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Ellen Churchill Semple's last book, The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History, is the least known of her three volumes on human geography. Its neglect by geographers, beginning not long after its publication, was accelerated during the 1930s. Reasons include the decline of interest in classical geography as a part of geography's task, the development of small-scale research methods and changing disciplinary objectives, and the designation of historical geography as either a responsibility of historians or, at most, permitting only cross-sections of the geographies of specific pasts, with little attention to historical processes. This essay examines Semple's Mediterranean project as a whole, including an analysis of her earlier Mediterranean work. It argues for the significance of the changing methods and emphases revealed in her late Mediterranean publications and book chapters and traces her struggle to complete the final product. It also traces the changing relations within American geography as later scholars, several of them women, have reassessed Semple's late work. The article closes with an argument: why today's geographers should read The Geography of the Mediterranean Region, as a model of how to write better geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which the author responds to articles written by geographer David Lowenthal in the periodicals "Geographical Review" and "Journal of American History." The author claims that Lowenthal snubs the documentary aspects of historical scholarship, examines Lowenthal's perspectives on a book chapter written by scholar Ralph Tarr entitled "Man and Nature," and discusses the scholarship of scholar Rollin Salisbury. The article also discusses Lowenthal's contribution to the book "Man and Nature."

The year 2013 marked the sesquicentennial of the birth of Ellen Churchill Semple, at one time a towering figure in American geography. Like almost all of her geographer contemporaries in the first decade of the twentieth century, she was a stout defender of 'geographic influences' in history. This article examines a failed attempt by professional historians to give geographers a hearing at the American Historical Association in a critical 'Conference' on the relevance of geography to history, in 1907. Organized by Frederick Jackson Turner, it was the first time professional historians in America had given Miss Semple a public opportunity in which to defend her views. How and why it turned out to be an intellectual disaster, and how its major participants changed their views later, is the subject of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Conventional narrative regarding the American reception of George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864), is that his work and ideas were "lost," "forgotten," or "neglected" until Lewis Mumford "rediscovered" him and introduced him to geographers at the University of California-Berkeley through The Brown Decades (Mumford [1931] 1955) and until Carl Sauer made him known to the profession at large beginning in 1938. This article upends the conventional narrative by looking at earlier references to Marsh's later versions of Man and Nature, which were published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action from 1874 to 1907. Analysis reveals that a number of geographers and historians cited these editions between 1875 and the early 1950s. Examining the legend of loss and rediscovery suggests the value of methods utilized in reception studies for research on the history of geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This fragment of an ongoing research project into the historical relations of geography and classics introduces a minor but significant scholar, Henry Fanshawe Tozer (1829-1916). Tozer's lectures on the geography of ancient Greece as part of an effort to modernize Oxford University's curriculum; his exploratory travels in the Balkans, the Aegean, and Asia Minor that resulted in three classic volumes; his book of selections from Strabo as an alternative to standard classical texts; and his well-regarded History of Ancient Geography entitle him to consideration from geographers. Most of his books have been reprinted (from 75 to 135 years after their initial publication), and he was regarded in his own time as a geographer. Yet few Anglo-American geographers today know his work. His selection for the Dictionary of National Biography's "Missing Persons" volume in 1993 and his omission from more recent surveys, such as those in the 2003 British Academy volume on British geography, suggest how much more we have yet to learn about the nineteenth-century roots of our discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Arnold Guyot's (1807-1884) studies of the physical geography of New England within the concept of "Humboldtian science." After a brief explanation of that framework, it discusses Guyot's work on the Smithsonian Institution's meteorological project and his measurement of the heights of New England mountains and their written and cartographic display. Guyot is shown to be a full participant in and a leading practitioner of Humboldt's methods during his New England years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) had a lifelong interest in geography. Except for his role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition and a few references to his Notes on the State of Virginia, however, geographers have taken a relatively slight interest in this aspect of his thought, despite his having sometimes been referred to as "one of the greatest American geographers." This essay suggests that we need to reexamine Jefferson as a geographical thinker. Reviewing some of the more important literature thus far, it suggests where such topics may profitably be extended and points to some aspects of his geographical interests not yet incorporated into the geographical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), four times Prime Minister, was also the most prolific Victorian commentator on the Homeric corpus. In 1858 Gladstone published a three-volume collection of Homeric studies, including a curious cartographic reconstruction of the mental world of Homer as revealed in his epic poetry. Over a forty-five year period, Gladstone continued to publish in this area, in the interest primarily of elevating British education and culture. His interest in Bronze Age geography, a subordinate part of his general effort, is nevertheless of interest in its own right and, in his attempt to reconstruct Homer's mental map of the world, an early example of mental mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strabo of Amasia (ca. 64 B.C.