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Before 1859, the right of any member of the public to abate a public nuisance existed unchallenged in American law as a judicially recognized form of popular justice. In that year, the decision in Brown v. Perkins, authored by Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, restricted the right to those who had suffered particular injury. The decision grew out of a suit for damages by the owner of an illegal saloon, which had been sacked by a local mob. Reversing what Shaw himself had said in his charge to the jury in the same suit in the preceding year, it had little grounding in earlier American case law. Shaw's prestige and the apparent demands of public policy, however, helped win courts over to the new doctrine in relatively short order. The change was most enthusiastically promoted by judges and scholars of conservative leanings disturbed by the threat of popular excess and most resisted by those of more radical inclinations. It paralleled American law's broader shift in the same period toward centralized regulation and the constitutionalization of rights and powers.

The leading police power case of Lawton v. Steele, decided by the US Supreme Court in 1894, offers insight into the question of judicial class bias during the decades following the Civil War. Conflict arose in rural northern New York State over restrictions on livelihood fishing by nets imposed to protect sport angling by affluent tourists. Opposition to the restrictions was grounded in a producerist worldview and class consciousness. The matter reached the courts in a challenge to state laws permitting the summary destruction, without legal process, of nets placed illegally. Seemingly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment and previous case law, such destruction was upheld by a Supreme Court divided along ideological lines, correlating with the justices’ Whig or Jacksonian antecedents. The dissenters, those of Jacksonian sympathies, argued unsuccessfully against the challenged laws.

The decision of the New York Court of Appeals in Riggs v. Palmer (1889) is remarkable for the mass of discussion about a variety of fundamental issues that it has generated. Elmer Palmer was convicted of murdering his grandfather Francis, and the court refused to let him inherit under Francis’s will despite the absence of any explicit statutory grounds for voiding the legacy. An exercise in legal archaeology uncovering details that are stated only obliquely (or not at all) in the majority and dissenting opinions corrects a number of errors often made about the case. More speculatively, it suggests a new explanation of the result, one supported by a review of similar cases in other states in the same era and of the composition of the Court of Appeals in 1889: that the decision in Riggs is best understood as an ad hominem one, provoked by the unusually light punishment that Elmer had received for his crime and rationalized by an appeal to legal principles. If it was, much of what has been written about the decision and its significance is called into question.

The thesis of first effective settlement, stated by Wilbur Zelinsky in 1973 and by several of his contemporaries under other labels, has been an important one in academic research examining the role of early occupance in shaping the later characteristics of places and communities. Essentially the same idea was a commonplace in American discussions during the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries regarding such topics as missionary work on the western frontier, the uses and value of local history, and the status of slavery in the national territories. It represents a case of an idea that arose and flourished independently in two different periods in lay and academic settings. In both settings, it reflected the outlook of its authors in depicting social change as largely exogenous rather than endogenous.

The phenomenon of urban primacy has been much studied in the social sciences since Mark Jefferson introduced the term in 1939. It is less well recognized that many European and American writers of ...

Research on borderlands and border landscapes has concentrated heavily on those associated with international boundaries and has given scant attention to ones between local-state units. Many of the processes at work in the former, however, may also operate at the local scale. A review of the literature on international borderlands identifies models of a number of such processes. An examination of published studies suggests that they can indeed manifest themselves at the local or municipal level as well, and that whether they do or do not depends heavily on historical and geographical context. Both conclusions are supported by a case study of a medium-sized American industrial city, Worcester, Massachusetts, and its environs during the last decade of the nineteenth century.

We thank Thomas and Fulkerson for their comments and for the opportunity to explore further some of the issues we raised in our paper, “The suburban bias of American society?”. In our response, we ...

Background The QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus (QFT-Plus) test is an assay for detecting a cell-mediated immune response to M. tuberculosis (MTB). The assay measures the in vitro quantitative IFN-γ responses to MTB or control antigens in an incubated blood sample. There are 2 options for QFT-Plus blood collection. One option is a lithium-heparin transport tube with sample aliquots subsequently transferred to 4 QFT-Plus Blood Collection Tubes (1-tube QFT-Plus); the 2nd option is to directly collect the blood sample in 4 QFT-Plus collection tubes (4-tube QFT-Plus). In this study, we compared the indeterminate (IND) rates by the 2 blood collection methods to assess which method was superior. Methods For both blood collection methods, QFT-Plus ELISA testing was performed at various Quest Diagnostics sites as specified in the assay’s package insert. A retrospective data analysis of results for the above 2 blood processing methods was conducted. Also, we evaluated the rates of IND results in follow up blood collections. Statistical analyses were performed by the proportion test. Results In 2019, the IND result rate for greater than an 1.8 million 1-tube QFT-Plus draws was less than 1% whereas, the IND result rate for 0.3 million 4-tube draws was 4% This difference was significant. The overall MTB positive rate was 7% for the 1-tube method and 6% for the 4-tube method. Within a one-month interval following an initial blood collection event, 464 patients with an original IND result had a 2nd blood sample collected and tested. Only 35% of the 2nd blood collection events produced an IND result, with 52% of the 2nd sample results reporting as negative and 13% were positive. Conclusion This study found that the 1-tube QFT-Plus collection method reduces the IND rates by 4-fold compared to the observed rate in the 4-tube process. Additionally, two thirds of patients with an initial IND result resolved to either a positive or a negative result when retested within 1 month. Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures

