Historical Geography

Historical geography is the subfield of the discipline that examines geographies of the past, including their relations with those of the present. In his treatise on historical geography, Andrew Hill Clark argues that the past is at least implied, if not explicit, in all geographic analyses. Clark claims that the concepts and methods of historical geography are applicable to all branches of geography, and therefore, historical geography should not be thought of as a distinct field of geography but more as a methodology, as a way of seeing geographically by focusing on space and time. This entry discusses the development of historical geography from the 1890s to the present, including the emergence of a new critical historical geography, beginning in the 1970s. It then examines the practice of historical geography and its relevance as a subfield today.

Like the field as a whole, the practice and role of historical geography in America were transformed by the four major periods of modern geographic thought. The environmental determinism of the early 20th century used historical geography to [Page 1429]create bigoted, unscientific generalizations about how climate influences society. By the 1920s, historical geography held a central position in American geography, as geography's regional approach repudiated environmental determinism. Historical geography in this period focused on regional narratives that largely examined various aspects of material culture and settlement patterns. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the quantitative revolution, and historical geography was pushed to the periphery. Finally, influenced by the critical geographies of the 1970s, historical geographies focused on social theory, reflecting the cultural turn in geography, and asked critical questions about culture and identity, economics, politics, scale, and the environment.

Despite these transformations, two things have remained constant throughout each period: (1) the historical geography methodology and its focus on the historical record, primary data sources, and field observations and (2) relevance. As other subfields have increasingly recognized the importance of a historical perspective in answering geographic questions, the need for historical geography as a distinct subfield has been greatly reduced.