What Is Human Geography?

Pre-Classical Geography

• The earliest geographic descriptions took the form of maps
• Sketches in sand or soil
• Scratched into rock or wood
• Clay tablets (Mesopotamian)

Classical Geography

• Eratosthenes - “father of geography” → coined the word
• Wrote book describing the known world, no copies left
• Shortly after 1000 BCE, geographic map layouts gained more area coverage
• @@The Greeks were the first civilization to become geographically mobile and to establish colonies@@
• They established 2 major geographic traditions
• Literacy
• Written depictions of the known world
  • Descriptions of lands and peoples by Herodotus based on observations made during extensive travels
• Aristotle wrote about possible relationships between latitude, climate, and population density, and speculated about the ideal locations for cities and the conflicts between rich and poor groups
• Strabo summarized literary traditions as encyclopedic descriptions in Geographia
• Mathematical
• By the fifth century BCE, the Greeks knew the Earth was a sphere
• In the second century BCE, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth
• Hipparchus devised a grid system of imaginary lines on the earth’s surface mapping longitude and latitude
  • Latitude was calculated by the angle of a sun’s shadow, but longitude was more difficult due to a lack of resources to measure time precisely
• Alexandrian Ptolemy summarized most mathematical traditions in his eight-volume Guide to Geography and produced a world map including a grid system that includes mapping procedures still used today

The Fifth to Fifteenth Centuries: Geography In Europe, China, and the Islamic World

The European Decline

• The word geography did not enter the English language until the sixteenth century
• Medieval Europeans knew little beyond their immediate environment
• @@The general assumption, inside and outside the monasteries, was that God had designed the earth for humans (teleology) → geography as such no longer existed during the Middle Ages@@
• The ancient Greek maps were drawn by scholars with expertise in astronomy, geometry, and mathematics
• The medieval European map-makers were more interested in symbolism (particularly scriptural dogma)
• Portolano maps were the most practical and depicted a series of radiating lines to correspond to points of a compass
• Marco Polo (1254–1323) was a Venetian who visited China and wrote descriptions of the places he saw
• He could not add to Greek knowledge because Marco Polo was an explorer, not a geographer (was inexperienced in the knowledge of geography?

Geography in China

• Writings describing the known world of the Chinese date back to at least the fifth-century BCE

• The Chinese explored and described areas beyond their borders

• Chang Chi’en discovered the Mediterranean in 128 BCE

• Chinese geographies reached India, Central Asia, Rome, and Paris

  • Chinese travelers reached Europe before Marco Polo reached China

• Early geography culture differed from a geographic perspective

• Chinese Culture - viewed the individual as a part of nature

• Greek/European Culture - viewed the individual as apart from nature

• Grid systems were prominently in use during the Han Dynasty

• The first Chinese map-makers were civil servants who drew and revised maps in the service of the state

• Chinese maps were symbolic statements, asserting the state’s ownership of some territory

  Geography in the Islamic World

• The religion of Islam was founded in the seventh century CE by the prophet Muhammad / At the same time, Europe was immersed om the Dark Ages

• As Islamic conquests spread, geographic knowledge expanded to include North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and India

• By the ninth century, Islamic geographers were recalculating the circumference of the earth

• By the fifteenth century, they and their successors produced a wealth of geographic writings and maps based on earlier Greek work plus Islamic travels

• al-Idrisi wrote a book on world geography that corrected many of Ptolemy’s errors

• ibn-Battuta is described as one of the best-known travelers who journeys extensively in Europe, Asia, and Africa

• Khaldun was a historian who wrote at length about the relations between humans and the environment

• Maps produced by the Islamic geographies centered on Arabia

• An important eleventh-century Arabic atlas was discovered in a private collection in 2002

• Regarded as a missing link in the history of cartography

• the two-volume, 96-page manuscript includes 17 maps, 2 of them depicting the world s it was known at the beginning of the second millennium

• Some travel routes suggest that they were intended not to represent actual landscapes but to serve a practical purpose as memory aids for travelers unlike Greek and European maps at the time

• Chinese and Islamic geographies prior to the fifteenth century were roughly comparable to Greek geography

• In all cases, the geographers’ work reflected the knowledge and needs of particular societies

The Age of European Overseas Movement

• By 2400, the geographic knowledge had grown considerably

• The three components of geography, mathematical, literary, and cartographic, underwent rapid change

• Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans embarked on a period of unprecedented exploratory activity that happened to coincide with a decline in Chinese and Islamic explorations

• Their motivations included the desire to spread Christianity, establish trade routes, inquire about printing technology/mass map production, and the thirst for knowledge (establishing geographic analysis)