Past research has characterized countries as displaying the traits of urban or rural bias. Neither concept fits the United States well. We propose, as a hypothesis for research, that it may better be understood as displaying a suburban bias vis-a-vis both urban and rural populations. Drawing on the urban and rural bias literatures, we discuss two forms that suburban bias might take, allocational and dispositional, and the ways in which they might be identified. We offer initial evidence of a prevailing suburban bias in the United States in two spheres, those of judicial interpretation and American planning history, and conclude with suggestions for further research on the hypothesis.

For much of the twentieth century, the “Chicago models” proposed by E. W. Burgess in the 1920s, Homer Hoyt in the 1930s, and Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in 1945 dominated discussions of the spatial form of cities in the United States. The changes that have subsequently occurred in American urban geography naturally raise questions about the continuing relevance of the models. In recent years, a “Los Angeles School” in geography and urban studies has dismissed the Chicago models as outdated. But the critics have provided little empirical evidence in support of their claims. Identifying exogenous amenities—those of distance from the city center, terrain, and waterfronts—as central elements in the Chicago models, we analyzed the relation of these factors to the patterns of income in Los Angeles and Chicago using spatial statistical regression. The newer, automobile-age city closely follows, while the older city of Chicago deviates substantially from, the patterns predicted in the classical Chicago model...

Geographers have long found a distinction between two sets of factors in location a useful one to draw (Hanson 1999). The labels used for them have varied--they include situation and site, horizontal and vertical factors, location and locale, and space and place--and have not always exactly coincided in meaning. All the same, they correspond sufficiently for the two kinds of variables to be distinguished, labeled, and contrasted. The former term in each pair denotes the elements of an area's location vis-a-vis the world beyond it; the latter, the characteristics that occur in the area itself. One thesis that has often been drawn from the distinction is that when travel and transportation become easier, faster, and cheaper, the relative importance of horizontal or situation factors in location should decline and that of vertical or site factors, at least of more or less immobile ones, should increase. "With the diminution in transport costs and the consequent reduction in spatial barriers to movement of goods, people, money, and information, the significance of the qualities of place has been enhanced" (Harvey 1989, 10). Edward Ullman applied the thesis to patterns of intraurban land use, proposing that increased mobility, particularly through the rise of mass automobile ownership, had transformed the relative advantages for residence of different districts within cities ([1962] 1980, 192-94). It favored the development of attractive but once difficult-to-reach sites "on the basis of their intrinsic natural and cultural characteristics," and it reduced the importance of "close-in urban locations" whose advantages of what Ullman termed "location or situation" had previously made them the most highly valued ones. To test the assertion, and through it the broader thesis on which it rests, we compare the familiar patterns of the twentieth-century American city with those, to date less systematically documented, that prevailed in what has been called the walking city just prior to the transportation revolution brought about by the electric trolley and then the automobile (Warner 1962). SITUATION, SITE, AND AMERICAN CITY FORM The categories of situation and site mark out sets of different, and often diametrically opposed, residential advantages and disadvantages for particular locations within an urban area. Proximity to the urban center, as the point of maximum generalized accessibility, is a classic example of a situation advantage. At least in the United States, with its antiurban tradition, however, locations close to the center will also, all else being equal, be unattractive on the score of site, and more remote areas will be regarded as more desirable for residence, with the privacy they offer a particularly valued feature (Johnson 2008). As early as 1815, well-to-do Pittsburghers whose independent means freed them of the need to travel daily to the city center preferred marginal over core locations for residence (Swauger 1978). The same inverse relation between the two qualities appears in respect to vertical as to horizontal distance. Areas high above the city center possess a disadvantageously remote situation, but an advantageous site possessing the amenities of views and breezes (as do upper floors within buildings). Lots located on the main streets enjoy high accessibility and its correlate, greater visibility, but suffer, compared with more-secluded sites, from the disamenities of heavy traffic. (1) If the association of wealth with each of these variables changed in sign between the walking and the automobile-age city, it would bear out Ullman's conjecture. A wealth of studies in the postwar decades based on block-group or census-tract-level census data supports the hypothesized present-day preeminence of site qualities in American cities. Drawing on the data of the 1980 census, Michael White documented "a steady increase in average income with distance from the center of the city . …

