As the study of the earth's surface, geography is among the most concrete and accessible of all the sciences. Yet the very definition of geographical knowledge has been highly contested throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Geographers have disagreed over whether theirs is an analytic or a synthetic study, whether it deals primarily with the realm of nature or culture, and the degree to which it should be concerned with spatial relationships. Geography has also contended with a persistent reputation as simply descriptive inventory of the earth's surface, which has exacerbated its relationship with neighboring disciplines.
Institutional and Intellectual Origins
Through most of the nineteenth century geography was a broadly defined and practical field of knowledge utilized by scholars, explorers, bureaucrats, and politicians. Organizations such as the National Geographic Society and the American Geographical Society flourished in the nineteenth century as meeting grounds for men of science and government. The American Geographical Society, chartered in 1851, was devoted to the nation's growth and progress westward, especially the development of a transcontinental rail route. The organization welcomed not just geographers but also leaders in government, business, education, and science who shared their outlook. Through the society these members were exposed to the nation's exploration, surveying, and mapping efforts, primarily in the American West. Similarly, the National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 as a forum of exchange of information for the community of scientists and bureaucrats in Washington, D. C., involved in geological work. The society continued to facilitate geologically oriented research until the Spanish-American War, when it began a vigorous defense of the nation's mission abroad. In both these organizations, geographical knowledge served the state both concretely, through the supply of scientific expertise, and abstractly, in striking a nationalist posture.
Intellectually, American geography reflected a heavy European influence in the nineteenth century. Among the most influential and popular contemporary geographers were transplanted Europeans such as Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. Both elevated geography from the realm of description to that of science by considering the landscape as a unified entity to be studied as a whole, a process for which geography was uniquely suited in its stress on synthesis. Louis Agassiz, appointed at Harvard in 1848, was trained in the natural sciences and noted for his development of theories of glaciation and landforms. Arnold Guyot, appointed at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1854, began to introduce a concept of geography not as a description of the earth's elements but rather as an observed interrelationship between land, oceans, atmosphere, and human life, all of which interacted harmoniously in a grand design. Though geography would gradually shed this teleological cast, Guyot had pushed geography from description to inter-pretation. George Perkins Marsh also explored this relationship in his Man and Nature (1864), though with a thoroughly theological bent. Into this basic framework of the relatively static view of the human and natural world, the work of Charles Darwin introduced the idea of evolution. As a result, geographers began to pay attention to the evolution of landforms over time, which eventually bolstered the study of physical geography.
By the late nineteenth century geography was no longer simply a tool of exploration, data gathering, and mapping. With the era of exploration waning, and with the coincident rise of American universities, geographers began to turn their attention toward reconceptualizing geography as an analytic, scientific body of knowledge. This was a difficult change for geographers, both intellectually and institutionally. Many worried that their field's reputation—as a broad field open to amateur armchair explorers as well as scientific experts—would taint its prospects in the newly professionalized university.
The unquestioned intellectual father of geography at this critical moment of late-century maturation was actually trained not in geography but geology, because doctoral programs in the former had yet to be developed. William Morris Davis was trained at Harvard as a geologist by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and appointed professor of physical geography there in 1885. For Davis, the claims geographers made for their study as the "mother of all sciences" had to be halted if progress were to be made, for other scientists regarded this claim as the key indicator of geography's incoherence. Thus began a long tension within geography: What makes the field unique and worthy of its independence? How does a study that is essentially synthetic defend itself from the reach of neighboring sciences as diverse as geology, anthropology, and botany?
Together, Shaler and Davis initiated the first course of training in physical geography—the study of the surface features of the earth—and mentored the first generation of trained geographers in the United States. During the 1880s and 1890s Davis advanced an idea that applied Darwinian principles of evolution to the study of the physical landscape. The result was the science of geo-morphology, in which Davis argued that different elements of the environment worked to produce change on the landscape through dynamics such as soil erosion. This concept helped legitimate geography at the university level and in the process gave geographers a tremendous source of pride. At the same time, however, geomorphology reinforced geography's identity as a subfield of geology, thereby hampering its intellectual independence.
In the late 1870s modern geography began to appear as a field of study in American universities, usually found within departments of geology or "geology and geography." Only in 1898 was an independent department of geography established at the University of California. Davis was convinced that geography's weak reputation was in part attributable to organizations such as the American Geographical Society and the National Geographic Society—especially the latter, which became an increasingly popularized and middlebrow organization after the turn of the century. These groups were irritating to Davis because they reinforced in the mind of the academic and lay communities alike the sense that geography was the pastime of leisured travelers and curious amateurs. He actively dissociated himself from these organizations at the turn of the century, and at one point even attempted to take control of the National Geographic Society in order to return it to its serious, scientific roots. Thus Davis was enthusiastic about a new organization designed exclusively for professional geographers. The Association of American Geographers was founded in 1904, toward the end of the trend toward disciplinary organizations. While geologists were initially welcomed in order to solidify the new organization's membership base, within a few years their applications were deferred in the hope that disciplinary purity might be achieved.
