Cultural evolution: a basic concept for human and historical geography

The concept of cultural evolution profoundly affected the objectives and methods employed in the social sciences in the earlier part of this century but it has largely been ignored by geographers. In recent years a number of American cultural anthropologists have re-examined the concept of cultural evolution, including Sahlins and Service, who consider that cultural evolution is analogous to biological evolution involving the diversification of cultural forms through adaptive modification and the progress of culture through successive levels of development. They have called these two processes specific evolution and general evolution respectively and from these two perspectives on cultural evolution they have developed the Law of Cultural Dominance. Certain operational problems exist in the application of the concept of cultural evolution, but once they have been surmounted it promises to constitute a valuable mode of explanation in the analysis of cultures and cultural change.     

Reading Livy against Livy: The dream and nightmare of (American) empire1

Recent debates over the rise of an American Empire have relied on analogies to past empires, from ancient Athens to modern Britain. Such historical analogies, while inexact and debatable, are a basic mode of understanding our relation to the past. This article explores the analogy of the United States to the Roman Empire. The figure of Rome is a contested legacy, as can be seen in the long-ago writings of Livy and Tacitus, in the developing ideal of Rome during the Middle Ages, and in the works of modern scholars and poets living under Soviet domination in Poland. Tacitus tells us that the most profound symptoms of empire may be seen in the homeland. The debate over analogies for the American Empire is thus a debate over the “state of America's soul.”