ideas, and concerns.

Executive Director Doug Richardson recently announced that he is transitioning to retirement; the 2019 AAG meeting in Washington D.C. will be his last in that capacity. A committee in charge of searching for a new executive director has been constituted and will soon begin its work. In his over 17 years of leadership, Doug has helped the AAG achieve great success in growing membership, creating a major endowment, enhancing the profile of the Association’s publications, achieving record-level annual meeting attendance, and advocating for the value of geography in research, education, and public policy circles. Please join me in congratulating and thanking Doug for his tireless and excellent service-leadership.

While we have much to be proud of, we cannot lose sight of the difficulties faced by fellow students, faculty, and other professionals in geography. Some have endured austere budget cuts, crippling natural disasters, the potential elimination of departments and majors, travel bans and inhumane border security, the trauma of harassment and discrimination, and state attacks on academic freedom, science, and progressive scholarship. Please consider lending your aid and solidarity to these embattled colleagues. If just one of us—individually, collectively, or programmatically—is under attack, then the entire discipline is weakened and vulnerable.

Please share your thoughts and experiences by emailing me (dalderma [at] utk [dot] edu) or share on Twitter #PresidentAAG.

— Derek Alderman

Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee
President, American Association of Geographers
Twitter: @MLKStreet

I wish to express special appreciation to Doug Allen, Lauren Gerlowski, Chris Hair, Shadi Maleki, and Mia Renauld for their assistance in collecting student feedback and preparing this column.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0036

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Derek Alderman
Derek Alderman
New Books for Geographers

New Books: May 2018

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.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.

May 2018

Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West by Peter H. Hassrick (ed.) (University of Oklahoma Press 2018)

Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity by Mohammed A. Bamyeh (Rowman and Littlefield 2010)

Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land by Stephen E. Strom (University of Arizona Press 2018)

A Biography of the State by Christopher Wilkes (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2018)

Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman by Mark Jackson (ed.) (Routledge 2018)

Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee by Courtney Elizabeth Knapp (University of North Carolina Press 2018)

Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia by Lina del Castillo (University of Nebraska Press 2018)

Delicious Geography: From Place to Plate by Gary Fuller and T. M. Reddekopp (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)

The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea by Simon Springer (Rowman and Littlefield 2019)

Environmental Geopolitics by Shannon O’Lear (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

Fashioning the Canadian Landscape: Essays on Travel Writing, Tourism, and National Identity in the Pre-Automobile Era by J. I. Little (University of Toronto Press 2018)

Geographies of Disorientation by Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg (Routledge 2018)

Geographies of Plague Pandemics: The Spatial-Temporal Behavior of Plague to the Modern Day by Mark Welford)

The Geopolitics of Real Estate: Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights by Dallas Rogers (Rowman and Littlefield 2016)

Global Jewish Foodways: A History by Hasia R. Diner and Simone Cinotto (eds.) (University of Nebraska Press 2018)

Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel (Reaktion Books 2018)

Historicizing Humans: Deep Time, Evolution, and Race in Nineteenth-Century British Sciences by Efram Sera-Shriar (ed.) (University of Pittsburgh Press 2018)

Honduras in Dangerous Times: Resistance and Resilience by James J. Phillips (Lexington Books 2017)

How to Lie with Maps, Third Edition by Mark Monmonier (University of Chicago Press 2018)

The International Handbook of Political Ecology by Raymond L. Bryant (ed.) (Edward Elgar Publishing 2018)

Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth by Valerie Olson (University of Minnesota Press 2018)

Kropotkin: The Politics of Community by Brian Morris (PM Press 2018)

Love, Order, and Progress: The Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Auguste Comte by Michel Bourdeau, Mary Pickering, and Warren Schmaus (eds.) (University of Pittsburgh Press 2018)

Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda by Donald Hoffmann (University of Missouri Press 2018)

New World Postcolonial: The Political Thought of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega by James W. Fuerst (University of Pittsburgh Press 2018)

Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon by E. Elena Songster (Oxford University Press 2018)

Power and Progress on the Prairie: Governing People on Rosebud Reservation by Thomas Biolsi (University of Minnesota Press 2018)

Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes by Edward Slavishak (Johns Hopkins University Press 2018)

Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste by Josh Lepawsky (The MIT Press 2018)

A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America by Bruce Kraig (Reaktion Books 2017)

Territory Beyond Terra by Kimberley Peters, Philip Steinberg, and Elaine Stratford (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

Turkey: An Economic Geography by Aksel Ersoy (I.B. Tauris 2018)

US Public Memory, Rhetoric, and the National Mall by Roger C. Aden (ed.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility by James A. Tyner (University of Nebraska Press 2018)

Workers’ Movements and Strikes in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective by Jörg Nowak, Madhumita Dutta, and Peter Birke (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)

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AAG Staff

Robert W. Kates

Robert W. Kates, geographer, sustainability scientist, beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, died in Trenton, ME, April 21, 2018. He was 89 years old.

He was a professor of Geography at Clark University, Director of the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University, and most recently Presidential Professor of Sustainability Science at the University of Maine.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 31, 1929. Following high school, he studied at NYU. He married Eleanor (Hackman) Kates when he was 19, a marriage that would last 68 years. They moved to Gary, Indiana, where Bob worked in a steel mill for twelve years, and where their three children, Katherine, Jon, and Barbara were born.

