On History and Geography and their ‘Bastard’ Child Historical Geography, and on its Relationship to Géohistoire and to Geographical History

Abstract

History and geography offer different but complementary ways of looking at the world. Historical geography has been referred to negatively as the 'bastard' child produced by the union of history and geography but I argue more positively that the intimate relations of history and geography have resulted in an entirely legitimate and robust hybrid whose strength lies in its diverse but coherent approaches to past geographies. Within past geographies can be identified historical geographies of distributions and diffusions, historical environmental geographies, historical landscape geographies, and historical regional geographies. These comprise the principal members of the family of historical geography. But some of them have been given different names at different periods and in different places, and some of them appear to have produced their own offspring. This paper considers the role of geohistory and of geographical history within this extended family of history and geography.