The history of geography is an untidy term that sprawls across an extended chronology and embraces an illdefined body of thought, knowledge, and ideas. Different countries have different histories of geographical thought, and not infrequently North American practitioners study one or more of these national histories. The period of investigation for some may exceed two thousand years while for others it may be decades only. There is no mainstream, but a variety of individual efforts—some oriental, some occidental, some published, others unsung—that do not of themselves come together. The historian of geography studies what other people have thought, said, and studied concerning matters geographical. Islands of knowledge form in seas of ignorance. The canvas is vast and for most of us choices must be made. Over the last thirty years it is probably true to assert that a majority of workers in this enterprise have made special studies of segments of the history of North American geography and its antecedents. The larger purpose of this type of investigation is to understand what has gone before, to comprehend how progress is made in the advancement of thought and how such a body of knowledge in its evolution brought us to recent time. It is a form of historical inquiry cognizant of the context of times past and guarded as to the limitations imposed upon us by lack of sources. In this country, among the academic pioneers of this genre were E. van Cleef, C. T. Conger, J. Paul Goode, C. O. Sauer, E. C. Semple, and E. L. Stevenson of whom four undertook some of their studies in Germany. Arguably, formal recognition of this branch of our field was entered into the literature by Wright (1925, 1926). Development of this body of knowledge has, however, been slow. Occasionally the terms “history of geography” and “historical geography” have been mistaken for one another or used interchangeably. The history of geography seeks to reveal the direction that individuals, institutions, books, beliefs, and concepts have taken in the eventual construction of a discipline and profession. The history of geography relates to and intermingles with histories of other fields (most notably perhaps with geology).
History of Geography (Not Identical to Historical Geography)