Thinking it would be nice to have a job with summers off so he could take his family camping, Bob enrolled in night courses with an eye to becoming a schoolteacher. An instructor who noted his apparent academic aptitude introduced him to University of Chicago geography department chairman Gilbert White, who would become Bob’s life-long friend and academic mentor. Dr. White facilitated Bob’s admission to the University’s post-graduate geography program, despite his lacking an undergraduate degree.

It would be an understatement to say that Bob thrived in this academic environment. Thirteen years following receipt of his PhD in 1962, Kates was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his groundbreaking work in a variety of geography-related fields. He was a recipient in the first annual MacArthur Fellowship in 1981.

Over his multi-faceted career, Bob Kates received multiple awards and honors including the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1991, Honorary Doctorates from Clark University and the University of Maine, the American Geographical Society’s Charles P. Daley medal, the Stanley Brun Award for Creativity from the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and most recently a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Human Dimensions of Global Change section of the AAG.

He served as the president of the AAG, and was proud to be a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Bob’s academic career was prolific and spanned several interrelated areas. His earliest work was in natural hazards and human perception of environmental risk. His research took him worldwide, from studying reconstruction efforts following the Alaska earthquake in 1964 to helping create what is now the Institute of Resource Assessment in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Later his work broadened to how, in his words, “hazards, nature, technology and society interact to generate both vulnerability and resilience.” This led to work in population studies, hunger reduction, natural resource management, climate change, and foundational contributions to the emerging field of sustainability science.

A geographer by training, Bob’s curiosity and creativity were not constrained by traditional academic disciplines. He loved to ask big questions: “Why does hunger persist amid a world of plenty, and what can be done to end it?”; “How has humankind transformed the earth; indeed, can life be sustained?”; “Can there be a transition to sustainability that over the next two generations would meet human needs, while maintaining the essential life support systems of the planet?”

To help answer such questions, Bob enlisted hundreds of people from the world of academics, policy-makers, and international organizations to work on answers and solutions. His ability to combine ideas that at first glance do not seem to belong together was matched by his ability to engage and recruit wide circles of people from diverse fields to work together. His work style was collaborative: He helped author several books and hundreds of papers, many of which were in conjunction with others.

Confronted with the daunting scope of the problems he studied, Bob’s mode was to fuse academic rigor with a commitment to find achievable goals that could, in his words, “in some small way help change the world.” The question he often shared with his family, underlying all the rest, was “How does one do good in the world?” His lifelong concern with social justice and human rights made him unwilling to divorce practice from theory, to dismiss incremental improvements in people’s lives, or to lose hope.

For example, during his time directing the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program, Kates helped develop a program not only to define the scope of global hunger, but also to develop an international multi-component plan to address it. The typical “Kates question” that shaped the program was not how to end world hunger. Instead, it was “What could be done to cut world hunger in half, in the following decade?” What concrete measures were possible, what resources were required, what it would cost, who could pay for it, then how to advocate for action? Bob’s prodigious energy, organizing talent, and inveterate optimism made such undertakings possible.

Bob was predeceased by his wife Eleanor in 2016. He leaves his children: Katherine Kates and her husband Dennis Chinoy, Jonathan Kates, Barbara Kates and her husband Sol Goldman. He leaves six grandchildren: Sam Kates-Goldman, Miriam Kates-Goldman, Shanyu Wang Kates, Sara Kates-Chinoy and her husband, Eric Nelson, Jesse Kates-Chinoy and his wife Mariemm Pleitez, Hannah Shepard and her husband Wade Shepard. He also leaves four great grandchildren: Petra Shepard, Rivka Shepard, Jack Nelson and Ezra Nelson.

Bob loved his family dearly as his life’s bedrock, and welcomed each new member, by birth or by marriage, into the family circle. He was gratified to live long enough to see his grandchildren launched on their various life adventures.

His health declined over the last several years. When his energy and capacity waned, he reluctantly relinquished his engagement with long-time friends and colleagues, and took comfort in the love and care of his family. He continued to relish a tasty grilled steak, a good mystery novel, Patriots football games, and the view from his deck overlooking Trenton Narrows. He died suddenly and painlessly the day before Earth Day.

To foster continuing work regarding his quest, “What is, and ought to be, the human use of the earth?”, gifts in Bob’s memory may be made online to the Robert W. Kates Fund for Creative Graduate Studies at umainefoundation.org/memorial to benefit the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine. Or donations can be mailed to the University of Maine Foundation, Two Alumni Place, Orono, ME 04469 with a note that it is for the Mitchell Center Robert Kates Fund.

A memorial service will be held sometime this summer.

Source: https://obituaries.bangordailynews.com/obituary/robert-kates-1929-2018-1057279836

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Newsletters

Newsletter – April 2018

PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

Making AAG Meetings More Public

By Derek Alderman

Derek Alderman's Making AAG Meetings More Public illustration of raised hands to comment/thought balloonsWe are just days away from the start of the AAG annual meeting. I look forward to seeing many of you in New Orleans. For most of us, participating in the conference is work. It may be a labor of love, but it represents, nonetheless, a significant investment in terms of money, energy, and time. Please know that your investment and work on behalf of the discipline and the Association at the meeting is appreciated…No doubt, conferences should be about the work of building disciplinary bonds and expertise; however, I would suggest our meetings potentially offer an even wider array of professional interactions and benefits that open us to new places, people, and skills. In this column, I discuss the value, but also the challenges, of making our AAG meetings more public-oriented.

Continue Reading.

Read past columns from the current AAG President on our President’s Column page.

