G. Stanley Hall,Child Study,and the Teaching of Geography

Abstract

G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924), founding president of Clark University, was a leader in the child study movement and a significant figure in psychology and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hall had pronounced opinions on many educational subjects, including the teaching of geography. His criticisms and program for the reform of school geography were based on a mix of European ideas of heimatkunde or “home geography,” developmental or “genetic” psychology, and his work in the child study and nature study movements. This article traces Hall's involvement with geographic pedagogy from the 1880s through World War I, including his sponsorship of the first American Ph.D. dissertation in the teaching of geography, completed at Clark in 1906.     

Prelude to Brazil: Leo Waibel's American Career as a Displaced Scholar

Beyond Germany, Leo Waibel (1888–1951) built a distinguished reputation for his work in Africa and the Americas. Today he is remembered especially in Brazil, where he boosted the development of geography as a research discipline in the years 1946–1950. During his tenure of the chair in geography at Bonn (1929–1937), Waibel's main research preoccupation became the role of the tropics in the world economy. In early 1937, he sought research leave to make an extended field trip to Brazil. Stripped on political grounds in the same year of his chair, Waibel came to the United States, where he became the only geographer to receive help from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars. He would eventually serve as one of the very limited core staff on President Franklin Roosevelt's “M” Project on migration and settlement. This paper reconstructs the context of his work in the United States, clarifying especially the nature of his collaborations with Isaiah Bowman, widely regarded at the time as the leading geographer within the United States. Waibel's correspondence from the United States, and later from Brazil, reveals an international career marked by contradictions.     

Sustaining the “Societal and Scriptural Fence”: Cultural,Social, and Political Topographies of Same-Sex Marriage in Alabama

In June 2006, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly approved a statewide referendum that added a prohibition against same-sex marriage to the state's constitution. This research examines the Alabama vote by “placing” the politics of sexuality within the state's multifaceted web of cultural and social space. We fuse a traditional electoral geography approach with an overall postpositivist cultural and social perspective, beginning with an assessment of the politics of place by situating Alabama as a place with a long history of battles over the so-called culture wars. The cultural politics of the legislative debate and the geographic distribution of the actual vote are also examined within a socio-demographic context, drawing some comparisons from a similar vote in Georgia in 2004, another state in the American Deep South. Those opposed to same-sex marriage in Alabama made effective use of various social constructions that are deeply embedded within a “moral” geography, situating the state as a fenced-off bastion of “religious traditional values,” a common theme throughout the American South. In this vein, social boundaries and territory were demarcated as a powerful political act in Alabama, a strategy that situated the state as hetero-normatively “in place,” while deeming sexual minorities as “out of place.”     

The Legacy of Jedidiah Morse in Early American Geography Education: Forgotten and/or Forgettable Geographer?

Despite numerous and significant writings by historians of geography and biographers from other disciplines, and his authorship of the first geography textbooks written in and for the new American republic, most geographers are largely unaware of the contributions of Jedidiah Morse in academic geography. Writings about Morse suggest that he had alienated himself from many of his contemporaries early in his career through his authoritarian brand of Calvinistic republicanism, a perceived contradiction of that style with his entrepreneurial ambitions, his role in the controversial Bavarian Illuminati, and a dispute with a noted New England historian. But subsequent, broader intellectual movements sealed Morse's fate as a forgotten geographer (to most), including the end of the Second Great Awakening, Transcendentalism, Darwinism, and the “new,” process‐based geographical thinking inspired by Carl Ritter, Alexander von Humboldt, and Arnold Guyot. Regardless of the reasons for Morse's lost legacy, his contributions to geographical education are important and should be remembered.     

THE LEGENDARY “REDISCOVERY” OF GEORGE PERKINS MARSH

The conventional narrative regarding the American reception of George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864), is that his work and ideas were “lost,”“forgotten,” or “neglected” until Lewis Mumford “rediscovered” him and introduced him to geographers at the University of California‐Berkeley through The Brown Decades (Mumford [1931] 1955) and until Carl Sauer made him known to the profession at large beginning in 1938. This article upends the conventional narrative by looking at earlier references to Marsh's later versions of Man and Nature, which were published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action from 1874 to 1907. Analysis reveals that a number of geographers and historians cited these editions between 1875 and the early 1950s. Examining the legend of loss and rediscovery suggests the value of methods utilized in reception studies for research on the history of geography.     

