Canons and wars: American military geography and the limits of disciplines

In the early 1950s, the United States armed forces began to promote, on television and elsewhere, a network of dispersed but domestic research and testing sites that drew together military, industrial, and academic interests. From Nevada and New Mexico to Arizona and Alaska, a series of field-based exercises to prepare for ‘global war’ were staged and then selectively broadcast for the public. This was a set of places where forms of geographical knowledge, including the tools for engaging with natural and cultural foes, were being generated. But despite their role as locations for the making of powerful ‘truths’ about the world and its qualities, these sites – along with most of the scholars who used them for experiments and training – occupy decidedly non-canonical positions in the history of geography. Drawing from research on several of these locations and their institutional patrons, this paper argues that twentieth-century American military geographies should be more comprehensively situated within histories of geographical knowledge. The result will be a fuller and more critical understanding of how certain canons are consolidated, precisely because we will gain a better sense of the world beyond academic disciplines in which canons are made. •Military geographies are more comprehensively situated within histories of geographical knowledge.•A novel examination of the geographies produced by the United States armed forces after World War II.•A critical reflection on the consolidation of ‘canons’ and their relation to both disciplines and the wider world.