ANNUAL MEETING

Emerging Workforce Scholars Program at the AAG Jobs and Careers Center

Launched at the 2017 Annual Meeting in Boston, the AAG’s Emerging Workforce Scholars program enables aspirational community college and undergraduate students from underserved New Orleans-area communities to attend the Annual Meeting and interact with geography and geoscience professionals to learn about the work they perform and the preparation required for careers in their field. This year, the AAG is proud to partner with Limitless Vistas, Inc., New Orleans Flood Protection Authority-East, Delgado Community College Workforce Development, University of New Orleans Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, and others to make this another successful career exploration program. Plan to attend the program Keynote with Ron Spooner, chief engineer for the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (S&WB) and Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and extend a warm welcome to the Emerging Scholars as they explore careers in geography and the geosciences!

See more information about the Emerging Workforce Scholars Program and events.

Go Green by Downloading the AAG Mobile App

AAG-App-Quad-baby250-209x300Make the most of your AAG annual meeting experience by downloading the AAG mobile app, the digital version of the AAG Annual Meeting Program. With the AAG mobile app, attendees can browse sessions and abstracts, create and save a personalized schedule of events, and find up to the minute information about room changes or upcoming activities. A detailed user manual is available for download on the AAG Annual Meeting website. Don’t wait until you’re standing in the registration line, download the AAG mobile app before you get to New Orleans!

Get started with the AAG mobile app.

Cheer on your Regional Team at the 2018 World Geography Bowl

The annual round robin tournament features teams of students from each of the AAG Regional Divisions competing for both a team championship title and individually for an MVP Award. The 2018 World Geography Bowl will be held on Wednesday, April 11 starting at 7:30 PM in the Bayside A-C, Oak Alley, and Nottoway rooms on the 4th Floor of the Sheraton hotel, one floor down from the International Reception. Stop by on your way to the reception or join in to watch the championship round after the reception concludes! Prizes donated from generous sponsors are awarded to winning teams and individuals.

Learn more about the bowl.

Family Activities, Childcare, and Dining in New Orleans

Are you bringing your whole family with you to #AAG2018? The AAG has compiled a list of activities everyone will enjoy throughout the week in the Crescent City, including this walking tour of the area: New Orleans, Unmonumentalized by Brian Marks. Don’t forget, the AAG will also be offering subsidized on site childcare for ages 6 months to 12 years between the hours of 7:00 AM – 8:00 PM on Tuesday; 7:30 AM – 7:30 PM on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; and 7:30 AM – 6:00 PM on Saturday during the conference. Want to check out the local food scene? Skeeter Dixon has gathered some dining suggestions for those looking to try out an Oyster Bar, Po Boy, or cocktail.

Find family activities and dining.

Jobs and Careers Center at the 2018 Annual Meeting

The Jobs and Careers Center will be open daily from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM daily during #AAG2018. Stop by for over 65 sessions, workshops, and field trips related to careers and professional development. Sessions will cover a broad range of topics, from working as a geographer in the public, private, nonprofit, or academic sector, to networking strategies, to becoming a certified GIS Professional (GISP), to women in leadership roles in geography. Students, be sure to attend the Student Networking Happy Hour on Thursday, April 12 from 3:00 – 5:00 pm.

Full schedule of Jobs and Careers events.

FocusOnNewOrleansLogo

Flood Control Infrastructure and ‘Political Hydrology’ along the LA-TX Gulf Coast

Flooding still represents the costliest natural disasters in the United States on an annual basis, explains Paul F. Hudson of Leiden University. New Orleans, site of the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting, has seen its fair share of flood events, with Hurricane Katrina damages totalling $153.0 billion and Hurricane Harvey disaster-related expenses expected to rise beyond Katrina’s costs. President Obama’s Executive Order 13690 was expected to help decrease the monetary costs associated with flood occurrences, however it was recently overturned. Hudson outlines the goals of EO 13690 and compares action in the United States with recent work in the Netherlands. Annual Meeting.

Continue Reading.

Southwest Louisiana’s Creole Trail Riding Clubs

While many outsiders may be familiar with the larger Mardis Gras parades and festivals in Louisiana, fewer people know about the trail riding events of the state’s Creole riding clubs. Alexandra Giancarlo elaborates on the history of Creoles in southwest Louisiana and the cultural trail riding events that continue today, many now as fundraising opportunities for charity events or to help local community members. Look for Giancarlo’s #AAG2018 field trip exploring this topic: Zydeco, Gumbo, and Black Innovators: A Day Trip to Southwestern Louisiana Creole Country.

Read the full story.

New Orleans: Place Portraits

med_bourbon-street-street-sign-at-lafitte-s-blacksmith-shop-300x200The Big Easy has always been cool, but the geography of cultural strongholds in the city has changed over time. Bourbon Street in the 1930s was a hotbed of nightlife with its 63 nightclub establishments, some of the first in the United States. But is Bourbon Street, with its critics’ claims of inauthenticity, still considered “cool” today? Richard Campanella of the Tulane School of Architecture and New Orleans’ unofficial “geographer laureate” maps out the historical geography of coolness in the Crescent City, ending with a call to see Bourbon Street as post-cool, a “triumph of localism.”

“Focus on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast” is an ongoing series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the greater Gulf Coast region in preparation for the 2018 Annual Meeting.