• The maps produced following such voyages did not always reflect new discoveries

• A 1459 map by Fra Mauro deliberately concealed new information in order to maintain secrecy

  Exploration

• Exploration is not geography but it furnished new facts and provided the basis for new maps, books, and descriptive geographies

• Major explorations led by…

• Bartolomeu Dias around southern Africa (1486–1487)

• Columbus to North America (1492–1504)

• Vasco da Gama to India (1497–1499),

• Magellan reached Asia by sailing west (1519–1522)

• James Cook made three voyages into the Pacific (1769–1780)

  • Cook corrected one of Ptolemy’s greatest errors by revealing that the supposed southern continent did not exist as envisioned
  • Establishing longitude at sea was not available until 1761 and was not used on a major voyage until Cook’s second in 1772-1775

Mapping

• During the early phase of the European overseas movement, science, in general, changed from being a practice controlled by the church to one concerned with the acquisition of knowledge
• Maps returned to the model developed by the Greeks
• a model in which facts triumphed over imagination
• The typical map from the fifteenth century downward was functional
• Medieval maps used a mixture of fantasy and dogma
• Gerardus Mercator (1512-94) was undoubtedly the most influential of the new map-makers
• He tackled the crucial problem of representing a sphere on a flat surface
• 1569 Mercator projection
  • This projection showed d the earth as a flat rectangle with a grid of latitude and longitude lines, which was enormously useful to sea travelers because a straight line on the map was a course of constant compass bearing
  • Mercator’s map had replaced all earlier charters used at sea
• Abraham Ortelius produced the first modern atlas in 1570 that ran into 41 editions by 1612

Geographic Description

• The awakening of Europe and the burst of exploratory activity had an impact not only on map-making but also on geographic description
• Society turned to geography to provide answers to a multitude of questions concerning the shape of the earth, the location of places, physical processes, and human lifestyles
• Geographers faced an enormous task: writing about all aspects of the entire world
• Some works of fiction were regarded as factual and some imaginative works by an author, Sir John Mandeville, were reprinted three times in 1530 alone.
• Peter Apian (1495-1552) was a map marker and writer who in 1524 published a book that divided the earth into five zones (one torrid, two temperate, and two frigid) and provided notes on each continent and listed major towns
• Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), a contemporary of Apian, produced Cosmography in 1544, the first major work following the initial burst of European expansion activities that included descriptions of the earth’s major regions

Geography Rethought

Varenius

• Contemporary geography continues to be concerned with map-making and description, but it also addresses many other questions
• In 1650, Bernhardus Varenius’s (1622-50) Geographia Generalis remained the standard geographic text for at least a century
• Varenius provided an explicit definition of geography as the study of the state of the earth, both h physical and human, and also emphasized the need for both detailed description (what he called special or particular geography) and generalizations (what he called general or universal geography
• The one and a half centuries following the publication of Varenius’s major work witnessed major advances in a wide range of geographic issues
• Geographic questions were asked about such fundamental issues as the physical environment’s role as a cause of the growth of civilization, the unity of the human race, and the relationship between population density and productivity

Kant

• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) taught at the University of Königsberg and is best known for his work in logic and metaphysics
• He also lectured in geography for a period of 40 years
• He has been described as “the outstanding example in western thought of a professional philosopher concerned with geography”
• To introduce his lectures on geography, Kant emphasized that the subject involved the description or classification of facts in their spatial context
• As a result, he has been interpreted by some later geographers, especially Alfred Hettner, as an explicit advocate of geography as a regional study
• This interpretation is also based on Kant’s argument that geography is the description according to space and that history is the description according to time
• In Physische Geografie (1802), Kant asserted that geography and history together comprise all knowledge

