"Matthew Hannah's book focuses on late nineteenth-century America, the period of transformation and upheaval which followed the Civil War and gave birth to the twentieth century. This was a time of industrialization and urbanization. Immigration was on the increase and traditional hierarchies were being challenged. Hannah explores the modernization of the American federal government during this period, using a rich tapestry of theoretical and empirical material. Discussions of gender, race and colonial knowledge are woven into an extended engagement with Foucault's ideas on 'governmentality' and other concepts from recent social theory. The empirical strands of the narrative are organized around the public career and writing of Francis A. Walker. A hugely influential figure at that time, he was director of the 1870 and 1880 US censuses, commissioner of Indian affairs and a prominent political economist and educator. Through an analysis of his work and his governing vision of social order, Hannah enriches and moves beyond previous interpretations of the period, demonstrating that the modernization of the American national state was a thoroughly spatial and explicitly geographical project."--Jacket.

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