ASSOCIATION NEWS

2018 AAG Book Awards Announced

honors and awardsThe AAG is pleased to announce the recipients of the three 2018 AAG Book Awards: the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, the AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography, and the AAG Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography. The AAG Book Awards mark distinguished and outstanding works published by geography authors during the previous year, 2017. Formal recognition of the awardees will occur during the AAG Awards Luncheon at the Annual Meeting on Saturday, April 14, 2018.

See the Awardees.

MEMBER NEWS

Jepson named a 2018-19 AAAS Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellow

Wendy Jepson, professor of Geography at Texas A&M University, was named a AAAS Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellow for the class of 2018-2019. Jepson, who was recently elected an AAG National Councilor, is one of the 15 food and water security researchers chosen to represent this year’s class of fellows. The goals of the Leshner Leadership Institute are not only to address scientific issues surrounding resource availability, but also to better engage the public through science/society dialog.

Read more about Jepson.

Profiles of Professional Geographers

Geographers Cristi Delgado, GISP, Enterprise GIS & Open Data Coordinator for the City of Berkeley, California and Paul McDaniel, Assistant Professor of Geography at Kennesaw State University love the ways that a career in geography connects them with current events and their communities. In this month’s Profiles of Professional Geographers, read about their varied career paths and the diverse skills needed to pursue employment in the geographic field.

Learn more about Geography careers.

IN MEMORIAM

Alfred W. Crosby

Alfred W. Crosby died peacefully at Nantucket Cottage Hospital among friends and family on March 14, 2018. He was 87 and had lived with Parkinson’s Disease for two decades. During his career, Crosby taught at Albion College, the Ohio State University, Washington State University, and the University of Texas at Austin, retiring in 1999 as Professor Emeritus of Geography, History, and American Studies. In addition to his many accolades, Crosby was also involved in the Civil Rights movement, taught Black Studies and the history of American jazz, helped to build a medical center for the United Farm Workers’ Union, and took a leadership role in anti-war demonstrations.

Read more.

POLICY

Omnibus Appropriations Bill Includes AAG-Supported Increases for Research Agencies

Image-118 capitol building

The AAG continues to monitor federal decisions of importance to geography and our members. On March 23, President Trump signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill that funds the federal government through the end of Fiscal Year 2018 (September 30). The legislation provides increased appropriations for many programs of importance to geographers, listed in the full AAG report of this bill. The AAG has repeatedly supported robust funding for federal science agencies, and we will continue to promote the value of research programs as Congress moves on to consideration of 2019 budgets. Unfortunately, the omnibus does not include a fix for the popular DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program.

Full report available.

RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of ‘Annals’ on “Smart Spaces and Places”

Annals-cvr-2017The Annals of the American Association of Geographers seeks contributions for a Special Issue on the topic of Smart Spaces and Places. ‘Smart’ technologies have advanced rapidly throughout society (e.g. autonomous vehicles, smart energy, smart health, smart living, smart cities, smart environment, and smart society) and across geographic spaces and places. We welcome theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to address questions such as how to make spaces and places ‘smart’, how the ‘smartness’ affects the way we perceive, analyze, and visualize spaces and places, and what role geographies play in knowledge production and decision making in such a ‘smart’ era. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted by email to Jennifer Cassidento (jcassidento [at] aag [dot] org) by April 30, 2018.

Read the full call.

Early Career Faculty and Department Leadership Workshops

On behalf of the Geography Faculty Development Alliance, the AAG is pleased to announce the 2018 Early Career and Department Leadership Workshops! These annual workshops for early career faculty and late career graduate students or geography department leaders will be held at the George Washington University in D.C. from June 10-16, 2018 (early career) and June 13-16, 2018 (department leaders).

More information and registration available.

NCRGE Transformative Research in Geography Education Funding

NCRGE_logoThe National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE) invites proposals to develop new collaborative and interdisciplinary research networks in geography education. Through this program, NCRGE aspires to strengthen geography education research processes and promote the growth of sustainable, and potentially transformative, lines of research. Along this vein, NCRGE is also hosting a series of sessions in Transformative Research in Geography Education at the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting.

Funding proposal deadline May 15, 2018.

PUBLICATIONS

‘Southeastern Geographer’ Special Issues on Geographies of Louisiana and Black Geographies

southeast_geographerIn recognition of the location of AAG’s 2018 Annual Meeting in New Orleans and Black Geographies as one of the three meeting themes, Southeastern Geographer offers free access to digital issues on Geographies of Louisiana and Black Geographies. Since its founding in 1962, Southeastern Geographer has often published research on issues before they were the “hot-topics” of today, including racial segregation evident in residential neighborhoods, electoral geographies, Confederate monuments, and long-term weather patterns with implications for climate change. Papers selected from across several decades demonstrate some of the breadth of such work. The digital issues will be available with open access until May 31, 2018. After that, they will be accessible through Project MUSE’s standard subscription.

Browse Geographies of Louisiana or Black Geographies.

May 2018 Issue of the ‘Professional Geographer’ Now Available

PG coverThe Professional Geographer, Volume 70, Issue 2, has been published. Of note to geographers interested in the Public Engagement theme for #AAG2018, the focus section in this issue is Out in the World: Geography’s Complex Relationship with Civic Engagement. The issue also includes short articles in academic or applied geography, emphasizing empirical studies and methodologies.

See the newest issue.

New Books in Geography — February 2018 Available

New Books in Geography illustration of stack of books

Each month the AAG publishes a list of newly-published books in geography and related fields. Books compiled from the month of February include titles by David Harvey and topics ranging from the 2016 election to GIS and drones to poverty and place.

Browse the whole list of new books.