Universal Geography 1800-1874

• The first major work of this period was published by a Danish geographer, Conrad Malte-Brun (1775-1826) between 1810 and 1829
• This study includes both general and special geography as defined by Varenius
• Mathematical, physical, and political principles are discussed along with physical phenomena, including animals and plants, and human matters, including race, language, beliefs, and law
• Describing all areas of the known world, Malte-Brun succeeded in producing a complete geography
• Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter were two German scholars who dominated geography in the first half of the nineteenth century
• Humboldt’s greatest work was the Cosmos, a five-volume study published between 1845 and 1862
• The title is the Greek term for an orderly universe (as opposed to chaos)
• As he wrote, “my true purpose is to investigate the interaction of all the forces of nature.”
• In addition to conventional regional descriptions, he strove to offer a complete account of the way all things are related → General concepts were carefully blended with precise observation
• Beginning in 1820, long before the first departments of geography were established, Ritter held a chair in geography at the University of Berlin
• He was concerned with relationships and argued for coherence in describing the way things are located on the earth’s surface
• Die Erdkunde was only partially complete world geography comprising 19 volumes published between 1817 and 1859 with topics ranging from interests such as moving from description alone to description and laws
• All three geographic themes were evident in the work of Humboldt and Ritter
• The study of humans and land is central to their conception of geography
• Their interest in the formulation of concepts as general statements that aid in the understanding of specific facts anticipate a focus on regions
• The concerns of spatial analysis
• At this point in history, Africa and Asia were still largely a mystery
• Both recognized the need for complete geographic descriptions and yet neither could truly fulfill that aim and by the year of their deaths, 1859, there was simply too much geography
• Humboldt and Ritter were the first geographers to pay full attention to concept formulation to the derivation of general statements from the detailed factual information available
• Their interest in the relations between things and their inclusion of humans as part of nature established the basis for much subsequent geography.
• Thus, they represent both an end to the long road begun by the Greeks and a beginning to geography combining regional description and concept formulation

Map-Making, Exploration, and Geographical Societies

• There was a steady continuing interest in some of the traditional geographic concerns
• Map-making was considered so important that governments began to assume responsibility for the task and in England, the Ordnance Survey was founded in 1791
• Largescale topographic maps, showing small areas in considerable detail, became possible with the development of exact survey techniques in eighteenth-century France
• .Atlases also became much more sophisticated as exploration continued and was greatly assisted by the founding of geographical societies in Paris (1821), Berlin (1828), London (1830), St Petersburg (1845), and New York (1851)
• The ever-growing interest in overseas areas encouraged prosperous individuals as well as governments to support these organizations

Institutionalization: 1874-1903

• The year 1874 marks the formal beginning of geography as an institutionalized academic discipline
• In 1903, the first North American university department of geography was established
• Scholars had to consider the appropriate weight to give the many aspects of established geographic traditions, namely, mapping, description, general and special geography, regions, and human–land relations, ongoing developments in all the physical and social sciences, as well as the hugely controversial issues raised by Darwinian thought and the moral questions associated with expansion overseas
• @@TLDR: From 1874 onward, geographers had a great deal to accommodate academically@@

France

• 1874 - The Prussian government established geography departments in all Prussian universities

• No specific reasoning other than geography was in its prime following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870

• Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905)

• Described geography as “the science of the earth’s surface”

• Richthofen maintained the distinction between special and general geography and further argued that the two could be combined to form a chronological (regional) approach

  • The subject matter of this regional geography (or chorology) included human activities but only in relation to the physical environment

• Friedrich Ratzel

• Focused on human geography, or what he termed anthropogeography.

• His major work, Anthropogeographie, was published in two volumes (1882 and 1891)

  • The theme of the first volume is the influence of physical geography on humans
  • This volume had a greater impact due to its simple cause and effect logic subjected
  • The second volume focuses on humans using the earth

• Regarded as a founder of human geography because he is most likely the first to focus on human-made landscapes

• Alfred Hettner (1859-1941)

• Most influential follower of Richthofen

• His methodological and descriptive work coined geography as unequivocally regarded as the chronological science of the earth’s surface

• A persuasive advocate of regional geography

• @@German geography following 1874 consisted of three different interpretations@@

• geography as chorology (Richthofen and Hettner)

• geography as the influence of physical geography on humans (Ratzel, volume 1)

• geography as the study of the human landscape (Ratzel, volume 2)

  Germany

• Geography in Frane followed a route independent of Geran developments

  • Many ideas expounded by Ratzel in Volume 2 were reflected

• Elisée Réclus (1830–1905)

  • Paved the way for later French geography
  • Geographer and anarchist who was barred from France and imprisoned at various times → published descriptive systematic geography of the world and a 19-volume universal geography

• Paul Vidal de la Blache

  • @@Established a dominant French geographic tradition that is known as geographies Vidalienne, or la tradition Vidalienne@@
  • Focused on the relations between humans and land, the evolution of human landscapes, and the description of distinctive local regions
  • Vidal believed geography should consider both physical geographic impacts on humans and human modification of physical geography
  • Parallels with Humboldt, Ritter, and Ratzel (volume 2)

Britain

• Britain’s first professorship of geography was established at University College London in 1833
• In 1887, geography lectureships were created at Oxford and Cambridge universities with funding provided by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS)
• But it was not until 1900 that the first British geography department was set up as Oxford with the help of RGS
• Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947)
• First dominant influence
• He was determined to become the first European to climb Mount Kenya in Africa to ensure his geographic views would be respected since he would be considered a successful explorer as well
• Mackinder felt geography and history were closely related
  • a global geographic perspective was essential → following Richthofen, physical geography was a prerequisite for human studies\

