Wright, John Kirtland (1891–1969)

John Kirtland Wright, historian and geographer, spent most of his career as a professional geographer with the American Geographical Society. In his many roles at the society (including research associate, director, and, more important, editor of the society's journal, Geographical Review), he published more than 500 documents. Many of these were book reviews and “Notes” of one or two pages, a regular feature in the Geographical Review. These notes and reviews covered a diverse array of topics, including many aspects of physical, human, and regional geography, as well as geographical methods and techniques. No area in geography was omitted: Topics ranged from Ancien Régime, Antarctica, and Eratosthenes to linguistics, migration, the Pyrenees, and the Zuider Zee. It has been pointed out that his ideas and contributions are interwoven into the entire fabric of geography, into the canvas, not just splashes of paint on the surface.

Operating outside academia, many of his ideas emerged late in his career as mainstream concepts in geography, and their diversity and foresight laid foundations for intellectual structures throughout the discipline. Aids to Geographical Research, with Elizabeth Platt (first published in 1923, with a second edition in 1947) and other bibliographically focused resources, including the Research Catalogue of the AGS, were facilitators for research in the discipline. Many of his conceptual innovations deal with exploiting the relationship between history and geography. Beginning in 1925, “The History of Geography: A Point of View” was followed by “A Plea for the History of Geography” and The Geographical Basis of European History. This theme continued in his publications and presentations while he worked with the effective organization and presentation of statistical data; in 1937, he examined “Some Measures of Distributions.” Works that followed were nonstatistical forerunners of the quantitative revolution. His 1944 paper on the “Terminology of Map Symbols” became the basis for the organization and symbolization of data on maps in academic cartography. Cartographic concepts and processes were examined from the organization of data for mapping to the perceptual and cognitive processes of the map reader. Decades of consideration of the statistical and graphic organization of geographical information resulted in work on human nature and the impact of aesthetic feeling, imagination, and subjectivity in geography.

At the outset, given the opportunity as he began his graduate studies at Harvard, he chose not to specialize in geography, which at the time involved the study of “nature-minus-man.” He decided to make his study of history geographical, which he did for half a century. He looked from a variety of perspectives at terrae incognitae (unknown lands), which made the use of imagination critical to geographical exploration and mapping. The results of exploration involve interpretations, modifications, and inventions, all involving aspects of the imagination. His ideas were seminal in the movement that has been called the “cognitive reformation” of American geography, involving environmental perception, cognition, and behavior. One can turn to the 1966 series of essays in Human Nature in Geography and find that he was ahead of the developments that would occur throughout the discipline during the 20th century.

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