Historical Geography

Historical Roots of Contemporary Historical Geography

The eclectic pluralism that characterizes historical geography today did not emerge out of a vacuum but instead arose from a century-long encounter between historical and geographic thinking. To understand the diverse nature of contemporary historical geography, it is first necessary to examine its historical roots, vestiges of which are still evident today. Those roots by no means follow a straightforward path, nor do they stem from one source. Rather, historical geography developed in a succession of overlapping periods of innovation from several intellectual strands. At times, historical work within human geography garnered attention as one of its central subfields; at other times, a historical perspective was dismissed for its perceived lack of explanatory power and antiquarianism. Such debates aside, each of these periods is marked by an impressive and steady increase in the work of historical geography.

Even before history and geography became fully professionalized in university settings during the latter half of the 19th century, scholars worked at their interface. None did so with greater insight or rhetorical force than the lawyer, manufacturer, congressman, and diplomat George Perkins Marsh. His 1864 book, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, profoundly reshaped Americans' attitudes toward the natural environment as he used world history as a tool for understanding environmental degradation in the United States. No less original than Marsh's arguments about the destructive effects of economic development on the American environment were those of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who was also alarmed by the changes in the land. Environmental damage was less of a concern for Turner than were questions of national experience and character, which he insisted were founded on settlement geography. In his famous 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and throughout his long career, Turner argued that American national character was forged in the settlement frontier—the ever retreating zone at the edge of the country's populated core.

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