Historical Geography: Focus On The ‘Geographic Past’ and ‘Historical Place’

Abstract

What is historical geography? Until the recent concern with environment in America, few scholars took academic geography seriously, let alone historical geography. Even today the environment, its spatial structuring, and the manner in which people locate themselves and their activities in geographical space are issues easily subordinated to other disciplines. Geography is easily viewed as a mere dimension of some other aspect of human life. Historical geography is not something historians generally study as an end in itself. They use geography to help define political, economic, or social issues. Geography of the past (and often only the physical aspect) is viewed as an explaining variable, and rarely as a variable to be explained. Certainly, geography can influence human behavior. Opportunities for human life are distributed spatially in various ways. Human history evolves as individuals, communities, and other social groups pick and choose among these opportunities. It concerns the development of new ways of life, and the continual reorganization of new and old in an ever changing geographical mosaic. Geographers believe that this mosaic deserves explenation in its own right. The concept of place is central to geographical analysis. Places are discrete. They have specific locations. They have boundries which contain selected kinds of people, activities, and artifacts. Places exist in time. They open and close, and their activities can be periodized. They also vary in scale. A geographer might study the American South or the Middle West as a region. He might also study the manner in which people define personal spaces, distribute themselves in spaces as small as rooms, and how their spatial distributions change in time. Historical geographers focus on place and place change in the past. The study of place can be approached in at least two ways. Emphasis can be given to the structuring of geographical space which results when places are created and used by people. This is the dominant theme in human geography today. It has led to an emphasis on mapping spatial distributions, and comparing these distributions using quantitative techniques in hypotheses testing frameworks. This form of geographical analysis uses the scientific method. Its purpose is to identify causal relationships betweeen spatial patterns so that generalizations with high predictive capabilities can be derived. This study of distributions in space necessarily emphasizes groups of people. The individual is subsumed in the quest for central tendencies or measures of deviation from recognized norms across large populations. Focus on the individual, both as a decision maker and as an actor in geographical space, represents another approach. In studying human spatial behavior, emphasis is on how people view place. How do beliefs and attitudes about places influence human behavior? What kinds of satisfactions (or dissatisfactions) do people expect from different kinds of places and how do these anticipations influence locational and other choices? Emphasis on human spatial behavior involves both the study of population and the study of individuals, the latter inviting a clear humanistic orientation. Scientific method, especially the use of deductive models, has proved limited in the study of human experience. A broader epistemology is evolving. 2