This Land Is Your Land: The Geographic Evolution of the United States.(Review)

This Land Is Your Land: The Geographic Evolution of the United States By Seymour Schwartz, Foreword by Barber Conable, Jr. Abrams, 304 pages, $75

My home town of Knoxville is named for Henry M. Knox, who also gave his name to Fort Knox, Kentucky. Local historian lack Neely describes him as a "plump, blandly competent Boston general in the American Revolution, then a Secretary of War who presided over no wars, a man who never came within a day's ride of Tennessee." My home state of Tennessee is named after the river, which was in turn named for an Indian town called Tinnasi. This odd combination of place names is not unusual in the American landscape, as Seymour Schwartz illustrates in This Land Is Your Land.

Geography is a natural corollary to the study of history. Schwartz quotes the statement of Jamestown's John Smith, "As Geography without History seemeth as carkasse without motion, so History without Geography wandereth as vagrant without certaine habitation." And so Schwartz's geographical narrative follows American history from Columbus to the entrance of Alaska and Hawaii into our union. Each state is discussed in order of its incorporation into the nation.

During his first expedition, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Caribbean Sea he named San Salvador. Though there is disagreement among scholars, the location is now believed by many to be an island in the Bahamas. As the Spaniards and their Italian captains got an early start exploring the Western hemisphere, they attached their names to many parts of it. Several who sailed with Columbus eventually settled on an island they named Puerto Rico. Columbus never made it to the major land mass of North America, but in 1513 Puerto Rico's Governor, Ponce de Leon, explored the peninsula that is now the southeasternmost portion of the United States. He named it Florida after the term for Easter, Pasqua Florida.

The naming of the North and South American continents suggests the often accidental nature of terms of place. The grand prize went to Amerigo Vespucci, the explorer whose real talent was public relations, since he built on Columbus's discoveries. (He also may have inflated his role in the expeditions in which he participated.) Schwartz reports that the German geographer-cartographer Martin Waldseemuller misassigned the name "America," and only to the South American continent at first. After Europe, Africa, and Asia, wrote Waldseemuller, a fourth continent "has been ...