Read the March 2018 Issue of the ‘Annals of the AAG’

Annals-cvr-2017

Every year since 2009 our flagship journal, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, has published a special issue that highlights geographic research around a significant global theme. The tenth special issue of the Annals, published in March 2018, brings together 27 articles on the topic of Social Justice and the City, edited by Nik Heynen.

Full article listing available.

Winter 2018 Issue of ‘The AAG Review of Books’ Now Available

Volume 6, Issue 1 of The AAG Review of Books has now been published online. In this first issue of 2018 be sure to check out the discussions of Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation, Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market, and Cities in Global Capitalism.

Read the reviews.

FEATURED ARTICLES

Stop Teaching GIS

By David DiBiase

Teach how to learn GIS instead. …
… Since the late 1990s, over 10,000 students have taken [Nature of Geographic Information, part of Penn State’s online GIS programs], and most have expressed satisfaction with their experiences. Penn State colleagues and students helped me update the course incrementally. But the geospatial field has changed fundamentally since the late 1990s, and the Penn State Online program, which the course was designed to introduce, has evolved and expanded along with it. Equally important, our understanding of how people learn (and, in particular, how they learn online) has advanced considerably. Nearly 20 years on, Nature of Geographic Information was overdue for a complete makeover.

Continue reading.

Featured Articles is a special section of the AAG Newsletter where AAG sponsors highlight recent programs and activities of significance to geographers and members of the AAG. To sponsor the AAG and submit an article, please contact Oscar Larson olarson [at] aag [dot] org.

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Annual Meeting

New Orleans, Unmonumentalized

Much has been said and written about the recent removal of four New Orleanian monuments to Confederate leaders and an 1874 white supremacist uprising[1] [2]. More will be said at the Annual Meeting. The wide-ranging struggle over New Orleanian monuments includes how those memorials (re)defined New Orleans’ place in American space and time around Lost Cause ideology, variously comforting, threatening, affirming and negating certain historical/geographical narratives about the city, the American South, and the United States as a whole. They rendered the Confederate cause noble, the South distinctive yet within an American nationalist imaginary of post-bellum reconciliation and “redemption,” and simultaneously championed white supremacy while obscuring and/or glorifying the violence necessary to secure and maintain it. [3]

What New Orleans’ Confederate monument boosters wanted to do to and through monumentalized public spaces is important, as are the efforts of Take ‘Em Down NOLA to redefine those spaces, this city, and the American national story through monument removal. Geographers have written about the broader questions of historical memory and memorialization in the American South[4]. In considering the meaning-making done by and against Confederate monuments in the Crescent City, we should not forget what unmonumentalized places, events, and people do to historical memory, what I call the political geography of forgetting inconvenient history in New Orleans. What historical events unheralded in public spaces do to collective memory and the political definition of place can be as important as those monumentalized. Think of those numerous small plaques, sidewalk markers, and “stumbling stones” in Paris, Berlin, and other European cities to the deported and murdered in the Holocaust; Before their installation, the fact of Nazi extermination of Jewish life was largely invisible in contemporary urban landscapes, or confined to museums and monuments instead of distributed through quotidian spaces where those absent lives were lived and ended. Think also of how few, and recent, are Parisian memorials to Algerians killed in that city during France’s dirty war against Algerian independence. The relative visibility of memorializations of German (and Vichy French) state violence against Jews and the Resistance in the 1940s and near-invisibility in public space of French state violence against Algerians and Leftists in the 1950s and ‘60s both reflects and reinforces France’s belated historical reckoning with collaboration in World War Two and ongoing historical amnesia of crimes by “good” Republican, Gaullist France twenty years later.

New Orleans’ passage through black slavery and slave resistance, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction and its counter-revolutionary rollback are the historical backdrop upon which Confederate monumentalization rested. Here, I wish to address a few historical sites within an easy walk from the AAG Annual Meeting that have remained unmemorialized, which are foundational to not just this city’s past and its reality today, but are constitutive of major aspects of America’s present reality. Check them out while you’re visiting New Orleans for the Annual Meeting. And if you do, consider what it means for our past, our present and our future these places aren’t part of the stories we tell ourselves about where we came from and how that shapes the prefigurative politics of who we are and can imagine ourselves becoming.

Historical sites mentioned here: [1] Jackson Square, where Jean St. Malo was executed in 1784; [2] The Omni Hotel, formerly the site of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, New Orleans’ most opulent slave auction site; [3] The corner of O’Keefe and Common Streets, scene of the 1866 New Orleans Massacre; [4] Lower Canal Street, site of the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place; [5] Former site of Orleans Parish Prison, currently inside Armstrong Park. Where 11 Italians were lynched in 1891. Conference hotels: [A] The New Orleans Sheraton; [B] The New Orleans Marriott; [C] The Crowne Plaza Hotel. (Courtesy, Brian Marks)

