Midcentury Geohumanities: J. B. Jackson and the “Magazine of Human Geography”

Abstract

This article makes the argument that J. B. Jackson’s Landscape was where the concept of the “geohumanities” was first cultivated in the transdisciplinary context of a single magazine. Specifically, during the rise of spatial science and the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the magazine was an incubator and refuge for the cultural and historical geographers who would help found the nascent area of humanistic geography; the magazine also served as a gathering place for a community of scholars from many different disciplines, all interested in issues of landscape, space, and place as topics and ideas with relevance that extended beyond any single intellectual perspective. In many ways the magazine itself was a metaphorical landscape: a hybrid territory where different influences—from the social sciences, sciences, and humanities—came together to create something new. Tracing this earlier history of transdisciplinary humanistic geography is important for contextualizing the current geohumanities project.