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Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860-1890. Karin M. Morin. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. xi and 245 pp., maps, photos, illus., notes, bibliog., index. $72.20 cloth (978-1-4094-0143-8); $55.72 electronic (978-1-4094-0144-5)

Karen Morin’s study of Charles P. Daly and the American Geographical Society (AGS) is a fine piece of scholarship and an important addition to the stillmodest corpus of work on late nineteenth-century U.S. geography as a broad set of practices extending beyond the fledgling academic discipline. What is perhaps most remarkable about the story is how many issues and events of larger significance Morin is able to unfold out of the “origami figure” formed by Charles Daly’s many-layered career. It is readily understandable that a geographer interested in a genealogy of the discipline would become fascinated with Daly: He had his fingers in local, national, and international projects from urban social reform in New York City to the Northern Pacific Railroad, the trans-isthmian canal project through Nicaragua that was eventually abandoned in favor of Darien/ Panama to Arctic exploration, and King Leopold of Belgium’s colonial adventures in the Congo (these involvements are recounted in detail in chapters 3–6). The focus on an individual figure as a way to explore all of this has its risks, as Morin admits, chiefly the temptation to dwell in an overly voluntaristic way on his “performances” of popular geography at the expense of the larger processes and relations these performances drew together. Morin largely succeeds in avoiding this pitfall. Perhaps the main quibble in this respect is that, although larger forces do generally earn a nod at least, the AGS itself during the period of Daly’s presidency hardly leaves a footprint in the narrative independent of his positions and projects.