Historical Geography and Early American History

Abstract

istorians probably share with most of those outside of the geography profession some uncertainty about the nature of geography, an uncertainty which generally gives rise to an even larger measure of doubt concerning the nature of historical geography. The variety of phenomena geographers study and the array of fields into which geography is subdivided have increasingly blurred the essential integrity of the discipline. It is therefore worth reiterating that the coherence of geography lies in the geographer's consistent concern over the centuries with several traditional lines of enquiry.1 Of these related but distinct traditions, three have furnished the basic concerns of historical geography. To identify the three is to define historical geography. The first is the spatial tradition, which has grown out of an attachment to the recording, mapping, and analysis of the distributions of phenomena, and can be seen in studies focusing on things as diverse as livestock densities, political boundaries, and freight rates. The second tradition is the area studies, or chorographic tradition. Those who pursue it have for their goal the description of the characteristics of places, as large as continents or as small as neighborhoods. Third is the man-land tradition, which emerged as the result of long-continued investigation of the relationship between man and the physical environment; a once popular and very narrowed version of this tradition, which was characterized by an exclusive concern with the influence of the physical environment upon man, has since given way to an emphasis upon man's alteration of the physical environment. The major purpose of this brief essay is to review twentieth-century contributions to historical geography that pertain to early American history. Among the contributions are samples of all three traditions, and the works to be discussed will be related to the tradition they represent.