-ca. A.D. 23) wrote the first comprehensive geography of the world known to the Greeks and Romans. Interest in Strabo and his Geography, which survives nearly intact in seventeen books, has fluctuated over the centuries among both classicists and historians of geography. After some historical background on Strabo and his reception, this essay considers the contribution of two significant recent English-language treatments, as well as Strabo's Geography itself, and suggests ways in which the Strabonic model may have renewed relevance to the geographer's task of interpreting the oikoumene in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Franz Boas as an aspiring professional geographer during the 1880s: his Baffin Land research, his publications, his participation in geography organizations, and his struggle to attain a university appointment in geography. Frustrated by a seeming lack of opportunity for advancement in Germany, Boas explored career opportunities as a geographer in America and launched a series of unsuccessful but meaningful attempts to dominate the intellectual direction of American geography. Finally, the article reviews the circumstances surrounding Boas's appointment as an anthropologist at Clark University in 1889. Through examining Boas's own words and actions, the paper demonstrates that his professional identification with geography was lengthier and stronger than earlier accounts have suggested. It also critiques the myth of a Baffin Land “conversion” to anthropology, and delineates the circumstances of his shift from German human geography to his Americanist recasting of anthropology after 1889. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antecedents of twentieth century humanistic geography in America lie in part in the cultivation of geography by classicists, historians, librarians, and other nineteenth and early twentieth century humanistic scholars and writers. One of them, William H. Tillinghast, a Harvard College librarian trained both in classics and history, wrote an exemplary essay in the 1880s on ‘The Geographical Knowledge of the Ancients’ that provided a model analysis of early Western geographic ideas anticipating that of John K. Wright in the 1920s. Institutional analysis suggests their common rootage in an evolving Harvard ‘school’ of humanistic geography based in history and classics, the product both of a sequence of mentor/disciple relationships and a broader institutional environment shaping Wright''s early concepts concerning the history of geography. 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The decision to establish geography as a graduate academic discipline at Clark University beginning in 1921 is examined as a part of the strategy and structure of academic entrepreneurial activity. The institutional strategy of Charles Thurber, President of the Clark Board of Trustees and of President Wallace W. Atwood is traced from its formal inception in 1919 through its early implementation to the end of 1923. The ideal of a "Great Geographical Institute" is set against the specific contours of its host institution in this period to show how local and personal factors both permitted the adoption and limited the success of the strategy and therefore prevented the Clark Graduate School of Geography from attaining the broad and secure local institutional base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clark psychology in the post&shyHallian era has attracted little attention from scholars. The only general account, Carl Murchison's ‘Recollections of a Magic Decade at Clark’ (1959), is both partisan and limited in scope. This paper examines the ‘second cycle’ of the Clark department in a period of unusual productivity in research, publication and graduate training from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, as well as the internal tensions and constraints that led the department to self-destruct in 1936 and lose its scholarly leadership and professional visibility until the post-World War II era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The career of Harlan II. Barrows illustrates some of the methodological problems of the history of geographic thought as well as some of the facts of the establishment of historical geography in the American university world. Barrows "environmentalist" position, as applied in the development of this field, allowed him to make significant shifts from the quest for a more precise formulation of the effects of environmental influences to an implicit recognition of the central role of human choices. Barrows' writings and particularly his teaching show the pace and direction of the shift clearly. In the light of the accessible published literature, supplemented by certain manuscript sources, persistent descriptions of his work in historical geography which place it under the rubric of "environmental determinism" are shown to be mistaken. Barrows was an exciting lecturer whose main influence was exercised through his famous introductory course in the historical geography of the United States. What we can affirm of his work and influence illustrates perhaps the leading characteristic of American historical geography, its dependence on a relatively few, strategically placed scholars who have shaped the field along the lines of their special predilections and temperaments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary first compares the strength of the history of geography in other countries and of other disciplinary historical work in the United States with the weaknesses of the history of geography in this country. Lack of guides to resources for research; the decline of relevant, authoritative, and imaginatively taught courses; the resultant difficulties of the publication of texts, readers, and monographs; and the lopsided nature of existing research are all briefly discussed. Some suggestions for the future development of the field are then made, based on the author's half-century of engagement with the field and his recent experience of writing a non-traditional monograph on the history of Anglo-American geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the conventional wisdom concerning the Midwestern origins of American academic geography at the doctoral level. Prosopographic analysis of 34 Ph.D.s awarded in geography between 1893 and 1921 finds that these were largely earned in Eastern universities, and that both Eastern and Midwestern institutions awarding doctorates in the field drew students primarily from the home region. By contrast, prosopographic examination of a second and later group, the faculty and graduate students at Clark University between 1921 and 1946, discloses an interregional pattern of recruitment closely tied to Midwestern institutions. Paradoxically, though sited in an Eastern university, early Clark geography was substantially Midwestern in personnel and program. Further institutional and prosopographic study of the early sites of graduate study is needed to reveal the complexity of American academic geography in its formative period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]