Moral Geography traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors, imaginatively conjoined the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land and made space sacred. While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been much studied, this is the first major study of the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier. Moral Geography provides a fresh approach to understanding nineteenth-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve. Through the use of maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives, and geographical texts, Amy DeRogatis recovers the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries, and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of life on the early American frontier.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Moral Geography provides a much better guidebook to the region and its religion, and DeRogatis never lets us get lost, taking us along a scholarly path that seems both familiar and fresh at the same time.
(Gregory Nobles Journal of American History Oct-Dec 2004)Interesting and innovative... Most readers of Moral Geography will appreciate DeRogatis's attempt to 'read' material sources in seeking to understand the landscape of the Western Reserve.
(Lydia Huffman Hoyle Regster of the Kentucky Historical Society 5/1/05)...the brief narrative here does little justice to the nuanced deconstruction of maps, letters, biography, and travel literature that comprises the heart of DeRogatis's work. From close readings of these texts she has skillfully teased out a language in her sources...
(William H. Bergmann, University of Cincinnati Ohio History 10/1/05)Moral Geography does a great service by introducing those who felt the tension between new and old orders.
(Kathleen Flake Journal of Religion )Amy DeRogatis' sketch of moral geography on the American frontier has opened up a rich and fertile vein of scholarship.
(David N. Livingstone Books & Culture )Innovative new study of the religious settlement of Connecticut's "Western Reserve."... A model of interdisciplinary scholarship, and her new study will enjoy wide readership.
(Douglas L. Winiarski Religious Studies Review )Review
There is much to recommend in this innovative and important study. DeRogatis overturns our understanding of the spatial organization, from personal to regional scales, of the post-Revolutionary American frontier. She makes a significant contribution to the on-going critical reevaluation of maps and map making, tearing down still further the false divide between graphic and literary maps. And, she reveals a new dimension to the complex historical construct that is 'New England.' Moral Geography is profitable reading for geographers, historians, and literary scholars, as well as students of religion and American studies.
(Matthew Edney, professor of geography, University of Southern Maine )
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In 1817 the Connecticut Missionary Society realized that the moment had arrived to caution the public about the "moral dangers" of the American frontier. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
missionary society trustees, sponsoring society, moral garden, eastern missionaries, settled pastorates, missionary letters, frontier missionary, western emigration, missionary culture, missionary labor, frontier missionaries, gospel simplicity, missionary model, competing denominations, frontier landscape, frontier missions, benevolent design, western reserve, frontier space, missionary cause, frontier settlers, moral landscape, home missionary society, covenanted community, physical landscape Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Connecticut Missionary Society, New England, New Connecticut, New York, Joseph Badger, Thomas Robbins, Native Americans, New Haven, United States, John Seward, Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, Randolph Stone, Simeon Woodruff, Connecticut Land Company, Oberlin Colony, Jonathan Lesslie, William Hanford, Jedidiah Morse, David Brainerd, Garden of Eden, Giles Cowles, Ezekiel Chapman, Abel Flint, Luther Humphrey, Oxford University Press New!
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