Moral Geography Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier [Paperback]

Amy DeRogatis is assistant professor of religious studies at Michigan State University.Moral Geography traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors, imaginatively conjoined the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land and made space sacred. While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been much studied, this is the first major study of the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier. Moral Geography provides a fresh approach to understanding nineteenth-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve. Through the use of maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives, and geographical texts, Amy DeRogatis recovers the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries, and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of life on the early American frontier.Moral Geography provides a much better guidebook to the region and its religion, and DeRogatis never lets us get lost, taking us along a scholarly path that seems both familiar and fresh at the same time.Interesting and innovative... Most readers ofMoral Geography will appreciate DeRogatis's attempt to 'read' material sources in seeking to understand the landscape of the Western Reserve....the brief narrative here does little justice to the nuanced deconstruction of maps, letters, biography, and travel literature that comprises the heart of DeRogatis's work. From close readings of these texts she has skillfully teased out a language in her sources...Moral Geography does a great service by introducing those who felt the tension between new and old orders.Amy DeRogatis' sketch of moral geography on the American frontier has opened up a rich and fertile vein of scholarship.Inlģ