Norfolk, Virginia, and the Hampton Roads (Tidewater) Region Thomas R. Allen (bio), Thomas Chapman (bio), Ryley C. Harris (bio), Nicole S. Hutton (bio), Jonathan Leib (bio), and Jennifer L. Whytlaw (bio) Norfolk, Virginia, is the host city of the 78th annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG). The conference will occur from November 18th to 20th, 2023 at the downtown Sheraton Norfolk Waterside Hotel and will be hosted by Old Dominion University's (Figures 1 and 2) Department of Political Science and Geography. Norfolk is located on the Elizabeth River, at Mile Marker 0 of the Intra-Coastal Waterway in one of the world's largest natural harbors and is home to the world's largest naval base, Naval Station Norfolk, as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) North American headquarters (Pike 2011). This cover art essay highlights the physiography, cultural history, vernacular, and current landscape of Norfolk and the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. physiographic setting Located on the outer Coastal Plain physiographic province, Norfolk is situated at the confluence of the Elizabeth River and the James River, the specific feature defining the term "Hampton Roads" referring to terminuses at the riverfront. The region is underlain by thousands of feet of Quaternary sediments derived from the Appalachian Mountains (Parham et al. 2013). The region lies east of the Fall Line and within the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the ancient Susquehanna River (Grymes 2020). However, several coastal [End Page 219] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Northwestern twilight view of the Old Dominion University campus, Norfolk, Virginia, taken from above Hampton Boulevard. Photo Credit: Ryley C. Harris. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Aerial photo taken during Old Dominion University's Mars Fest, with a southern view of the downtown Norfolk skyline. Event hosted by the Barry Art Museum. Photo Credit: Ryley C. Harris. [End Page 220] plain draining "blackwater" rivers composed of alluvial bottomwoods and swamp forests are also prevalent (i.e., the Elizabeth River and its three branches drain portions of the Great Dismal Swamp and associated peatlands perched on late Pleistocene terraces formed during higher sea-level stands). The region is also experiencing a relatively rapid rate of coastal subsidence owing to the relaxation of the ice sheet forebulge located to the north during the Quaternary glaciations (Eggleston and Pope 2013). This vertical land motion (VLM) is estimated at approximately half of the current rate of observed "relative" sea-level rise of 4 mm/year (Sherpa et al. 2022). Furthermore, filling and construction on salt marshes in the urban estuary and along the waterfront appear to indicate much more variability of subsidence than expected, with buildings along downtown and the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth experiencing foundation shifting and tilting and wetlands susceptible to a hidden vulnerability owing to VLM (Ohenhen et al. 2023). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. King tidal flooding (October, 2022) worsened by northeasterly winds at Knitting Mill Creek, Norfolk, VA. Photo Credit: Ryley C. Harris as part of the Blue Line Project. The region is also proximate to the active coastal storm tracks of the Atlantic Seaboard, with the southernmost length of the Labrador Current stretching past the area toward Cape Hatteras. Hence, the region is prone to strong extratropical and tropical storm passages (Allen and Allen 2019). The tidal range in the region is approximately 1 meter, reflecting a semidiurnal-type tide (i.e., two tides per day, with one higher than the other) (Figures 3 and 4) (Ezer and Atkinson 2014). Tides penetrate up the west to approximately Jamestown on the James River, where there remains measurable salinity and salt marshes (Roberts et al. 2002). [End Page 221] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. A look to the north across the North Carolina-Virginia border into Virginia's False Cape State Park during the October 2022 king tide. Photo Credit: Ryley C. Harris. cultural history Initially called "Skicoak" by Indigenous peoples, Norfolk, Virginia's pre-colonial settlement history can be dated back over 1,000 years. At the beginning of colonial settlement, several Native American tribes lived in...

