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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 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]