United States

• The establishment of the first North American department of geography, at the University of Chicago in 1903, came about at a time when American geography was influenced largely by German scholars
• Physical geography (physiography) was dominant
• William Morris Davis (1840-1934) was a geologist who promulgated the German view that physical geography influenced human landscapes and that geography was essentially a regional science
• Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932)
• Followed the early Ratzel to become a leading proponent of the “physical influences” school of thought
  • Most American geographies adopted a regional focus
• At the time there was no evidence of a distinctive school analyzing the relations between humans and physical geography
  • Neither the general legacies of Humboldt and Ritter nor the views of Vidal were in evidence

Geography in 1903

• @@CRUCIAL TURNING POINT IN GEOGRAPHY@@
• By 1903, geography was a full-fledged academic discipline in many European countries and the US
• Elsewhere, geography was institutionalized somewhat later due to academic contacts with pioneering countries
  • E.g. Canada established a partial department of geography at the Univesity of British Columbia in 1923 (12 years before the complete department was established in 1935 in Toronto)
• In 1903, the general subject matter was that there had been no real change since Greek times— and a number of different approaches were advocated
• Physical geography
• Physical geography as the cause of human landscapes,
• Regional descriptions
• Humans and nature combined
• Geography also continued its association with mapping, and to a lesser extent, exploration

Prelude to the Present: 1903-1970

• The period from 1903 to 1970 was characterized by several different approaches to the geographic subject matter
• @@There was a fourth principal area of the study added - spatial analysis@@

Physical Geography as a Cause

• Human landscapes and cultures resulted primarily from physical geography reducing the need to think about economics, politics, societies, and so forth
• Semple, Ellsworth Huntington (1876-1947), and Griffith Taylor are geographers who favored this approach
• The principal significance of the physical-geography-as-cause perspective (@@AKA environmental determinism@@) lies in the fact it was taken for granted as a self-evident truth
• Most twentieth-century geographies did not explicitly take this perspective so implicitly
• @@No relationship between physical and human geography is straightforward enough for us to assume that the former is the cause and the latter the effect@@
• Fortunately, environmental determinism is an explicit identification of physical cause and the human effect
• although very popular in the first half of the twentieth century and occasionally taken to extremes, never became the focus of a formal school of geography and is now discredited

Humans and Land

• The specific study of relationships between physical and human facts needed a better definition and a more formal methodology
• Three scholars provided new conceptions
• Vidal
  • Geographie Vidalienne, beginning about 1899
• Otto Schlüter
  • Founded a German school of Landschaftskunde - “landscape science/geography”
• Carl Sauer
  • An American who effectively introduced the various European ideas to North America in 1925
  • The landscape school that grew out of his work focuses on human cultural groups’ transformation of the physical geographic landscape over time
• The ideas of Vidal, Schlüter, and Sauer combine to define landscape geography explicitly rejecting any suggestion of physical-geography-as-cause by rejecting environmental determinism in favor of possibilism
• Possibilism → the view that human activity is determined not by physical environments but by choices that humans make
  • Emerged as a component of the newly institutionalized discipline of geography at much the same time as environmental determinism for three reasons
  • A substantial literature centered on humans and land, already presumed that humans could make decisions not explicitly caused by the physical environment. (Humboldt and Ritter were its two most notable authors.)
  • Geographers could point to many instances in which different human landscapes were evident in essentially similar physical landscapes.
  • Possibilism corresponded to the historically popular view that every event is the result of individual human decision-making

Regional Studies

• Regional geography was the most popular focus during the first half of the nineteenth century
• The ultimate task of geography was to delimit religions
• In America, this view was attractive for physical geographers
• 1939 publication of The Nature of Geography by the American Richard Hartshorn argued forcefully for geography as the study of religions - areal differentiation
• Geography in the North American world by 1953 was thus characterized by two related but different emphases:
• analysis of the relationship between humans
• land and regional studies
• In 1953, a new focus was forcefully introduced

Spatial Analysis

• The beginning of spatial analysis is observed in a 1953 paper by F.W. Schaefer
• This approach focuses on explaining the location of geographic facts
• Schaefer argued that geographers should move away from a simple description in regional studies to a more explanatory framework based on scientific methods such as the construction of theory and the use of quantitative methods
• Schaefer objected to what he saw as the overly special focus of regional geography
• The 1960s were characterized by the phenomenal growth in detailed analyses based on the proposal and testing of hypotheses by means of quantitative procedures
• By 1970, regional geography was receding in popularity and spatial analysis had found a niche alongside somewhat modified versions of both the landscape and regional approaches

