ABSTRACT
Until recently, history has been about time, not space. Space was simply the places where history happened, and historians paid it little attention, preferring to cede its study to geographers and specialist historians of architecture, landscape, and design. However, this has begun to change. In the mid-1980s scholar Michel Foucault (1926-1984) suggested that while “[t]he great obsession of the nineteenth century was . . . history . . . [t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”1 Since then a number of historians have recognized that space is not simply a neutral background for events, and that we can deepen our analyses of political, social, and cultural developments over time by situating them in space, and by integrating our analyses of space into our histories of people. Town halls, city parks and commercial pleasure gardens, slums, urban tenements and suburban homes, parlors, sculleries, and bedrooms, railway stations and carriages – all of these spaces have meanings.
