| This dissertation explores how the railroad, a technology that revolutionized understandings of American space and place, shaped cultural understandings of geography in the 19th and early 20 th centuries. Cultural responses to the transformative interaction between the railroad and geography include literary, journalistic, and cartographic artifacts that reveal competing paradigms for conceiving of American geography. I examine artifacts that respond to four major rail developments of this period---the underground railroad, transcontinental rail completion, corporate rail monopolies, and Jim Crow rail travel---giving special attention to literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Claude McKay as well as journalistic texts by abolitionists, travel writers, muckrakers, and union activists. In these texts, four geographical paradigms emerge---figurative, essential, abstract, and activist---that represent not only distinct ways of viewing geography, but also of constructing the relationship between geography and identity. My elucidation of cultural conceptions of geography formed in modernizing America aims to foreground geography's fundamental role in modern American identity formation and to help us begin to understand how geographical identity operates as a culturally constructed category of identity formation in some of the same ways as other identity categories, such as race, class, and gender. |
