By 1910 lumber companies had stripped the Great Lakes states of their white pines, leaving behind a forty-million-acre expanse that came to be known as the "cutover." Business interests, university scientists, and state governments worked aggressively to redevelop this land for crop agriculture. A key challenge was ridding the land of stumps. Especially after the First World War, explosives were touted as a ready means of converting cutover scrub land to crop acreage, thus building instant equity for the farmer. This study focuses on Wisconsin, whose drive for land clearing was the most far-reaching. From 1919 to 1928 the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture distributed nearly nineteen million pounds of war-surplus explosives to farmers. Michigan, Minnesota, and states in the American South and West did likewise, for a nationwide total exceeding sixty-three million pounds. A massive public relations campaign urged plowmen to clear as many acres as possible, and journalists at all levels signed on to promote cutover farming. However, explosives often proved dangerous in untrained hands, and the hoped-for agricultural bonanza never materialized. As crop prices slumped in the 1920s, submarginal acres were taken out of production, and the ethos of "land clearing" was replaced with one of multifaceted "land use."

Reviewed by: Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States, and Scales of Canada's Global Resource Empire, 2017–1217 ed. by Pierre Belanger Arn Keeling Extraction Empire: Undermining the Systems, States, and Scales of Canada's Global Resource Empire, 2017–1217. Pierre Belanger, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 800, color photographs, maps, figures. $55.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-262-53382-9. Extraction Empire is part exhibition guide, part compendium, part edited collection, and part insurgency manual aimed at exposing Canada's historical birth within and ongoing complicity with systems of global colonial "extractivism." At eight hundred glossy pages and weighing in at more than two kilograms (four pounds), it is a literally and figuratively unwieldy attempt to marshal disparate scholarly and activist literatures toward a critical convergence on mineral and energy industries in Canada and beyond. Informed by scholarship but a decidedly unacademic approach to these questions, Extraction Empire generates some interesting insights through its juxtaposition of essays, poems, images, and artifacts, but it labors under its idiosyncratic structure, polemical framing, and lack of empirical insight. As a collection, Extraction Empire has its origins in an installation prepared for the 2016 Venice Bienalle, created under the direction of urbanist and landscape architect Pierre Belanger. The installation featured a short film, screened subterraneanly through a hole in the ground, aimed at documenting the historical implication of mineral extraction in the colonization of Canada and that nation's subsequent emergence as a leading center of global mining capital by the end of the twentieth century. The subsequent collection bears the marks of this particular origin in its at times confusing and repetitive but also stimulating organization and content. A good deal of the material included appears to only indirectly reference mining, dealing with topics such as parks, urban planning, and Indigenous resurgence, its inclusion justified by its links to the "empire" side of the book's framing. It's difficult to know how to approach or use this book, given that its structure resembles more bricolage than narrative inquiry. The volume [End Page 230] is composed of "Essays," "Visions," "Declarations," "Media," "Maps," "Surveys," "Treaties," and "Ads"—though not in that order. Indeed, these materials (a small proportion of which is original to the volume) are interleaved to generate jarring juxtapositions of text (say, a reprinted scholarly essay, interview, or poem) with images (from news pictures to diagrams of mineral survey posts to company advertisements and logos) and artifacts (such as copies of treaty texts, flags and coats of arms, or other official documents). This strategy provides moments of interest and insight as the reader encounters the "thing" under discussion (rather than a textual reference to it), but it can also be a bit bewildering when the images or artifacts appear decontextualized and unreferenced. Similarly, the overall page layout and sequencing is confusing to the point of being unhelpful, but there are also creative and arresting diagrams and pages throughout. Th e exhibit and book's basic premise—that geology and the search for minerals have long been and remain deeply implicated in, if not central to, the expansion of European empire and the (ongoing) settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples—is a pretty well-established one. In centering this story on Canada, and linking mineral development to the full suite of settler-colonial strategies and technologies deployed in the country, from the fur trade to treaty making to residential schools and the reserve system, the book does make a contribution of sorts. Through both reprinted and original essays, the text links traditional approaches to Canadian resources and history (notably those associated with staples and Harold Innis) with critical insights from scholarly and activist literatures on settler colonialism and Indigenous studies. Lacking much engagement with recent scholarship on mining in Canada, the book falls short of generating original insights into the historical geography (or contemporary conditions) of mining, either at specific sites or in the country as a whole. At times, some of the text tends to mirror the bricolage approach of the volume as a whole, resulting in a sort of critical free association and repetition that made it difficult to follow. Nor is the role of Canada's mining...

On 23 July 1866, a protest took place in Hyde Park, London, which provides a lens through which to analyse historical struggles over access to, and control of, public space. What began as a protest in favour of manhood suffrage became a conflict over the character and purpose of the park. It sparked public debates about which groups of people could access Hyde Park, and what activities were acceptable within it. These debates raise questions about who was entitled to make such decisions and the impact of these decisions on London's radical culture.

Academic offerings in historical geography may be in a period of eclipse, but scholarship on geographies of the past is prolific. There are several reasons for this, and one that is often overlooked is the fundamental value of this line of inquiry beyond the academy. This lecture considers three historical maps as tools to examine the values of historical geography to current and future societies. A 1940s depiction of a chemical plant's toxic dump exposes knowledge of hazardous wastes well before federal legislation addressed this danger. It had significant value in recent environmental litigation and federal efforts to clean up damaged landscapes. An 1850s sanitary map of New Orleans reveals early efforts to depict threats and to delimit the sources of epidemic disease that foretold the emergence of risk assessment and served as a stepping stone in hazards mapping. New Orleans's "Green Dot" map released in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina highlights the erosion of social memory in adapting to hazardous situations and the need for planners and government bodies to allow thorough and effective citizen participation in responding to changing environments. Each represents a different type of value, while underscoring the deep and enduring social contributions that can arise from well-researched and clearly written historical geography.

Every three years, historical geographers from around the world gather to share their research, discuss the latest trends and debates in the discipline, and develop new and existing networks.Over the years, the International Conference of Historical Geographers (ICHG) has been hosted by countries around the world, including Canada, Australia, Israel, Japan, and most recently the UK in 2015.Th e 2018 conference took place in Warsaw, Poland, and was attended by four hundred delegates.Over fi ve days, delegates took part in more than one hundred sessions, complemented by four keynote speakers, four mid-conference fi eld trips, and a gala dinner.I left the conference feeling enthused and confi dent in the vibrancy and diversity of historical geography.