Book Review| January 01 2021 Review: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, by Brent Tarter Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, by Brent Tarter. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. 130 pages. $19.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780813943206. Jonathan Leib Jonathan Leib Old Dominion University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar National Review of Black Politics (2021) 2 (1): 66–69. https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2021.2.1.66 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jonathan Leib; Review: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia, by Brent Tarter. National Review of Black Politics 1 January 2021; 2 (1): 66–69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2021.2.1.66 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentNational Review of Black Politics Search In November 2020, voters in Virginia went to the polls to vote for US president, Congress, and numerous local officials. Also on the ballot was a state constitutional amendment (Amendment One) that would take redistricting of state legislative and US House districts out of the hands of the state legislature (known in Virginia as the General Assembly) and create a commission made up of eight legislators and eight citizens selected by a panel of retired circuit court judges. The commission would then create the district lines that, if approved by a supermajority of commission members, would be voted on by the full General Assembly. Amendment One passed, with two-thirds of Virginians voting in favor. Amendment One was endorsed by major newspapers in Virginia, while the state’s Democratic Party (which won full control of state government in 2019 for the first time in twenty-six years) urged voters to defeat Amendment One... You do not currently have access to this content.

Two trends have remade the field of political geography over the past quarter-century. First, a revision of taken-for-granted concepts that amounted to spatial determinism. Second, pioneering many new and emerging concepts such as political ecology. Both trends are important contributions to the evolving section of the AP Human Geography course on the Political Organization of Space. Following a plea to make political geography more political and geographical, this article presents a classroom example from the field of political ecology.

Religion, Murder, and the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina Gerald R. Webster (bio) and Jonathan I. Leib (bio) Contentious debates over the meaning and appropriate display of Confederate symbols have been waged across the American South for the past three decades (Leib and Webster 2007). While these debates are clearly racialized, they are also imbued with religious arguments and fervor (Webster and Leib 2002, 2012). One major reason is the aggressive religiosity characterizing the South’s cultural landscape, in which religion plays a central role in social, economic and political relations (Webster 1997). While less well understood, it is also the case that many white southerners saw the Civil War as a religious conflict against Northern apostasy. As Wilson (1995, 19) states, “Ministers and churches . . . insisted that the Confederacy was a crusade against the evil empire of the Yankee. It was a holy war.” As a result, Confederate symbols like the battle flag and heroic figures like Robert E. Lee took on religious overtones that continue to exist today among traditional white southerners.1 The debate over the Confederate flag in South Carolina has been waged for over two decades, with particularly vitriolic arguments about the continued flying of the battle flag over the state capitol dome beginning in the latter part of the 1990s. In 2000, a legislative compromise led the state to move the battle flag off the capitol dome to a Confederate soldier’s monument on the state capitol grounds (Webster and Leib 2001, Leib and Webster 2004). The compromise was strongly criticized by many on both sides of the issue, with African American legislators supporting the compromise being characterized as “weak-kneed” and white supporters of the compromise labeled as “turncoats” (Webster and Leib 2001, 294). The debate over whether the battle flag should remain flying on public space on the South Carolina capitol’s grounds remained at a standstill for fifteen years, from May 2000 until July 2015. On Wednesday evening, June 17, 2015, a young white racist enamored with Confederate symbols, including the battle flag, joined a Bible study group of African American worshipers at the historic [End Page 29] Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. At approximately 9:00 pm he pulled a Glock 41 .45 caliber handgun from his pack and opened fire, killing nine while shouting racial epithets. The shooter used hollow-point bullets to cause the maximum damage to his victims. The shooter’s intention was to start a race war (Smith 2015). On July 10, 2015, twenty-three days after the Charleston murders, the Confederate battle flag was removed from the Confederate soldier’s monument on the South Carolina state capitol grounds. In this essay we examine the reasons for the battle flag’s removal with an emphasis on the South’s religiosity. We argue that religion is a central foundation for why the flag debates in the region have been so fervent. We further argue that the fact that the murders occurred in a church during a Bible study on a Wednesday evening was an important reason why South Carolina leaders were successful in removing the battle flag from the grounds of the state capitol. This paper first provides a brief overview of the South’s strong religiosity. We then examine the origins of the religious fervor associated with the Confederacy, major Confederate figures such as Robert E. Lee, and Confederate symbols such as the battle flag. The paper then concludes with a discussion of the role of religion in the reaction of political leaders and the removal of the flag from the state house grounds following the Charleston murders. The connection between religion and the battle flag is important given that the Southern states are generally regarded as being the most deeply religious, even “Christ-haunted” (Wood 2004) region of the United States, and that much of the American South is in the Bible Belt (Brunn, Webster and Archer 2011, Webster et al. 2015).2 National polls consistently find that church attendance is highest in the American South among U.S. regions. For example, a recent Gallup Poll found that 11 of the top 12 states in terms of the highest weekly church...

