Mental Territories

Rarely recognized outside its boundaries today, the Pacific Northwest region known at the turn of the century as the Inland Empire included portions of the states of Washington and Idaho, as well as British Columbia. Katherine G. Morrissey traces the...

Katherine G. Morrissey is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arizona.

Morrissey's book is a synthesis drawn from an extensive geographic literature that ranges from mental mapping and perceptual geographies to exhaustive regional studies.... Good bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

Mental Territories offers a fresh focus on a part of the country that has long been outside the American mainstream.

Mental Territories is an intellectual history.... This book is beautifully written.... The best history combines thoughtful analysis, fine writing, and good storytelling—and Morrissey excels at all three.

A model case study of the nature of boosterism that was central to the aspirations of many of the West's would-be metropolitan centers. Morrissey's liberal use of a fascinating series of promotional maps and illustrations amply documents that municipal passion.... Mental Territories is a valuable study, and not just for a single community and subregion. It takes an in-depth look at the intellectual process itself and thus offers students of the West a good example of the analytical tools that can be used to examine municipal boosterism and the perceptual construction of region.

An example of fine interdisciplinary scholarship that draws on a wealth of theoretical support and on an impressive array of primary sources, Mental Territories may be considered a model of a new approach to regional history and geography... It is a book that I will recommend to colleagues and students looking for deeper ways of understanding America's regional diversity.

A thought-provoking work... The book's rich sources, entertaining case studies and eccentric characters make a lively and readable work.

Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado:

Katherine Morrissey's approach is fresh and distinctive, the scale of the research is enormous, and the case studies and brief biographies are both engaging and instructive. Most important, this book bridges the gap that usually separates the world of social history from the world of elite intellectual history.

D. W. Meinig, Syracuse University:

A penetrating, provocative look from the inside at the creation and contestation of regionalism that will give the 'ghostly' Inland Empire new vitality and fame among readers concerned with the rich complexities of a more fully human geography.