Start in Jackson Square at the heart of the French Quarter. During the Spanish colonial period, this was the Plaza de Armas at the foot of the seat of the colonial government and Catholic cathedral. As a slave society initiated by French colonists in 1719 and expanded by the Spanish, Louisiana was home to maroon communities of African people who emancipated themselves from bondage by retreating into wetlands behind the high ground near the Mississippi River from which plantations were cut out of the forests and cane brakes of South Louisiana. One of those people history has recorded was Jean Saint Malo, who led a community of Maroons east of New Orleans in present-day Saint Bernard Parish before his capture by Spanish slave-catchers in 1784. He was executed in today’s Jackson Square on June 19, 1784. There’s no historical marker of this event, or St. Malo’s life, in the Square. The hugely important role of African people in building colonial New Orleans and making a Revolutionary Atlantic, from the Louisiana maroons, the Haitian Revolution forcing France to sell Louisiana to the United States, the Haitian refugees who came to New Orleans in the 1790s and greatly shaped the city, to the Haitian-inspired 1811 slave uprising in St. John the Baptist parish not far from the city, are largely a constitutive absence in New Orleans’ public memory.[5]From Jackson Square, head down Chartres Street (it’s pronounced ‘Charters’ by locals) two blocks to the Omni Hotel on the corner of St. Louis and Chartres. This hotel sits on the former location of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel[6], built in the 1830s and the site of the most prominent slave market in the city, a city which in the 1850s had at least 50 different businesses buying and selling enslaved people. Five different slave auctioneers, buyers, and holding pens were located on this street corner alone; another cluster was around Esplanade and Decatur on the other side of the Quarter, a third in the modern CBD just west of Canal Street along Baronne Street. In a very material way, these innocuous New Orleans intersections were the beating heart, the nerve center, the financial nexus of that enormous engine of human suffering, forced migration, and economic valorization we call the American domestic slave trade. And it was that trade that pushed black slavery, Native American land dispossession, and the pernicious circuit of slave/land/cash crop accumulation westward through the South. The domestic trade centered upon New Orleans revived, through that territorial expansion, what might have been a stagnant institution, augmenting the tremendous political and economic power of the Slave South the United States of America, and later the Confederate States of America, fought so hard to sustain, expand, and defend from any challenge. And while the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge now has a permanent exhibit on the New Orleans’ role in the slave trade, and the Historic New Orleans Collection put on an important exhibition on the city in the domestic slave trade in 2015[7], consider what it says not about New Orleans’, but about America’s, blindness to its history there exists today but one humble brass plaque acknowledging any of this in those New Orleanian neighborhoods through which so many thousands of enslaved people were bought and sold, through which the destiny of 19th Century North America was cast, making first the Mexican-American War and later the American Civil War inevitable.

CHANGE. Architectural remnant of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, home to one of New Orleans’ dozens of slave markets, built into the existent Omni Hotel. 400th block of Chartres Street, French Quarter. (Courtesy, Brian Marks)

In the St. Louis, people were auctioned under a grand dome in an auditorium ringed with decorative columns. In this city where slave markets and holding pens were ubiquitous, only two historical markers exist; in Algiers, across the river from the French Quarter, a marker attests to the landing site where thousands of enslaved people arrived from the Middle Passage. Across the street from the Omni is a marker on The Original Pierre Maspero’s Restaurant (440 Chartres) acknowledging that building was once the site of a slave auction. One architectural detail on Chartres hints at the former occupant of that block, part of the word ‘[EX]CHANGE’ preserved on an arch of the former St. Louis Exchange that was incorporated into the Omni, built on the site in 1960. It’s a poignant reminder of what this place was and how the materiality of New Orleans’ central role in the domestic slave trade survives in spite of the erasure of this memory from the city’s sidewalks and buildings.

O’Keefe Street looking towards Canal Street, overlooking the site of the 1866 New Orleans massacre. (Courtesy Brian Marks, March 2018)

Keep walking down Chartres to Canal Street and turn right. Go up Canal four blocks and cross Canal to Roosevelt Way, then one more block to the corner of O’Keefe and Common. At this location a year after the end of the Civil War, on July 30, 1866, a meeting was held in the de facto State Capitol, the New Orleans Mechanic’s Institute, to amend the 1864 Louisiana Constitution, which did not guarantee equal voting rights to all men over 21, to include universal male suffrage. While slavery had been abolished through the 13th Amendment the year prior, black voting rights and civil rights more generally were flagrantly suppressed throughout the South, including Louisiana. The state’s Republican legislators and freedmen, many Union Army veterans, wanted to put into the state Constitution what would eventually become the 15th Amendment. That late July afternoon in 1866, around 1:30pm, a pro-voting rights march of black army veterans and others, marching from the Treme neighborhood just north of the French Quarter to the Mechanic’s Institute was met at O’Keefe and Common by an armed crowd of ex-Confederates and off-duty New Orleans Police and Firemen who attacked the march and subsequently the convention delegates inside the Capitol; at least 37 people were killed and more than 100 injured on this street and in the building, long since demolished.[8]

The same street view (as previous photo) during the massacre, from the perspective of the police/civilian assailants’ skirmish line. From Harper’s Magazine, August 1866. (Courtesy Brian Marks)

The 1866 New Orleans Massacre wasn’t just a local story; outrage over the killings nationwide was one of the precipitating events in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the Republican sweep of Congress in 1866 and 1868, the implementation of Military Reconstruction in the South and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. And yet, there’s no public memorialization of where it happened in New Orleans. Why is that? And what does it do to how Americans think about how their country came to be what it is today, or how New Orleanians imagine their city in American history, that it remains unacknowledged in public space?