Environmental determinism can be defined in two ways: as treating the environment as a factor influencing human affairs independently and from the outside, and as an overriding emphasis on the environmental elements in a situation of nature–society interaction. A claim may be determinism without being fatalism (i.e., seeing an environmental factor as always and necessarily producing a certain outcome), and it may be environmental determinism even if the environmental feature in question itself stems in part or whole from human actions.

One critique of neo-determinism, which emphasizes the role of social institutions over what it mislabels “geography,” errs on the opposite side by disregarding the important role often—though not independently—played by the environment. Both the “institutions” and the “geography” approaches seek an exogenous variable that can be treated as a first cause and fail to find it, because environment and society, as geographers would stress, are interdependent and co-evolving.

To say that the environment does not operate on human societies in a deterministic way is by no means to say that it does not matter for them. Geographers since the 1920s have emphasized, though, that how it matters cannot be understood apart from an understanding of the societies themselves. “Natural hazards” and “natural resources,” for example, are not natural factors external to society, but co-creations of natural and social processes.

“Neo-environmental determinism” has appeared in a number of forms and areas: in the spatial regionalization of human life and activity, in the interpretation of prehistory, in the study of contemporary world patterns of human well-being and economic development, and in the projection of the future consequences of human-induced climate change. Most neo-determinism has developed outside of geography, and critiques of such reasoning by geographers offer valuable caveats and correctives to it.

In an example of what William Freudenburg and his colleagues called the “conjoint construction” of nature and society, hills may represent either assets or liabilities for urban settlement, dependi...

Carl Smith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xii and 327 pp., illustrations, notes, index. $35.00 cloth (ISBN-13 978-0-226-02251-2).Carl Smith, professor of American Studies and Engl...

Though natural scientists today rarely take a Promethean stance on environmental matters, many in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries did. Their work, Meyer argues, made them acutely aware of nature’s amorality, its indifference to human well-being and even survival, and its wholesale inefficiencies, and inclined them toward a program of its thoroughgoing redesign. Equally, the skepticism of tradition and custom inculcated by their calling made them little inclined to value what exists, in society or nature, merely because it does exist. As notable representatives of this outlook, Meyer discusses, among others, Lester Frank Ward and W J McGee in the USA, such European radicals as Reclus, Kropotkin, and J.D. Bernal, and such popularizers of science and its worldview as H.G. Wells.

Meyer argues that the rich history of progressive Prometheanism before about 1960 highlights the singularity of today’s environmental politics. He takes a closer look at the USA and finds that important pre-1960 conservative thinkers more often espoused an environmentalist earthview than a Promethean one, in contrast to their progressive opponents. The main reason for today’s alignments, he suggests, is the pervasive (and rather novel) anti-statism of the contemporary right, which it makes it as suspicious of any claims that environmental problems are serious enough to require government regulation as the left is open to such claims. Some of the earlier connections between progressivism and Prometheanism, though, seem to be reemerging today in the concept of the “good Anthropocene”: a global environment largely and increasingly reshaped for the better by deliberate human action.

One form of progressive environmental Prometheanism took the engineering sciences as models alike for social and environmental reform. Rejecting the conservative attachment to tradition as a mask for oppression, it envisioned the rational replanning of society for improved human welfare and saw the rational replanning of the terrestrial environment for the same purpose as its natural corollary. Meyer traces the beliefs and politics of technocratic Prometheanism’s most notable advocates in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, among them the leaders of the Saint-Simonian movement in France, the progressive conservationists in the USA, and such theorists of Russian Bolshevism as Aleksei Gastev and A.A. Bogdanov.

Theorists of utopia typically envision the radical reform of society, Meyer observes, and many have seen the radical reform of society’s natural environment as equally essential to the achievement of a perfected future. He shows that the politically progressive program of a new world and a new earth combined, the latter achieved by the human control and transformation of the earth’s surface, had notable advocates in the period and countries examined. Among them were the utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen and their disciples. Another was the Russian theologian N.F. Fedorov, many of whose Promethean ideas the Soviet regime following the Revolution either adopted or independently reinvented as part of its official ideology.