The late John Winberry was a productive scholar over his more than three decade academic career at the University of South Carolina. Professor Winberry may be best remembered today, in terms of his research on the American South, for his important work in the early 1980s on the geography of Confederate monuments found in cemeteries and courthouse squares across the southern landscape. In this paper, we argue that this research still resonates today for two reasons: first, his considerable detail in locating Confederate monuments both in time and space, and second, his observations about the 'place' of these monuments, their meanings, and how these meanings shifted over time. His observations, navigating both modernist and post-modernist paradigms, foreshadowed much of the work that has been done over the past twenty years by a new generation of scholars on the politics of memory in the American South.

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million people died in the Cambodian genocide. We argue that the mass violence that transpired during this period was a manifestation of the Khmer Rouge's attempt to make life. Through a focus on the production of both violence and vulnerability we direct attention to the contradictory policies and practices forwarded by the Khmer Rouge that were designed to maximize life through the maximization of death. Specifically, we consider the mass starvation that accompanied the genocide as a structure of violence; we forward the argument that the rationing of food constitutes a calculated yet contradictory policy, namely that food rations represent in material form an inner contradiction of fostering life and disallowing life. Subsequently, the policy of forced rations—which imposed a particular space of vulnerability on Cambodia's population—resulted in massive loss of life through starvation and disease that were not the unintended side-effects of poor research, poor planning, or poor implementation on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, but rather were the necessary consequences of a proto-capitalist form of state-building.

Intensos debates sobre si es apropiado mostrar la bandera confederada en espacios públicos se han librado a través del sur estadounidense desde finales de 1980, y las actitudes de estos debates están divididas a lo largo de líneas raciales. Los debates más candentes se produjeron en los cuatro estados que sancionaron las manifestaciones más destacadas del emblema de batalla: Alabama y Carolina del Sur (donde la bandera ondeaba sobre sus capitolios estatales), y Georgia y Mississippi (donde el emblema de batalla se incorporó a las banderas de los estados). Aunque hubo llamados en los cuatro estados para hacer frente a la legitimidad de la exhibición pública de la band-era de batalla a través de referéndums públicos, solo Mississippi ha tenido una votación pública apropósito. La bandera del estado de Mississippi ha incorporado el emblema de batalla en su diseño desde 1894. En abril de 2001, el estado llevó a cabo una consulta pública sobre la posibilidad de sustituir la bandera de 1894 con una nueva bandera diseñada por una comisión. La propuesta nueva bandera eliminó el emblema de batalla y lo remplazó con un círculo de veinte estrellas, pero fue rechazada por una abrumadora mayoría de los votantes del estado. En este trabajo se analiza la geografía de la votación del refer-endo a través de dos diferentes concepciones de la política electoral, las cuales ayudan en la explicación de los patrones espaciales de los votos en el referéndum de la bandera de Mississippi: el modelo de división electoral y el modelo tradicionalista-modernizador. A través de análisis cartográfico y estadístico, se concluye que ambos modelos proporcionan información valiosa sobre el voto y las actitudes hacia el debate de la band-era de Mississippi.

Contentious debates over whether it is appropriate to display the Confederate battle flag in public spaces have been waged across the American South since the late 1980s, with attitudes in these debates largely divided along racial lines. The most vitriolic debates occurred in the four states sanctioning the most prominent displays of the battle emblem: Alabama and South Carolina (where the flag flew over their state capitols), and Georgia and Mississippi (where the battle emblem was incorporated into their state flags). Although there were calls in all four states to address the legitimacy of the battle flag’s public display via public referenda, only in Mississippi has a statewide public vote been held. The Mississippi state flag has incorporated the battle emblem in its design since 1894. In April 2001, the state held a public referendum on whether to replace the 1894 flag with a new flag designed by a commission. The proposed new flag deleted the battle emblem and replaced it with a circle of twenty stars, but was rejected by an overwhelming majority of the state’s voters. In this paper, we examine the geography of the referendum vote through two different conceptions of electoral politics which aid in explaining the spatial patterns of the votes in Mississippi’s flag referendum: the electoral cleavage model and the traditionalist-modernizer model. Through cartographic and statistical analyses, we conclude that both models provide valuable insight into the vote and attitudes towards the Mississippi flag debate.

