American geography, social science and the Cold War

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the history of geography should be written from an externalist perspective; that is, its history should be directly related to the larger historical context in which it is embedded. My example is American human geography during the early Cold War period. The argument is that as a result of America's experience during the Second World War, the USA mobilised its academy to help it win the Cold War. America drew not only on the physical sciences, but also the social sciences. Given the success of the physical sciences in winning the Second World War (especially the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb), the model for Cold War social sciences were the physical sciences. Therefore, like them, American social sciences increasingly carried out large, multidisciplinary projects, which were generously funded by the state, and which used formal, mathematical techniques and models to analyse big numerical data sets using the cutting-edge computing machines of the day. Because of some powerful individual gatekeepers, human geography initially resisted the kind of change that other American social sciences experienced. By the mid-to-late 1950s it could resist no longer. As exemplified by the work of William Warntz, American human geography also became another Cold War social science.