The cartographic exploration of US Army fort and personnel variation in the contiguous United States has been well developed in the past, but not nearly enough to capture the essence of this interesting historical geography. In order to address this shortcoming in the geographical literature it was necessary to establish some rational points of reference to compare fort and personnel attributes of significant timeframes from 1800 to 1900. More specifically, once the distributional patterns were revealed, they were compared by using center of population, geographic means, point pattern analyses, base age, population, and historical backgrounds to definitively classify each periods Army fort attributes and to illustrate their distributional trends. The central results indicated that the distances between military presence and the US population during the one-hundred years were variable, but closely related to the social, political, and military atmospheres of those times. Furthermore, the trends discovered concerning the collective establishment of forts on the landscape show that base construction, during many periods, coincided strongly with well known concepts in US history: westward expansion, Indian Wars, and international conflict. Using the stated metrics for understanding the establishment trajectories over time, one can identify some concrete geographical relationships between not only Army bases and personnel, but also the US population as a result of this research. Since the literature regarding Army bases and personnel in the past has focused predominately upon emphasizing the historical or qualitative aspects of this topic, this research likely introduces an appealing, yet needed, spatiotemporal perspective on the historical geography of these forts in the contiguous United States.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MONTANA/oai:etd.lib.umt.edu:etd-12122007-143329 |
| Date | 18 January 2008 |
| Creators | Ravitz, Ben |
| Contributors | Paul Wilson, David Shively, Michael Hedegaard, Abe Ravitz |
| Publisher | The University of Montana |
| Source Sets | University of Montana Missoula |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-12122007-143329/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Montana or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.0084 seconds