THOMAS JEFFERSON,AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS,AND THE USES OF GEOGRAPHY*

ABSTRACT. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) had a lifelong interest in geography. Except for his role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition and a few references to his Notes on the State of Virginia, however, geographers have taken a relatively slight interest in this aspect of his thought, despite his having sometimes been referred to as “one of the greatest American geographers.” This essay suggests that we need to reexamine Jefferson as a geographical thinker. Reviewing some of the more important literature thus far, it suggests where such topics may profitably be extended and points to some aspects of his geographical interests not yet incorporated into the geographical literature.     

Teaching American Indian Geography and History with New Perspectives: The Lodge Pole River Project Example

Abstract

A three-year institute called “The Lodge Pole River Project” was designed to change educator perceptions of American Indian historical geography and encourage the creation of balanced and culturally sensitive American Indian K-12 curriculum. This project offered unique opportunities to assess a geography institute's impact upon teacher knowledge and perceptions towards Native people and pedagogical approaches to teaching about American Indians and their landscapes. The assessment suggests that three weeks of field work, archival research, and curriculum writing increased participant knowledge of American Indian history and culture, solidified sympathetic perceptions and attitudes towards Native people, and strengthened the ability of educators to offer different interpretations of American Indian geography and history to their students.     

J. B. JACKSON AS A CRITIC OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

ABSTRACT. Understanding what the American landscape meant to J. B. Jackson requires an exploration of his background, education, and antagonism to the International Style. No full critique of modernism appears in Jackson's mature published work. However, knowledge that the first issues of Landscape magazine in 1951 and 1952 were the work of a single author leads to discovery of Jackson's pseudonyms, especially H. G. West, P. G. Anson, G. A. Feather, and A. W. Conway. This article examines Jackson's pseudonymous writings and links them to his well-known essays on the landscape: “The Westward-Moving House,” “Other-Directed Houses,” and “Southeast to Turkey.”     

SELF‐DETERMINATION AND THE DIFFICULTY OF CREATING NATION‐STATES: THE TRANSYLVANIA CASE*

ABSTRACT. In the lead‐up to the World War I Paris Peace Conference the United States convened The Inquiry‐a group of leading scholars‐to propose equitable terms, including new borders, for the final peace settlements. In many areas throughout Europe, among them Transylvania, coming to a settlement that fully accounted for Woodrow Wilson's principle of self‐determination proved difficult. Hungary's populace comprised many nationalities, some very hostile toward Romania, the state that eventually acquired the entire region. In this article I analyze how the American plan differed from that finally adopted at the conference and how closely The Inquiry's plan for Transylvania followed the principles laid out by President Wilson in his famous “Fourteen Points,” which provided the basis for American participation in World War I. The ethnic mix within Transylvania made it an especially difficult region in which to apply Wilsonian principles.     

Bridging the Qualitative–Quantitative Divide in Transport Geography∗

Recent viewpoints concerning the state of research in transport geography have touched on the issue of insularity and the need to bridge the divide between the largely spatial–analytical or quantitative research in transport geography and the critical or qualitative research prevalent in urban, economic, and most other subfields of human geography. Transport geography has been criticized by some for being a quiet corner of our discipline that has lost its centrality largely because it remains within the analytical framework of the 1960s. This article explores these sentiments by reexamining recent transport-oriented research in highly cited geography journals to assess the degree to which the qualitative–quantitative divide exists within transport geography and between transport and other subfield in human geography, as well as to explore issues of productivity and centrality of transport-oriented research in geography. Results indicate that geographical research involving transport topics is much more prevalent and reflects a wider range of epistemological and methodological approaches than is frequently assumed. Nevertheless, there is still a considerable divide between “mainstream” transport geography and other human geographical research that necessitates much more interaction between transport and other subfields and greater incorporation of alternative research approaches within the mainstream of transport geography. To that end, we propose a preliminary critical transport geography research agenda that is open to a variety of methodological approaches, including quantitative analysis.     

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT'S IMAGE AND INFLUENCE IN NORTH AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY, 1804–2004

ABSTRACT. Alexander von Humboldt is universally identified as a key figure in laying the foundations for modern geography. His main sites of research and scholarly production were centered on Europe, Latin America, and Russia. He drew on global sources of geographical data and knowledge in constructing and producing his voluminous works. Although he only briefly knew North America firsthand—at the outset of his career, in the late spring of 1804—he maintained a lifelong interest in the realm, especially in the United States. In turn, many North American scholars were admirers and followers of his perspectives, practices, and publications. Although geography did not emerge as an institutionally based discipline in the United States until the late nineteenth century, Humboldt's influence and impact on its antecedents were considerable. Contrary to conventional wisdom, his authority and influence in geography persisted well beyond Humboldt's death in 1859. His vision of demonstrating nature's unity in diversity and his enlightened views on social issues have continued to appeal to select sectors and actors in North American geography, especially Latin Americanists, historians of the discipline, and, more recently, proponents of an engaged, critical geography.     

