Meinig, Donald (1924–)

Until his retirement in 2004 as Maxwell Research Professor of Geography at Syracuse University, Donald W. Meinig was one of North America's most accomplished and productive historical geographers. A native of the Palouse region of eastern Washington State, Meinig received his MA (1950) and PhD (1953) from the University of Washington and taught at the University of Utah before joining the faculty of Syracuse University in 1959. During his long and distinguished career, Meinig produced a series of highly praised studies that provided new interpretations of the historical and cultural forces that shaped several distinct American regions, including the Northwest, Mormon country, the Southwest, and Texas.

Meinig devoted the last two decades of his professional career to a monumental four-volume series, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. This unprecedented achievement represents the most ambitious attempt ever by a geographer to bring the entire enterprise of discovery, conquest, settlement, [Page 1880]and development of the United States into a coherent conceptual framework.

Meinig's approach in this study is to portray America as a “gigantic geographic growth with a continually changing geographic character, structure, and system” (Volume 1, p. xv), with close attention to the varieties of peoples involved and the larger context of bordering societies. Throughout the series, he emphasizes the imperial dimensions of this enterprise and demonstrates that America was “created from a massive aggression against a long succession of peoples” (p. xviii). Throughout a narrative of more than 2,000 pages, Meinig employs several consistent basic principles that inform his approach: context, coverage, scale, structure, tension, and change (pp. xvi–xvii). He also examines the dynamic and changing nature of the spatial morphology of the United States using the concepts of core, domain, and sphere that he developed for earlier studies.

Unlike most professional geographers, Meinig does not claim to belong to a tradition or school of scholarship, and he feels that this lack of association gave him the freedom to move geography—historical geography in particular—in new directions. He has been particularly interested in elevating regional geography from the practice of merely listing categorized descriptions into something more artful and interesting to other disciplines. His method of doing this is to add history, context, interconnection, and constant flux to regional description, remaking it as interpretation and focusing on space, place, and change. To Meinig, geography has the potential to be art as well as science. To be a geographer is to see the world in a particular way, and to do geography is to express this view with language, diagrams, and maps full of movement and tension. Although few geographers have been as careful as Meinig in their use of language, fewer still have been as masterful in their use of maps and diagrams to enhance their interpretative narratives, to stress the dynamics of change, and to stimulate the geographical imagination.

Few works by geographers have received the attention and praise across disciplines that Meinig's work has inspired. Historians in particular have embraced his grand narrative for the scope of its monumental task and the explication of patterns that resulted from his approach. Nevertheless, he has been criticized for privileging pattern at the expense of process and political and social forces at the expense of economic and environmental ones. Other critics have found his language to be, on the one hand, too carefully crafted for effect and, on the other, unscientific and imprecise.

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