My 2024 Journal of Historical Geography Lecture is now available in prepint

Last year I was invited to deliver the annual Journal of Historical Geography Lecture during the annual RGS/IBG annual conference. It was a fun time, and people seemed to enjoy and appreciate the talk. I riffed off one of Brian Harley’s lesser known critical papers.

The more formal version—with fewer illustrations, added footnotes, and the slightly revised title as “Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion of Exceptionalism”—is now available from JHG in the preprint version. I have no idea when it will be officially published with volume # and page ##.

You can download a copy of the PDF here:

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1l7TU15XEo6idv

During the peer-review process, this essay was distinguished by its receipt of the full spectrum of recommendations: accept as is, accept with small revisions, accept with major revisions, reject. 🤪🤪

I finally realized that a key problem was that at least two of the reviewers got confused by my use of the term “exceptionalism.” In the USA, there is a wide recognition that popular and political culture holds the USA to be an “exceptional” country, made different from all other countries by any one of a series of factors (God’s grace, the frontier experience, the democratic revolution), but this is a usage that is perhaps less well understood in the UK. The two reviewers seem to have thought I was using “exceptional” to mean special or remarkable, not different from or unique. I added some initial comments to clarify, and the piece works well.

Enjoy!