| The Columbia Gazetteer of North America. 2000. |
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| Preface |
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| With 50,000 entries, The Columbia Gazetteer of North America is far and away the most comprehensive encyclopedia of the geographical places and features of the region. The entries, drawn from the 1998 Columbia Gazetteer of the World, are designed to meet two goals—accuracy and maximum coverage of places and features. The information that is presented reflects the input of 63 geographical specialists intimately familiar with a wide variety of sources, and with personal knowledge of the places and data described in these sources. | 1 |
The Gazetteer covers every incorporated place and county in the United States, along with several thousand unincorporated places, special-purpose sites, and physical features. The following categories indicate the scope, coverage, and sheer amount of information contained in the Gazetteer:| | The political world—regions, states, provinces, districts, counties, parishes, capitals, cities, towns, villages, neighborhoods, special districts. |
| The physical world—continents, seas, gulfs, lakes, ponds, lagoons, rivers, bays, inlets, channels, streams, islands, archipelagoes, peninsulas, keys, sandbars, mountains, mountain ranges, plateaus, deserts, valleys, glaciers, volcanoes. |
| Special places—national and state parks, forests, reserves and monuments, historic and archeological sites, resorts, theme parks, airports, ports, dams, nuclear plants, mines, canals, shopping malls, industrial zones, stadia, military bases, roads, highways, expressways, and mythic places. |
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| The Gazetteer is, in every sense, a guide to the profound changes that have taken place within North America and the Caribbean over the past half century, and thus has value to librarians; academic researchers; planners; students; writers; people in government, industry, and tourism; travelers; and all others for whom places hold fascination and who require accurate data about them. | 3 |
| The geography of the region has been altered by post-industrial, high tech, financial service, resort and tourist enterprises. Traditional manufacturing has weakened or disappeared from many parts of the United States, while holding its own in Canada, and increasing in parts of Mexico and the Caribbean. The number of family-owned farms in the U.S. continues to decline, as corporate farming exploits the benefits of scale. While grain and cattle producers worry about falling prices and declining export markets, those concentrating on specialized fruit, vegetable, and poultry output experience sustained growth. | 4 |
| The federal highway system of the U.S. has been extended to nearly every corner of the country, serving as the catalyst for urban and industrial development. Many of the military bases that proliferated during World War II have closed, while space-age-related centers have been developed. United States growth is reflected in such entries as those of San Jose, with its focus on the high technology of Silicon Valley, and Boston, with its Route 128-Yankee Division electronic highway. Charlotte, the third largest banking center in the United States; Cape Canaveral, with its John F. Kennedy Space Center; Miami’s “Little Havana” created by the large influx of Cubans; and Vail, the nation’s largest ski and summer recreation area—these all represent major developments that exemplify the post-World War II landscape. | 5 |
| Canada’s main connection to the Pacific Rim, Vancouver, has flourished economically. Its largest metropolitan area, Toronto, which is the center for the country’s manufacturing and service sectors, has benefited from the inflow of population and capital from Quebec. | 6 |
| In Mexico, cities within the “maquiladoras” duty-free border zone, such as Tiajuana, Juarez, and Matamoros, have attracted hundreds of thousands of manufacturing assembly jobs for the consumer products that are exported to the United States. Employment has also been stimulated by new, planned resorts along the Caribbean coast, such as Cancun and Cozumel. Bermuda has become a center for international financial services, including insurance and banking, which outstrip even its tourist industry as a source of income. The Cayman Islands, too, have emerged as an offshore banking center. | 7 |
| While there has been unprecedented economic expansion in much of North America and pockets of growth in the Caribbean, there has also been decline—in central cities throughout the United States, in the mill towns of the northeast, in the centers of the industrial “rustbelt” of the mid-west from Illinois, through Ohio, and also Pennsylvania. Major efforts at urban renewal have not wiped out the poverty of the ghettos. Economic recovery eludes Lowell, Massachusetts, new home to the second largest Cambodian population in the United States. The city had lost its textile mills and then saw the collapse of the computer industry that had replaced them. East St. Louis, once a transportation hub with nearby stockyards, remains depressed despite the introduction of river-boat gambling. The steel mills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Lackawanna, New York, are shuttered, as unemployment pervades these former centers of heavy industry. | 8 |
| Even the commercial nuclear power plants of the United States are beginning to enter a period of decline. The number of plants sky rocketed from eighteen in the 1960s to 111 in 1990. However, no new stations have been authorized by the federal government since 1978. Yankee-Rowe in Franklin County, Massachusetts, the first nuclear power facility in the United States, was decommissioned in 1992, and other closings are scheduled. | 9 |
| Overpopulation, drought, and poor soils continue to plague rural Mexico, driving millions of peasants to migrate to Mexican cities or to the United States. Jamaica, too, remains mired in poverty. The sugar industry has declined, while new industries like bauxite mining, alumina, tourism, and apparel, cannot make up for the loss of agricultural jobs. In Cuba, the Castro government’s efforts to diversify agriculture by decreasing the dependence upon sugar have failed, as sugar is still grown on two-thirds of all cropland. With the withdrawal of Russian economic and military aid, Cuba’s economic difficulties have become endemic, as food and oil imports represent an increasingly heavy burden. The foregoing are examples of the geographical changes represented in the North American Gazetteer’s entries. | 10 |
| The spelling used in the Gazetteer takes into consideration that English-language spellings of foreign or native names vary considerably. While relying heavily on the spellings used by the U.S. Department of Interior’s Board of Geographic Names, both for places within the United States and for foreign names, the editors have, at times, recommended alternative spellings. In general, the main headings of the entries are the names used by the official national agencies and transliterated into English. | 11 |
| The pronunciation of place-names in this Gazetteer follows the pronunciation guide found in Kenneth G. Wilson’s The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, 1993. This guide is based on a rhyming scheme for words in the English language, and is commonly used by news broadcasters and newspapers. | 12 |
| I am deeply indebted to my editor colleagues—geographical scholars all—who gave unstintingly of their time and energies, and have helped bring this Gazetteer from concept to reality. I also wish to extend thanks and admiration to the Columbia University Press family, and especially to Lisa Hacken, Project Director of The Columbia Gazetteer of the World; Stephen Sterns, Managing Editor for world Gazetteer and The Columbia Gazetteer of North America; James Raimes, Assistant Director of the Press for Reference Publishing; and William Strachan, Director of the Columbia University Press. Their commitment to the quality and integrity of the Gazetteer is in the highest scholarly traditions of an academic press. | 13 |
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| Saul B. Cohen, Editor | 14 |
| University Professor Emeritus, Hunter College-CUNY | 15 |
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| | | The Columbia Gazetteer of North America. Copyright © 2000 Columbia University Press. |
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