Features of the physical urban site merit more attention than they have traditionally received in models of city form, but in bestowing it the interrelation of social and natural features must be recognized and a neoenvironmental determinism avoided that would see the roles played by site features as always and everywhere the same. In American cities today, the affluence of residents, as a rule, increases with elevation. Yet in the “walking city” of the nineteenth century and earlier, high land's difficulty of access might have outweighed its attractions and made it the home of the poor and not the rich. The possibility is investigated through a study of upland residential patterns in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1891, just before the city's first electric trolley line was installed. Though a simple inversion of today's pattern did not appear, working-class residents indeed predominated on the highest land. They shared it with pockets of upper-class estates and with other land uses—such as parks,...

The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth saw a great outpouring of utopian novels in the United States, much of it inspired by the extraordinary success of a single work, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 ([1888] 1967). Although the ideal societies they described varied greatly, in their attitudes toward the natural environment most of these novels' authors were in agreement. They envisioned the human reshaping of the earth no less than the reform of human institutions. Supposing, as one literary historian observed, "that man was duty-bound to adjust nature to his comfort rather than to conform man to the delicate balance of nature," one after another of them projected "schemes to alter massively the face of the earth and to change the climate" in particular (Burt 1981, 177-178). In the typical future they portrayed, "excessively hot regions have been cooled and excessively cold ones warmed; excessively wet ones have been made drier and excessively dry ones wetter.... Declares [one character]: 'We have absolute control of the weather'" (Segal 1985, 27). Such successful tinkering with the elements figured in many of the fringe and obscure visions of the future that made up the bulk of the period's output. It appeared too in the work of the foremost American man of letters to turn his hand to utopian fiction in Bellamy's wake. In three novels published between 1894 and 1907, William Dean Howells contrasted the United States of his day with an invented nation, Altruria, which occupied a continent in the Southern Hemisphere. American society as Howells portrayed it was plagued by innumerable evils arising from the unrestrained competition and the class and gender inequalities of the Gilded Age, dominated by corporate wealth. Altruria had removed the chief incentives to greed, selfishness, and crime by abolishing the private accumulation of property, maintaining peace with other countries, reforming the unequal relations of the sexes and the institution of marriage, making divisions of social rank a thing of the past, and rationalizing clothing, diet, architecture, and language in the interests of taste, comfort, and economy. In all of these respects Howells held Altruria up to the American reader as a fit model for emulation. He presented it as equally admirable in its activities of environmental reform, for it had reshaped nature as successfully as it had society. The land had been "cleared of all sorts of wild beasts," water resources were managed intensively, and, most impressive of all, the climate had been vastly improved. The new regime that the Altrurian "Evolution" had installed in power had made bringing the weather under control one of its first priorities. "We had a continent to reform and beautify," an Altrurian visiting America explains to his hosts. "We had climates to change, and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust," and money that had originally been appropriated for wars had been diverted to this purpose. A gigantic channel had been dug through a peninsula that blocked a warm ocean current from reaching the continent's southeastern coast. As a result, a region that in its natural state had been plagued with snow and ice enjoyed "the climate of Italy" and had become beautiful, comfortable, and richly productive (Howells 1968, 156-157, 389-390). To Howells and his contemporaries, the two sets of Altrurian achievements--reform of society and reform of the earth--seem to have gone naturally together. Today, by contrast, one is struck, as a recent reader was, by the apparent incongruity between the ideals of Howells' imagined land and its inhabitants' attitudes toward nature, between its advanced social arrangements and such massive enterprises of environmental engineering (Love 1994, 40). Both of the goals that Altruria had pursued--of making society less competitive and more egalitarian and of subduing nature to human purposes--have their proponents today, but one does not now expect them (or often find them) to be espoused by the same people. …

There has always been-and, modern environmentalism notwithstanding, there no doubt remains-much about the environment that people would willingly alter if they could. Visions of a perfect earthly future have routinely incorporated a reconstructed earth. Not least have they described the transformation of features so often and so stubbornly unsatisfactory in many ways as weather and climate. Writers in classical antiquity who tried to imagine a terrestrial paradise purged its weather of everything dangerous or merely disagreeable, from extreme temperatures and tempestuous winds to overcast skies. Early Christian representations of the Garden of Eden gave it the same mild and moderate climate as medieval Europeans ascribed to the "Land of Cockaigne": "There is no heat or cold, water or fire, wind or rain, snow or lightning, thunder or hail. Neither are there storms. Rather, there is eternally fine, clear weather ... It is always a wonderfully agreeable May." Two geographers who made a study of the utopian novel found that the genre characteristically presents the weather as "either an equable given or something totally under man's control.", But there is a second and quite different way in which meteorological utopia can be sought. It does not depend on the perfecting of the elements by divine or natural favor or by human effort. It tries to make the weather unobjectionable without altering it physically. What will be abolished in this kind of paradise is not the weather that people think bad, but their reasons for thinking it bad. The causes of complaint lie not in the weather itself, it is assumed, but in human beings, their attitudes, and their social and technological arrangements. If those attributes and arrangements are reformed, dissatisfaction with weather would disappear.. An unnamed character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) expresses this point of view. He and several companions are riding through a surprise April snowstorm to join a newly founded utopian community outside of Boston. He reproaches the narrator, Miles Coverdale, for grumbling about the weather. They can never consider themselves "regenerated men," he admonishes Coverdale, until they feel as thankful for "a February northeaster" as they do for "the softest breeze of June."2