Head back to Canal Street, towards the river and the conference hotels for the Annual Meeting. Right where you’ll be crossing Canal Street many times with your fellow tote-bag toting AAG’ers between the Marriott and the Sheraton, this was a battlefield in an uprising against the United States on September 14, 1874. And the rebels won that day. Here along Canal Street down to Decatur near the river front, the Battle of Liberty Place saw the White League, a white supremacist paramilitary insurgency who sought to overthrow the Reconstruction state government of Louisiana, attack, defeat, and besiege the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, the State Militia, and the city and state government. Three dozen people were shot and killed in the battle. One block down from the Marriott at the Customs House, now the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium (423 Canal Street), Louisiana’s Governor, Republican loyalists, and U.S. Army troops were besieged for three days by 5,000 White Leaguers before military reinforcements arrived.[9] Even though Reconstruction in Louisiana survived until 1877, Liberty Place and many other related episodes of anti-Reconstruction violence around Louisiana and across the region between 1873 and 1876 affected a counter-revolution in the American South, known by its participants as “Redemption.” This counter-revolution ended black voting and civil rights, removed black elected officials from office, and cancelled the limited economic and public educational reforms that were attempted during Reconstruction.[10]

Canal Street looking towards the Mississippi with the two main conference hotels in view (the Marriott on the left, the Sheraton on the right). (Courtesy Brian Marks, March 2018)

New Orleans was, again, central to these processes. The two 1870s U.S. Supreme Court cases that gutted the 14th Amendment’s civil rights protections for nearly a century implicated this city. The Slaughterhouse cases[11] (1873) – ostensibly about New Orleans’ municipal government power to regulate water pollution from dumping offal from abattoirs upriver from the city’s drinking water intakes – were hijacked into a broad constitutional judgment voiding federal power to enforce citizens’ civil rights violated by state governments. A short drive from the conference to the corner of Harmony Street and Tchoupitoulas (it’s pronounced CHOP-it-TOOL-us) takes you to as close as you can get to that former river batture dumping site, now occupied by the Port of New Orleans. And you guessed it, there’s no public memorial or signage or acknowledgment of this place’s historic role in undermining the enforcement of the 14th Amendment until the mid-1960s.

Illustration of the White League routing the New Orleans Metropolitan Police in the Battle of Liberty Place, September 14th 1874. This view from the middle of Canal Street roughly between the two main conference hotels. The view is facing east towards the Customs House, currently the Audubon Insectarium. Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 1874. (Courtesy Brian Marks)

The case U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), tried in New Orleans district court before heading to Washington, destroyed the last vestige of federal enforcement power against constitutional civil rights violations.[12] Cruikshank was among the few indicted by federal agents for the infamous April 13, 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which more than 100 African-Americans were slaughtered at the Grant Parish courthouse by a white mob in the course of overthrowing the local, pro-Reconstruction, government.[13] (In that tiny North Louisiana town of Colfax, the official State of Louisiana historical marker emplaced in 1950 reads – today, in 2018 – the “Colfax Riot” … “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” A private memorial, dating to 1921, in that town’s graveyard to the three white rioters who died in the violence acknowledges they fell “fighting for white supremacy.” Following his initial trial in New Orleans, Cruikshank was acquitted by the U.S. Supreme Court who ruled the federal government overstepped its powers to enforce federal constitutional guarantees violated by state and local governments. This confirmed black people could be massacred with impunity and the national government would not intervene to hold them criminally responsible.

New Orleans did not fail to memorialize the Battle of Liberty Place. The problem is the city, soon after the insurrection, decided to honor and glorify the insurgents with a stone obelisk erected on Canal Street in 1891, relocated a short distance in 1993, and finally removed in 2017. This column is not about whether that monument or others in New Orleans should have been removed, but I do note that today there’s nothing in the area that tells the story of what really happened there in 1874, how it led directly to the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, impunity for anti-black violence, and disenfranchisement for 90 years, or what America would be like if history had gone another way, if equal voting rights had been enforced, if Reconstruction had not been subverted and different people with a different agenda had served in that pivotal Southern Congressional bloc in the following century. My opinion is we’d have had the legislation passed in the New Deal and Great Society about 50 years sooner, and a very different regional and racial distribution of wealth and power in this country. To not teach the historical/geographical hinge a site like the Battle of Liberty Place pivots between diverging paths in the making of America, the one taken that led us to this moment and another forsaken, is to rob us of our collective imagination to make a different future. In that sense, it’s not enough to just take down the monument.[14]

A last stop, assuming your feet don’t hurt too much already, is back up Canal Street, once more past the throngs of geographers, all the way to Rampart Street at the northern boundary of the Quarter. Turn right and follow Rampart to Armstrong Park, just past Congo Square, and go through the main, archway entrance opposite St. Ann Street. Inside the park, near where the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for the Performing Arts now stands, was the old Orleans Parish Prison. At this location the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants took place on March 14, 1891, an event that resonated widely to catalyze nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment in American public opinion.[15] The New Orleans of the 1880s and 1890s attracted thousands of Italian immigrants, many of them Sicilians, who worked on the docks, ran small shops, and did truck farming.[a] So many Sicilians crowded into the French Quarter, back then a decaying slum, that it earned the nickname ‘Little Palermo.’ When in October 1890 the New Orleans Police Chief was shot dead by unknown assailants, the Mayor and Police decided the guilty were Sicilians and rounded up 19 men for trial. Nine were actually tried and were acquitted of all charges. The next day a huge crowd, led by prominent New Orleanian legal and political figures, was agitated to action and led to the prison where they forced entry to the building and killed eleven of the 19 Italians held inside, eight managing to hide. The grand jury empaneled to investigate the murders made no indictments, even agreeing in writing with the lynch mob’s charge the jury had been bribed to acquit the Italians, so no one was held accountable.

