Abstract
The geographic distribution of place names on the landscape reflects the power of different groups vying for control of a locale at different points in history. They further generally present a one-sided version of history from the perspective of those holding power. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the geography of place names in the United States using the surname “Custer.” General George Armstrong Custer was controversial during his life and continues to be so 140 years after his death. In spite of the controversy surrounding his life, his death at the Little Bighorn in 1876 elevated him to the status of a national hero. As a result he was memorialized by the widespread naming of streets and other landscape features “Custer” in the years after he was killed. This project has identified 557 streets and 221 human and physical landscape features named after him including counties, cities, mountains and water bodies. Using cartographic analysis, this chapter finds that Custer features are most plentiful in the American West, with fewer in the South and Northeast. Arguably, Custer’s success as a Union General in the Civil War limited the density of Custer place names in the Confederate South, and his popularity waned in the Northeast after he led the Seventh Cavalry in a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on the Washita River in 1868. Notably, some the highest concentrations of Custer place names are found in the locales where Custer undertook some of his most controversial actions.
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Webster, G.R. (2018). Commemorative Custer Place Names on the American Landscape. In: Brunn, S., Kehrein, R. (eds) Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_103-1
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