The Advent of Human Geography
Davis was successful in training a number of young geographers at the turn of the century who began to return to the relationship between humans and their physical environment. More specifically, this generation found itself increasingly compelled to study the human response to the physical environment. This turn toward the "causal relationship" was in part a result of the imperative to strengthen geography's position among the disciplines. This new focus had the added benefit of distinguishing geography from geology. Physiography, which linked elements of the environment with one another, and ontography, which linked the environment with its human inhabitants, were the two main areas of disciplinary focus for geography just after the turn of the century. Most early geographers conceived of their discipline as having unique power to bridge the natural and human sciences. From the mid-1890s to World War I the prospect of uniting nature and culture through geography seemed both feasible and imminent at some of the most important centers of academic geography, including Pennsylvania, Chicago, Yale, and Harvard. But it was precisely this claim to breadth that neighboring sciences began to challenge, for in the new era of university science, disciplines were legitimated not by claims of breadth and inclusiveness but rather by narrowing their focus and delimiting their boundaries.
Because of their interest in the causal relationship, theories that united the realm of humans and their environment held special appeal for geographers. For instance, natural selection, though widely misinterpreted, was used to describe the relationship between the physical and the human environments as one of inorganic control and organic response. Evolutionary concepts became central to geography's effort to explain nature's influence upon human behavior, and geography focused increasingly on the question of why certain races, societies, or groups flourished while others languished. To be sure, geographers neglected the idea of random variation and exaggerated and accelerated the process of "struggle" in order to incorporate humans into the ecological world. Yet without this causal connection—the influence of environment on human behavior—the areas of study under geography could easily be divided up among other disciplines.
Even more important than Darwin's ideas were those of Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck, who suggested that characteristics acquired through the course of a lifetime could be passed biologically to off spring. Lamarck's ideas were well suited to the needs of the new social sciences at the turn of the century because they united the study of nature and humans by linking biology with environment. Though the rediscovery of Mendel's laws concerning genetic heredity in 1900 eroded the credibility of Lamarckian thought, geographers continued to invoke this model when describing the core of their study as the relationship between humans and their natural environment. In other words, Lamarck created for geographers a process to study, and this appeal was too strong to be easily dismissed. Furthermore, Lamarckian constructions meant that geographers were now studying the progress of civilization, which vastly expanded their field of inquiry. By focusing on one's adaptation to the physical environment, the random chance of Darwinian evolution could be replaced with the strength of an individual, a culture, a race, or a nation. These assumptions were not always conceived in deterministic ways. While some geographers invoked them as evidence of an intellectual and social hierarchy in order to justify American expansionism or European imperialism, others used them to open up possibilities for social change. This indeterminacy implicit in Lamarckism allowed it to shape geography long after it had been discredited in other behavioral sciences. In fact it was the range of interpretations possible in Lamarckian expositions that made it so attractive to geographers.
Geography and the State
One of the striking characteristics of geographical thought at the turn of the twentieth century was its implicit support of American expansionism, as demonstrated in the sharp turn that the fledgling National Geographic Society made toward an aggressive defense of America's position abroad during the Spanish-American War. Two Europeans, Halford Mackinder and Friedrich Ratzel, also exercised considerable influence over American geographical thought. Ratzel, trained as a zoologist, argued that a relationship existed between human history and physical geography, in some ways similar to Davis's idea of ontography. But while Davis was relatively tentative in his formulations, Ratzel painted in broad strokes by applying the idea of Darwinian struggle to human society in order to frame the state as an organism that was forced to expand in order to survive. Known by many as the father of geopolitical thought, Ratzel fit well with the contemporary expansionist posture of Josiah Strong, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Theodore Roosevelt, each of whom was encouraging American expansion into world affairs. Much like the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, Ratzel's ideas allowed geographers to link nature and culture. Ratzel's well-regarded The Sea as a Source of the Greatness of a People (1900) argued that sea power was central to national survival in the twentieth century.
Similarly, Halford Mackinder emphasized environmental influence as a key to the disciplinary identity of the new profession of geographers. His "Geographic Pivot of History" (1904) gave him an extraordinarily solid reputation in the United States; in it he laid out the geopolitical dimension of international politics. For Mackinder, the age of exploration had given way to a new era where the manipulation of information would be critical. In Mackinder's mind the human experience of geography and space had changed in fundamental ways in the late nineteenth century. As Stephen Kern has noted, the rise of geopolitics owed much to the cultural and technological changes taking place around the turn of the twentieth century, including the arrival of standardized time, the advent of flight, the expansion of the railroads, and advances in communication and radio, all of which transformed the everyday experience of space and time. Ratzel and Mackinder used geopolitical ideas in order to come to terms with this changed sense of distance resulting from these innovations. Both emphasized the relationship between geographical influence and human response.