Indoor climates and climate change are an integral – but to date poorly integrated – element of climate and climate-change research more generally. They have been examined chiefly through the study of human thermal comfort, about which two conflicting schools of thought have emerged. One sees thermal comfort as governed by a common and fixed human preference and confined to a narrow range of conditions. The other sees it as strongly influenced by habit and expectations, which can differ greatly from one person, place, or period to another. This paper examines, in the light of these theories and what they imply, an episode of major and rapid indoor climate change – a sharp rise in winter temperatures thatoccurred in the northern United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. It finds support for both points of view and suggests that each is valid under particular circumstances. The results, if borne out by more research, will help to inform projections of future demand for heating and cooling and for outdoor climatic amenities, both significant elements of the human dimensions of global climatic change.

In addition to his famous concentric-zone model of urban form, Ernest W. Burgess in 1929 outlined an altitudinal-zone model. It proposed a positive relationship in “hills cities” between the socioeconomic status of residents and the elevations at which they live. This article suggests a theoretical rationale for this “other Burgess model” based on the role of amenities in contemporary residential choice. Its performance compares favorably to that of competing models in an empirical test in cities selected to approximate as closely as possible the conditions that it assumes. [Key words: amenities, E. W. Burgess, urban form.]

Climate change may affect the frequency, intensity, and geographic distribution of severe coastal storms. Concurrent sea-level rise would raise the baseline of flooding during such events. Meanwhile, social vulnerability factors such as poverty and disability hinder the ability to cope with storms and storm damage. While physical changes are likely to remain scientifically uncertain into the foreseeable future, the ability to mitigate potential impacts from coastal flooding may be fostered by better understanding the interplay of social and physical factors that produce human vulnerability. This study does so by integrating the classic causal model of hazards with social, environmental, and spatial dynamics that lead to the differential ability of people to cope with hazards. It uses Census data, factor analysis, data envelopment analysis, and floodplain maps to understand the compound social and physical vulnerability of coastal residents in the city of Revere, MA, USA.

The expertise and knowledge accumulated by geographers in this area are now in urgent demand by the international scientific and policy communities to illuminate key issues of global environmental change. Geographers interested in the use and transformation of the land today have the opportunity to apply their insights in novel and valuable ways. At the same time, they face the challenge of communicating with a new audience whose interests and criteria of significance may differ from the ones to which they are accustomed. In particular, geographer's fondness for stressing the complexity of patterns and processes and the distinctiveness of each study area can be most useful, but must come to terms with countervailing needs for abstraction and generalization.

Although its existence is readily apparent in the published literature of a number of fields, pre-1950 exclusionary land-use conflict is largely ignored in studies assessing such conflict today. An inventory of land-use conflicts mentioned in a Worcester, Massachusetts, daily newspaper in the years 1876–1900 found a high incidence of efforts to exclude various undesired land uses. The results put in question many of the characterizations and explanations advanced of contemporary NIMBY activity.

Land use and cover changes are important elements of the larger problem of global environmental change. Landuse patterns result in landcover changes that cumulatively affect the global biosphere and climate. We describe efforts to analyze the driving forces behind land transformations and to create land use models that can be linked to other types of global change models. Two efforts to model land use in the U.S. are reviewed. One projects aggregate agricultural, forest, and range land, and the other attempts to model forest land use change at the parcel scale in two mountain landscapes. We conclude with suggestions for new approaches that could clarify the role of land use/cover change in global change and in natural resources management.

The spatial spread of policies, usually studied with an emphasis on contagion and demonstration effects, can also reflect considerations of trans-boundary spillovers. The model of the “race to the bottom” criticizes decentralized regulation as inherently tending towards laxity because of competition among jurisdictions for business. There exists also the possibility of a “race to the top,” in which a fear of an influx of an activity being regulated elsewhere causes the regulation to spread. An analysis of turn-of-the-century Massachusetts municipal saloon licensing policy illustrates the latter phenomenon.