Histories of American geographic thought and practice have sketched, but not critically explored, the relationship between war, intellectual change, and the production of spatial knowledge. This article sheds light on a crucial period, the middle decades of the twentieth century, when new modes of understanding and representing geography were being formulated at a variety of sites across the nation‐state, from Princeton to the University of Washington. In particular, there emerged an altered conception of region, not as a descriptive but as a theoretical unit. This intellectual transformation, driven by an invigorated scientific imperative, was closely wedded to broader geopolitical conditions of war and militarism—to the demands for synthetic regional intelligence and new collectives of research that could adequately address complex technical and social challenges consistent with global influence. Moving from the formative hub of the Office of Strategic Services to the more diffuse but no less powerful structures of Cold War funding, we chart the emergence of a new regional model, inextricably linked and concurrent with the solidification of a world of strategic regions open to the exertion of American power, but also part of a remarkable emergent technoscientific complex at home.

The dual themes of sovereignty and wilderness have come to define, or at least dominate, historical discussions of the North American Arctic. This paper argues that neither adequately captures the role of the Arctic during the early Cold War, a period of unprecedented interest in northern landscapes. Political and environmental approaches, with their national undertones, were incorporated into a dominant narrative whose implications were far less abstract: the Arctic became a frontier for military science, both imaginatively and materially. Civilian institutions with military affiliations emerged to advocate for additional Arctic research in the natural and social sciences, whereas Canadian and American military agencies established laboratories and training centres, constructed complex defence networks and staged numerous military exercises across Arctic spaces, operations which tested the performance of both humans and machines. These projects actively engineered Arctic terrain in the name of scholarly advancement and military necessity. If the Cold War Arctic is to be understood geographically, then the national scale must be placed next to the broader views of geopolitics and scientific inquiry but also next to the finer perspectives of military bodies moving across ‘hostile’ terrain.

The Second World War's global dimensions necessitated an intellectual mobilization dedicated to the study of the world's geographical regions. In the United States, the production of this intelligence prepared the ground for Cold War area studies, as information on certain cultural and natural spaces was collected and classified in central repositories or published in comprehensive manuals. Using archival and period sources, this article employs the central example of the Smithsonian Institution's Ethnogeographic Board to trace the relationship between the production of geographical knowledge and American military practices during the war. Through survival guides, services to intelligence agencies, filing efforts, and surveys of areal education, the board crafted a cartographic framework with a specific structure. The regional parts of this map were environments where the reach of militarism and social science could be localized. This study contributes to an understanding of geography's crucial relationship with militarism, and to the related history of geographical thought and practice during the Second World War by considering applied intellectual work and by transgressing disciplinary boundariesboundaries that were of little importance in wartime-to demonstrate that both regional and systematic approaches to geography could be made flexible in the face of geopolitical demands.

The militarization of Alaska during and after World War II created an extraordinary set of new facilities. But it also reshaped the imaginative role of Alaska as a hostile environment, where an antagonistic form of nature could be defeated with the appropriate combination of technology and training. One of the crucial sites for this reformulation was the Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, based at Ladd Air Force Base in Fairbanks. In the first two decades of the Cold War, its employees conducted numerous experiments on acclimatization and survival. The laboratory is now best known for an infamous set of tests involving the application of radioactive tracers to indigenous Alaskans--experiments publicized by post-Cold War panels established to evaluate the tragic history of atomic-era human subject research. But little else has been written about the laboratory's relationship with the populations and landscapes that it targeted for study. This essay presents the laboratory as critical to Alaska's history and the history of the Cold War sciences. A consideration of the laboratory's various projects also reveals a consistent fascination with race. Alaskan Natives were enrolled in experiments because their bodies were understood to hold clues to the mysteries of northern nature. A scientific solution would aid American military campaigns not only in Alaska, but in cold climates everywhere.

This paper historicizes American cities after the Second World War through the rich motif of noir literature and film. But, in doing so, the paper is also a critical consideration of noir's work in urban studies. Noir has been drawn, often usefully but also unfortunately, away from its referents, from the terrain that it most directly summons but also from the spaces in which its contradictions are most apparent. Moving from a discussion of the distractions of Chinatown to contextual themes such as mobility and ruin, the paper links noir criticism and noir texts with broader debates in postwar urbanism and modernism. As just part of these discourses, noir not only is irreducible to certain essences, but can potentially perform the opposite role, challenging conventions of urban understanding and practice. The result would be a more detailed and subtle account of modernism's American geographies.

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