HUMBOLDT AND THE HABITABILITY OF CANADA'S GREAT NORTHWEST*

ABSTRACT. Alexander von Humboldt's influence in British North America during the nineteenth century was filtered mainly through British imperial applications of “Humboldtian” sciences, including geomagnetism and biogeography. The best‐known examples include Edward Sabine and John Henry Lefroy, Royal Artillery officers who, during the 1830s and 1840s, transformed British North American outposts and territories, including Rupert's Land, into Humboldtian sites and regions in Great Britain's imperial “magnetic crusade.” Important groundwork had already been laid by John Richardson, who applied data accrued during John Franklin's overland Arctic expeditions during the 1820s to systematize Humboldtian inquiries into the habitability of Canada's Great Northwest. Despite both the relative decline of Humboldtian sciences by midcentury and Humboldt's own reservations about the political ramifications of his science, his “cosmic” outlook circulated in Canada to refine territorial expansionists' scientistic arguments justifying annexation of Rupert's Land after the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company expired in 1869.     

Simion Mehedinţi's Contribution to Modern Romanian Geography

Armed with a scholarship to find an answer to the question “What is geography?” Simion Mehedin?i's studies took him to continental Europe's three main centers of geographic thought: Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig. We explore how his innovative ideas flourished, especially in Leipzig under Ratzel. The first Romanian geographer, Mehedin?i, must be credited with having defined geography as a science of mutual relationships between geospheres. This thinking reached its pinnacle in two complex books, Terra and Ethnos, the contents of which we synthetically explore. We also trace the unfavorable historical and geopolitical conditions that led to this pioneering work being little recognized worldwide.     

Bluegrass Grows All Around: The Spatial Dimensions of A Country Music Style

Abstract

Country music offers students and instructors of geography a fertile area for explaining many of the concepts and traditions emphasized in the field. This study focuses on the physical, man-land, and spatial traditions of geography and their significance in analyzing a particular style of American country music. During the early part of the twentieth century, bluegrass music originated in Appalachia where man-land relationships were important to the inhabitants. It has since been diffused by the migration of musicians and facilities accommodating the old-time “pickin' and singin'” sound. The purpose of this study is to lend insight to the possibilities of using country music to illustrate the spatial-temporal phases of American culture.     

Evincing a Place for Place in Learning Progressions Research

This commentary is a response to Larsen and Harrington's article titled “Developing a Learning Progression for Place” (2018). Within the author focuses on the development of learning progressions in geography and future research directions.     

WILBUR AND ME

ABSTRACT. Wilbur Zelinsky has spent his spectacular scholarly career enhancing our understanding of American life through explorations into the nation's cultural geography. Although he has illuminated grand themes, he is also celebrated for his eclectic work on the geography of Americana. Few, however, may appreciate his lifelong enjoyment of American literature. Early in my scholarly journey, Wilbur encouraged my awakening interest in reading widely, beyond the boundaries of professional literature. Conversations with him about shared literary enthusiasms affirmed my reading proclivities. From classic novels to those of minor authors, commentary by journalists, biographies, and mass‐market fiction, literature offers provocative insights into American life and landscape. Reading widely takes one in unforeseen professional directions and yields unexpected rewards. Wilbur's sheer delight with the phenomena of the American scene, however seemingly trivial, instructs us to not overlook their possible geographical significance.     

Policy Boosterism,Policy Mobilities,and the Extrospective City

Abstract

This study develops the notion of “policy boosterism,” a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally developed and/or locally successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields as well as to broader communities of interested peers. It is argued that policy boosterism is (1) an important element of how urban policy actors engage with global communities of professional peers and with local residents, and (2) a useful concept with which to interrogate and understand how policies and policy knowledge are mobilized among cities. A conceptualization of policy boosterism and its role in global-urban policymaking is developed by combining insights from the burgeoning “policy mobilities” literature with those of the longstanding literature on entrepreneurial city marketing. It is supported by illustrative examples of policy boosterism in Vancouver: the city's Greenest City and Green Capital initiatives, the use of the term “Vancouverism” among the city's urban design community, and demonstrations of new urban technologies during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were used to market a particular vision of the city's governance to people from elsewhere, but also—crucially—to local audiences. The article concludes by highlighting four foci that might frame future work at the intersections of policy boosterism and policy mobilities.