National press coverage of the police chief’s murder, the trial, and lynching was extensive. Leading American newspapers like the Boston Globe and New York Times editorialized in favor of the lynching, while the Italian government and Italian-Americans widely decried the violence and lack of punishment for the murderers. Through these sensational press stories, Americans were acquainted for the first time with terms like “Mafia,” “stiletto,” and “vendetta” in service of the criminalization/racialization of southern Italians as undesirable persons to be discouraged or barred from the United States. So while mass immigration by southern and eastern Europeans to America would continue for another three decades, the 1891 New Orleans Italian lynchings were a critical, foundational moment normalizing hostility against these new immigrants[16], building towards the National Origins immigrant quota system that heavily restricted south and east European migration, and all but eliminated immigration from Africa or Asia, from 1924-65. We should all know about this, every child should learn it in American history class. In a New Orleans so proud of its Italian/Sicilian heritage — its St. Joseph’s altars, the Monument to the Immigrant showing an Italian family, knapsack and kerchiefs and caps and chubby baby and all, arriving from the river in Woldenberg Park with an angel harkening behind them to the Old Country, Irish and Italian parades on St. Patrick’s Day (don’t ask, it’s too complicated) – it’s inconceivable to me this event in this city is unmarked, unmemorialized, invisible in the middle of a public park. Because the events of 1891 silently shout every time a sitting Cabinet member praises America’s 1924 restrictionist immigration law[17]. And we don’t hear. And we could use those memories these days.

There’s numerous self-guided tours on the internet you can use to experientially learn more critical New Orleans history (and geography). I like the excellent collection of tours online at New Orleans Historical. And you can hire a tour guide to tell and show you more than I’ve done here; Hidden History Tours does excellent walking and bus tours of African-American New Orleans history from people who know the struggle to make this history visible because they’ve waged that struggle themselves. On the Annual Meeting agenda, consider the April 9th Black Geographies Past and Present field trip to Whitney Plantation, the daily 4/10, 4/11, 4/12 and 4/13 African Life in the French Quarter Walking Tours, the Thursday 4/12 A People’s Guide to New Orleans: Resistance in the Treme Walking Tour, or the Friday 4/13 Interpreting Slavery at River Road Plantations field trip. For those inside the meeting, consider hearing the President’s Plenary and subsequent discussion by five panelists on 4/10, the themed sessions on black geographies like Mike Crutcher’s 4/11 address on the Treme neighborhood and the 4/14 session on Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn. See you in New Orleans.

— Brian Marks, Louisiana State University and A&M College

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0031

[a] In my family’s story, one of my great-great grandparents was a Sicilian immigrant who stowed away on a ship bound for New Orleans, then jumped into the Mississippi and swam ashore just below New Orleans to arrive clandestinely.

[1] Jennifer Speights-Binet and Rebecca Sheehan, “Confederate Monument Controversy in New Orleans,” AAG Newsletter, January 2018. https://news.aag.org/2018/01/confederate-monument-controversy-in-new-orleans/

[2] Mitch Landrieu, 2018. In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. New York: Viking.

[3] Gaines Foster, “How the South Recast Defeat as Victory with an Army of Stone Soldiers,” Zocalo Public Square, September 28, 2017. https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2017/09/28/south-recast-defeat-victory-army-stone-soldiers/chronicles/who-we-were/

[4] Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman, eds. 2008. Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

[5] Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, 1992. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

[6] Richard Campanella, “The St. Louis and the St. Charles: New Orleans’ Legacy of Showcase Exchange Hotels.” Preservation in Print, April 2015. https://www.richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/article_Campanella_Preservation-in-Print_2015_April_St%20Louis%20and%20St%20Charles%20Hotels.pdf

[7] John Pope, “Slavery in New Orleans is the subject of a harrowing exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 27, 2015.

https://www.nola.com/arts/index.ssf/2015/03/slavery_in_new_orleans_is_the.html

Laine Kaplan-Levenson, “Sighting the Sites of the New Orleans Slave Trade.” WWNO New Orleans Public Radio, November 5, 2015.

https://wwno.org/post/sighting-sites-new-orleans-slave-trade

[8] James Hollandsworth, 2004. An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

[9] Lawrence Powell, 2013. “Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk-Stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics.” In Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, eds. From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World. London: Routledge. pp. 127-49.

[10] Nicholas Lemann, 2006. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Macmillan.

[11] C-SPAN, 2017. Landmark cases: The Slaughterhouse Cases. https://landmarkcases.c-span.org/Case/3/The-Slaughterhouse-Cases

[12] Robert Goldman, 2001. Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the vote in Reese and Cruikshank. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

[13] LeeAnna Keith, 2008. The Colfax Massacre. New York: Oxford University Press.

[14] Scott Marler, “Removing the Confederate Monuments In New Orleans Was Only a First Step Toward Righting the Wrongs of History.” The Nation, June 14, 2017.

https://www.thenation.com/article/removing-the-confederate-monuments-in-new-orleans-was-only-a-first-step-toward-righting-the-wrongs-of-history/

[15] Alan Gauthreaux, 2010. “An Inhospitable Land: Anti-Italian Sentiment and Violence in Louisiana, 1891-1924. Louisiana History 51(1): 41-68.

[16] Christopher Woolf, “A brief history of America’s hostility to a previous generation of Mediterranean migrants – Italians.” Public Radio International, November 26, 2015.

[17] Adam Serwer, “Jeff Sessions’s Unqualified Praise for a 1924 Immigration Law.” The Nation, January 10, 2017.

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Brian Marks
Brian Marks