Among the first generation of university-trained geographers who inherited these ideas of Ratzel, Mackinder, and Davis were Ellen Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, and Isaiah Bowman. Semple, a student of Ratzel's, was especially taken with environmentalist models as a way to explain American history. In works such as American Historyand Its Geographic Conditions (1903), Semple argued that living organisms evolve from simple to more complex forms through adaptation to physical environment. The larger the state, race, or people, the more certain its chance of survival relative to others competing for the same resources. Similarly, Huntington posited that the primary influence over human history was climate, and even suggested that these effects could be biologically passed on through generations. Books such as his Civilization and Climate (1915) were tremendously popular with the general public in the early twentieth century, though roundly criticized within geography and other social sciences.
World War I had a substantial impact on American academic geography. Most obviously, the war demonstrated the flexible nature of geographical borders in Europe and the ephemeral nature of colonial associations worldwide. The faith in European civilization was now tempered by its unparalleled capacity for destruction. In the United States, the war demonstrated the utility of geographic knowledge to the public and also advanced the careers of professional geographers called to work for the government. The geographer who benefited most from the war was Isaiah Bowman, then director of the American Geographical Society. One of Bowman's goals had been to make the society more relevant to social and political problems, and by placing its resources at the disposal of the federal government, the society's vast reserve of maps became pivotal to the construction of postwar Europe. The war also led many geographers, especially Bowman, to admit the limits of the environment over human behavior and to stress human influence over the environment. After World War I, geographers devoted tremendous energy to searching for a new relationship to unite the disparate areas under their field, prove its worth in the university, and conform to modern social scientific wisdom, which had deemed environmentalism a false and damaging approach to the study of human affairs.
Geography Since Midcentury
One response to the rejection of environmentalist frameworks as the basis for research was to narrow geography's field of inquiry. The clearest indication of this was Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography (1939), a massive statement of the field's direction written on the eve of World War II. For Hartshorne, what had historically made geography unique was its attention to systematic description of areal variation, not speculation about change over time or causal relationships between humans and their environment. The hope among earlier generations to discover laws of human behavior was dismissed by Hartshorne in favor of a focus on concrete, discrete studies.
Carl Sauer, one of the century's most influential geographers, rejected Hartshorne's treatise—and the approach of the interwar geographers generally—and characterized this period as "the great retreat" when geographers studiously avoided causal relationships between humans and their environment. Sauer thought this unacceptable: geography now conceded physiography to geology and shied away from the social sciences for fear of repeating past sins of environmental determinism. One of Sauer's alternatives was to emphasize the influence of humans over their environment rather than the reverse. In his wake, many students adopted Sauer's new approach in delving into the particularities of place and paying close attention to the development of landscape. Yet despite Sauer's attempt to discredit environmentalism, many geographers continued to grant the physical environment influence over human behavior during the interwar period, an indication of the fractured nature of the discipline at midcentury. In 1947, Harvard made the decision to dissolve its department of geography, the original locus of academic geography in the United States. In subsequent years, Stanford, Yale, Michigan, and innumerable smaller institutions closed their geography departments. Yet the overall number of geography programs rose sharply in the postwar years, a reflection of the general growth of higher education.
Geographers themselves found renewed energy in the 1950s and 1960s by turning toward quantitative analyses as the basis for a redefinition of geography. The "quantitative revolution" did not constitute a change in goals so much as in method: geographers were still searching for locational patterns, but they began to adopt mathematical models, which in some cases led a return to a more abstract, general orientation and away from the idiographic focus on discrete regions. This school of geography drew heavily from economics. But by the late 1960s the quantitative revolution left many concerned that geography was bereft of any purposive, reformist content. Some argued that the quantitative model of geography essentially operated conservatively, in defense of the status quo, and contained little critical potential. A reaction to this—in part inspired by Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)—brought a resurgence of political concerns to the study of geography, but this time with a radical rather than a conservative thrust.
Postmodern, or radical, geography involves first and foremost a critique of the traditional relationship between notions of space and time. For geographers such as Neil Smith and Edward Soja, for instance, Western culture has been preoccupied since the nineteenth century with a historicist focus, and this has come at the expense of an explicitly spatial orientation. They argue that this temporal bent has obscured our awareness of just how deeply the dynamics of power—especially those created by capitalism—are inscribed in spatial relations. For both Smith and Soja, to remedy this requires a critique of historicism and a turn toward spatial concerns. This goal of a more activist, self-critical form of the discipline has continued from the late 1970s forward to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and has brought special attention to the relationship between power and capitalism in the study of urban space. It has infused geography with both theoretical concerns and concrete purpose. In recent years considerable research has also been undertaken in the field of feminist geography, which explores the way gender relations are reinforced by spatial arrangements of societies. The wide influence of these new, conceptually rich areas of research extends well beyond the disciplinary bounds of geography, which suggests the trend toward a more ambitious and socially relevant scope for the subject.