Human Geography Trends: Recent TRends and Subdisciplines

• Wide-ranging discipline that employs a variety of approaches and is divided into a number of subdisciplines
• The different approaches reflect different ways of thinking about human geography, while the presence of subdisciplines reflects the fact that the subject matter of human geography is so diverse
• Since about 1970, human geography has seen a number of important revisions and additions both to subdiscipline identification and to traditional approaches

Physical and Human Geography

• Geography from the Greeks inward has had both physical and human components
• Until the nineteenth century, however, the clear tendency was to treat them separately
• Humboldt and Ritter, by contrast, focused closely on integrating the two.
• Subsequently, some geographers saw physical geography as paramount (the environmental determinist school)
• Some saw the human landscape as the relevant subject matter (the landscape school)
• Some saw the two as separate (the regional school)
• Very few geographers deny the relevance of physical to human geography, but equally few see the one as necessary to the other
• Therefore, they tend to be taught and researched separately, done by both geographers and environmental scholars
• A basic understanding of global physical geography is obviously relevant to much work in human geography
• @@The two are no longer seen as so closely related that we need to discuss them as one@@
• @@Contemporary human geography is a social science discipline but one with special and valuable ties to physical sciences, especially physical geography@@

Contemporary Landscape Geography

• The study of the landscapes has been a consistent presence in human geography
• It typically involves studies of human ways of life, cultural religions and related landscapes, and relationships between human and physical landscapes
• Since about 1970, ideas associated with humanism, Marxism, and feminism, greater awareness of advances in other social science disciplines, (specifically in relation to postmodernism) have enriched landscape studies
• Social and cultural geographic studies of the landscape are now concerned both with visible features and symbolic features
• There is now explicit acknowledgment that landscapes, like regions, both reflect and affect cultural, social, political, and economic processes

Contemporary Regional Geography

• The rise of spatial analysis came largely at the expense of the areal differentiation articulated by Hartshorne
• Since 1970, regional geography has resurfaced in a somewhat different guise here and there but has once again become a central perspective
• Earlier regional geography is no longer appropriate, so there is a clear need to move beyond the regional approach classifications
• @@Regional geography currently emphasizes the understanding and description of a particular region and what it means for different people to live there@@
• Regions as settings or locales for human activity
• Uneven economic and social development between regions, including a focus on the changing division of labor
• The ways in which regions reflect the characteristics of the occupying society and in turn affect that society
• Regional geography is continuously increasing satisfaction in the requirement that human geography serve society by addressing a range of economic and social problems

Contemporary Spatial Analysis

• The spatial analytic approach first became a prime interest of human geographers in the mid-1950s-1970
• @@A central concern is that the theoretical constructs it uses to explain locations are somewhat limited generalizations at the expense of specifics@@
• Topics studied by spatial analysts are mostly in the subdisciplines of economic, agricultural, settlement, urban, and industrial geography, as opposites to political, cultural, or social
• This tendency reflects the influence of various economic location theories
• Some geographers believe that spatial analysis is overly concerned with perhaps to the point of seeing space as a cause of human landscapes, and as a result ignores the full range of human variables as causes of landscapes
• Contemporary regional and landscape geographers explicitly argue that space is important only when it is analyzed in terms of the use that humans make of it

Global Issues

• Much of the early geography work was done by the early Greek, Chinese, and Islamic geographers
• European geography developed from about 1450 onward
• Human impacts/Major issues on a global scale include
• The spread of diseases (such as AIDS and Ebola)
• International migration and refugee problems
• Food shortages
• Vanishing languages
• The spread of democracy
• Agricultural change
• Urban growth and industrial restructuring

Applied Geography

• Geography is an academic discipline that serves society
• It has always had an applied component in which geographic skills are used to solve problems
• Geography as exploration is a prime example of applied work
• All subdisciplines of contemporary human geography respond to social and environmental issues such as:
• Peace
• Energy supply and use
• Food availability
• Population control
• Social inequalities

Technical Advances

• Navigation-assisted exploration aids human geography
• Aerial photography and both infrared and satellite imagery help facilitate data acquisition
• Advances in computer technologies and geographic information systems have facilitated mapping and data analysis

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Conclusion & Key Points

• Geography has evolved into a standard academic discipline
• Human geography is currently a responsible social science with the basic aim of advancing knowledge and serving society. In this respect, it is no different from Greek, Chinese, Islamic, or later European geographies.
• Our subject matter is clear and our approaches are necessarily various.
• Our key goal—to provide a basis for comprehending the human world as it is today and as it has evolved—is of crucial importance to contemporary world society

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