Possessions may be a burden to nomadic people of the present and past, but for those moving to more permanent dwellings, possessions offer a means to shed, transport, or create meanings across locales. Mormon pioneer diaries and other historical personal documents are used to assess the meanings and importance of the possessions these pioneers brought on their journey. Computer-assisted qualitative analyses of these documents suggested five major categories of possession symbolism: (1) sacred meanings, (2) material meanings, (3) personal meanings, (4) familial meanings, and (5) communal meanings. Within some of these categories of meaning there are notable differences between men and women. Even though the present findings are based on a particular group and time period, it seems likely that these types of symbolic possession meanings are also to be found in other moves.

Moving Possessions: An Analysis Based on Personal Documents from the 1847–1869 Mormon Migration

Recent attempts to contextualize the history of geography have ignored the gendered construction of much of that history, while arguments for a post-modern human geography have ignored feminist theory. By examining the stories of Victorian women explorers, this essay suggests how women have contributed to the formation of geographic knowledge, and, by implication, asks what can be learned by considering the contribution of women's ways of knowing to our reconstruction of human geography.

/pdf/toward-a-feminist-historiography-of-geography-60wdcivw4v.pdf

Toward a Feminist Historiography of Geography

(1991). Gender and culture of empire: Toward a feminist ethnography of the cinema. Quarterly Review of Film and Video: Vol. 13, No. 1-3, pp. 45-84.

Gender and culture of empire: Toward a feminist ethnography of the cinema

OVER THE LAST hundred years some of the classic works in American history have dealt with the relationship between the natural environment and American society, but environmental history as a distinct field is a far more recent development. Early works on the environment clustered in western history. Frederick Jackson Turner in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and Walter Prescott Webb in The Great Plains made the physical environment central to their analyses. Later, James Malin rejected the often crude environmental determinism of Webb and Turner, and attempted instead to engage in an ecological analysis which stressed the complexity and interdependency of the relationship between human social institutions and nature. Malin is a likely founder of modern environmental history, but he himself disclaimed the description of his work as ecological history. After Malin, direct examination of the historical relationship between society and the natural environment languished. Western history itself declined in influence during the 1960s, and although younger scholars within the field continued to do significant work on environmental topics, western histo-

American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field

Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, w...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-environ-111109-144855

Literature and Environment

To discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated. Both intellectual and cultural history, this volume continues Kolodny's study of frontier mythology begun in The Lay of the Land .

The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860.

IFLydia Howard Huntley Sigourney had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. In fact, she was invented. As American women writers began to publish in numbers before the Civil War, one of their number would inevitably be construed as an epitome of the phenomenon of female authorship in its range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies. Now, here was a poor, virtuous, essentially self-educated woman whose writing was sponsored by one of the leading families in Hartford, Connecticut, with additional patronage from many other New England aristocrats.1 She published pious poetry on domestic subjects in the major magazines and wrote for the Sunday School League. Having made a good marriage (from the social point of view), she faithfully performed her duties as wife, mother, and hostess; and she began to write for money only after financial reverses put the family under economic duress. Here, in short, was a woman whose example could instruct all would-be literary women as to what they could do, what they should do, and also what they had better not do. Here also was a life in which a modern success story of upward mobility through hard work and self-sacrifice led to an affirmation of traditional class structure. The social construction of Lydia Sigourney began, then, in her own lifetime. And, with Sigourney's canny participation, it continued throughout her lifetime as well. For example, the prefatory "advertisement" to the I815 Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, which was written by Daniel Wads-

Reinventing Lydia Sigourney

E VERY student of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work and life knows that he wrote The Scarlet Letter because he lost his job at the Salem Custom House. He told the world so in his autobiographical preface to the story, "The Custom-House," and all later biographers have followed his lead while filling out the details.1 But the sequence of events Hawthorne chronicles in the preface explains no more than how he came to be free to write, and offers no factual basis for understanding what he wrote. To be sure, his angry and defiant heroine might express some of his own humiliation and rage. To write a story which favored the outcast so heavily against the establishment might have been an act of sweet revenge on the author's powerful enemies.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical Speculation

Introduction: One Man, One World 1. Starting with Columbus 2. The Mammoth Land 3. Necessary and Sufficient Acts 4. Plain and Fancy Fictions 5. Transgression and Transformation 6. The Rebirth of Tragedy Epilogue: After the Culmination Notes Works Cited Index

Nina Baym

Papers

The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860.

Reinventing Lydia Sigourney

Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Mother: A Biographical Speculation

American Incarnation: The Individual, The Nation, and The Continent.

Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.