In my teaching, I like to use local examples when possible to illustrate theories and concepts. In this essay, I highlight a case study from Norfolk, Virginia, where I live and teach, which we use in class to help understand the concepts of memory, heritage and landscape. This case concerns two of the city's adjacent 19th century cemeteries, the Elm-wood and West Point cemeteries. One of the cemeteries is historically white and contains a recently-added white Confederate soldier statue. The other cemetery is historically African American and contains what is believed to be the region's only statue of a black Union soldier. Through a discussion of these two local statues and cemeteries, we explore how race and power are 'naturalized' in the presentation of the region's history, and investigate the role that memory and heritage play in constructing and contesting issues of race and power on the landscape.

In 1950, in the beginning phases of the Cold War, the U.S. Congress passed the Federal Civil Defense Act with the goal of protecting civilian populations in case of nuclear conflict. By the mid-1950s civil defense officials were busy developing detailed mass evacuation plans for American cities seen as targets of potential Soviet hydrogen bomb attacks. The 1950s was also the height of Jim Crow racial segregation in the American South. Using these important historical contingencies as a political, social, and cultural backdrop, we explore the geographical implications of Cold War civil defense planning efforts in a 1950s Southern segregated city, Savannah, Georgia, through the dual lenses of race and the geopolitics of fear. We do this by scrutinizing Savannah's 1955 Hydrogen Bomb Evacuation Plan, particularly as it pertained to the evacuation of the city's schoolchildren. Overall, the plan detailing local civil defense planners' strategy for evacuating Savannah residents makes no specific mention of racial segregation. But upon closer examination, the plan suggests that the maintenance of Jim Crow racial segregation, as well as larger Cold War geopolitical fears playing out at the local level, were key concerns in carrying out evacuation strategies in Savannah.

This set of essays is based on a panel session convened at the 2009 meeting of the Association of American Geographers, which sought to explore the many challenges and pitfalls involved with teaching nationalism as a topic in geography classrooms. The authors offer different but complementary insights into the practical difficulties and potential strategies for covering an innately difficult topic. The discussion of nationalism in the essays is also an effective venue with which to further engage discussions of critical pedagogy.

In the early 1900s, U.S. state and Canadian provincial governments began to register automobiles and issue license plates to their owners. Within several decades of the first issuance of license plates, state and provincial governments began to use these plates for advertising purposes, such as promoting local economies and tourism. In recent decades, however, governments have used license plates to promote national identities and nationalist ideals. Using examples from the United States and Canada, I examine how governments have used such banal signifiers of place as license plates to craft and promote these identities and how drivers have contested that usage.

The United States is a country with a deeply-engrained love affair with the automobile (Jakle and Sculle 2008). Owning an automobile is not only a status symbol, but it is also a mark of individuality. An automobile can come to reflect one‟s identity, painting images such as economic status, social and environmental awareness, rebelliousness, and even national identity (Gilroy 2001, Edensor 2004). However, automobiles are not static, identical expressions of identity as automobiles not only come in different shapes, colors and sizes, but one model of automobile may differ dramatically from one year to the next. Furthermore, owners often individualize their automobiles by adding factory options such as sunroofs, fog lights, tinted windows, spoilers and vinyl graphics.

In June 2006, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly approved a statewide referendum that added a prohibition against same-sex marriage to the state's constitution. This research examines the Alabama vote by oplacingo the politics of sexuality within the state's multifaceted web of cultural and social space. We fuse a traditional electoral geography approach with an overall postpositivist cultural and social perspective, beginning with an assessment of the politics of place by situating Alabama as a place with a long history of battles over the so-called culture wars. The cultural politics of the legislative debate and the geographic distribution of the actual vote are also examined within a socio-demographic context, drawing some comparisons from a similar vote in Georgia in 2004, another state in the American Deep South. Those opposed to same-sex marriage in Alabama made effective use of various social constructions that are deeply embedded within a omoralo geography, situating the state as a fenced-off bastion of oreligious traditional values,o a common theme throughout the American South. In this vein, social boundaries and territory were demarcated as a powerful political act in Alabama, a strategy that situated the state as hetero-normatively oin place,o while deeming sexual minorities as oout of place.o.