The Study of Local Public Economies: Multi‐organizational,Multi‐level Institutional Analysis and Development

One important extension of the IAD framework has been to the study of local public economies. These are multi‐organizational, multi‐level arrangements defined as the set of governmental jurisdictions, public and nonprofit agencies, and private firms that interact in various patterns to provide and produce public goods and services within a specific locality or region. Commonly, the localities or regions studied from this perspective have been U.S. metropolitan areas, often defined as a central city and its surrounding or adjoining county. Localities can be delineated, however, on various terms, and in the IAD framework, it is the geo‐physical nature of a locality that, in substantial part, drives the analysis. One of the strengths of the approach is its capacity to explain local variations in public organization as a function of the geo‐physical diversity of localities, while at the same time developing empirical generalizations and normative principles that apply across diverse regions. What, for example, might the organization and governance of a complex metropolitan area have in common with the organization and governance of a complex protected area, such as the greater Yellowstone eco‐region or the Adirondack Park? Construing both sorts of regions as local public economies can enhance our overall understanding of public organization at the same time that it permits a more nuanced understanding of diverse localities. Such work contributes to the ongoing IAD project of “understanding institutional diversity.”     

Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians

By focusing on the key book‐length studies of the Apollo program that landed American astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, this essay seeks to evaluate the historiography about Apollo in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, dividing the subject into five major areas. The first area is the foreign policy and public policy antecedents of Apollo and its immediate ramifications; some of these efforts have yielded significant studies. The second area involves the evolution of space hardware, in many instances these are overwhelmingly detailed studies of rockets and other space flight technologies. Third, there is a great fascination with the astronauts and their actual flights, and a rich tradition of memoir and narrative exists in this arena. The fourth area receiving attention from historians of Apollo and the lunar voyages emphasizes the history of science, in which much of the focus is on the scientists, scientific findings from the voyages of discovery, and the use of this evidence in developing larger theories about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Finally, and increasingly so in the last 20 years, the Apollo story has been recontextualized through social and cultural investigations of its meaning in modern America. Assessing the five major areas enumerated above, this essay also offers some possibly fruitful avenues of future research.     

Perception of Sacred Space

Discrimination of space into sacred and profane is as old as mankind. This study suggests a typology for categorizing sacred Space at three broad levels: mysticoreligious, homelands and historical. Each is further divided on the basis of the extent of the group which shares the consensus view of sanctity. Recognizable levels include international, national, regional, community, neighborhood and individual sacred space. The Mormon culture was used as a basis to test the validity of the proposed typology through use of two questionnaires administered to Mormons. The first questionnaire was an open-ended survey to determine all important regions which were recognized as sacred. The second questionnaire was then prepared which required respondents to rank 15 sacred sites or regions in terms of their sanctity. An analysis of the responses indicates that those sites which are perceived as most sacred are mystico-religious sites where Mormons believe contact occurs between divine powers and man. The next level of sanctity was applied to homelands. The recognized homelands include Utah and Jackson County, Missouri which the Mormons view as a promised land. The third and lowest level of sacred space includes sites of historical importance to Mormons.     

Toward a Geography of American Civil Religion

The concept of civil religion has been of considerable interest to students of American culture during recent decades. Little attention has been given, however, to regional variations in the practice of American civil religion. The purpose of this study is to explore basic patterns in the popular observance of the Bicentennial, as one possible approach to understanding the geography of American civil religion. The study is based on the register of Bicentennial events compiled by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration during 1975 and 1976. Findings indicate that the strongest commitment to public celebration of the Bicentennial occurred in a large region reaching from the western prairie states across the Great Plains into the northern Rocky Mountains. This commitment was expressed both in the region's large number of Bicentennial events and in the distinctively celebrative quality of many of those events. Civil religion's prominence in this region probably reflects several factors: the importance of religion generally in providing a sense of community in a region characterized by cultural isolation; the effect of rural and small-town conformity and the influence of a regional culture that is closely tied to the traditional mainstream of American culture.