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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 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]