Search

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., (Copyright 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Swiss-born Arnold Henri Guyot (1807-1884) was the first professionally trained geographer to hold an academic position in the United States. After his migration to this country in 1848 he lived for several years in Massachusetts. During this period he introduced contemporary German-Swiss ideas of geography to key opinion leaders in an important series of lectures (published as "Earth and Man"), established a system of weather stations, and lectured on methods of teaching geography in Massachusetts teachers' institutes and normal schools. This article discusses Guyot's work in the reform of school geography in Massachusetts as the seedbed for his later, better-known work as the author of innovative textbooks and other teaching aids. (Contains 2 figures and 3 notes.)

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founding president of Clark University, was a leader in the child study movement and a significant figure in psychology and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hall had pronounced opinions on many educational subjects, including the teaching of geography. His criticisms and program for the reform of school geography were based on a mix of European ideas of "heimatkunde" or "home geography," developmental or "genetic" psychology, and his work in the child study and nature study movements. This article traces Hall's involvement with geographic pedagogy from the 1880s through World War I, including his sponsorship of the first American Ph.D. dissertation in the teaching of geography, completed at Clark in 1906.

In his review of a 2004 anthology of essays on the history of historic preservation in the U.S. for the Journal of American History, historian Richard Striner (2005, 1016) of [...]

Leadership in American Academic Geography: The Twentieth Century Michael S. DeVivo Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books THE PAST FEW YEARS have seen significant advances in the exploration of the history of [...]

Donald Meinig is in many ways a Victorian scholar, and I mean that in every constructive sense. From his first major book, The Great Columbia Plain (1968), a landmark study [...]

The antecedents of twentieth century humanist geography in America lie in part in the cultivation American humanist geography. The ways on how classical geographic ideas were preserved, modified or discarded during middle ages is traced by William Tillinghast.

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. Key Words: Clark University, doctorates in geography, Midwest, prosopography, University of Chicago.

STRABO'S CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY: The Making of a Kolossourgia. Edited by DANIELA DUECK, HUGH LINDSAY, and SARAH POTHECARY. xvi and 286 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, [...]