This essay argues that the writer E. B. White, best known for his literary essays and children’s books, also had a significant but neglected career as a political writer. It considers his writings, during and just after World War II, on the subject of world government, and argues that he made the case for world federation by way of a novel model of cosmopolitanism that results from love of place and country rather than from dispensing with them. It considers the reception of his 1946 book The Wild Flag and the productive tension between White’s skepticism about political advocacy and his attempt to imagine a public for world government as constituted through his vision of cosmopolitanism.

Urban theorists have offered a number of powerful and popular concepts for mapping spatial relations. These languages have delivered considerable benefits to the theorization of spatial production. But the terms are often of less utility in telling the histories of particular places. They often confuse, rather than enlighten, when it comes to understanding the constellations of representation, action, meaning, and power at play in the histories of specific features of the built environment. The concepts themselves are not at fault; rather it is the tendency to see them as concepts and concepts only that hinders. As a cultural historian, I believe that uncovering spatial histories demands a close attention to specific, contingent processes, change over time, and struggle among discourses and actors. Revealing the way that spaces become actual places requires distilling from abstractions precise accounts of particular actors and discourses related in a process of flux and struggle across time and space.