Anthropogeography

Anthropogeography is a term used predominantly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that means roughly “the geography of humans.” The term comes from Anthropogeographie, the title of a two-volume work published in 1882 and 1891 by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who is well known for his influence in early human geography, particularly his thought in political geography. Ratzel strongly influenced the thought of the well-known American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, who presented Ratzel's anthropogeography to North America through her 1911 work Influences of Geographic Environment: On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography. Some thinkers, like the geographer J. K. Wright, criticized Semple for not clearly stating which ideas were hers and which originated from Ratzel.

The British geographer Halford Mackinder had a ...