The Geographical Review's Historical Dimensions and Recentism*

Abstract

The Review possesses many long-standing strengths that are well worth celebrating in this centennial volume. This essay complements the series of forthcoming essays, with a focus on the Review's commitment to the historical dimension and the resulting insights into present-day issues often lacking elsewhere. For example, content analysis has revealed that since 1980 the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, and Progress in Human Geography have shifted toward an overwhelming emphasis on the present and recent past (Jones 2004). Some have even coined terms such as and temporal parochialism to describe what seems to be a general tendency for scholarship on social topics [to focus] increasingly on later periods at the expense of earlier ones (Smith 2009, 114; see also Sluyter 2005b). Those critics argue that, ironically, an exclusive focus on high modernity and the present actually hinders understanding those periods because some of their most salient characteristics emerged out of the immense disjuncture between premodern and early modern times. As Carl Sauer wrote in this journal many decades ago, We may yet best delineate the basic traits of this land and its peoples from its prehistoric geography and from its geography of the sixteenth century (1941, 354). Many readers may believe that the Review is immune to recentism. Yet even geography periodicals that inherently focus on the past, such as the Journal of Historical Geography, have come to emphasize research on high modernity, with the majority of articles on the early 1800s through the mid-1900s (Jones 2004). Others have noted a similar trend in Environmental History as well as urban geography and history journals (Sluyter 2005b; Smith 2009). The possible institutional reasons for recentism, its relationships to broader intellectual movements, and other such issues beg extended discussion, but they would pertain to the Review as much as to other academic journals. The mandated brevity of this essay allows for much more limited goals: first, determination of whether the Review has also succumbed to recentism; and second, illustration of the merits of resisting it. To test whether the Review has succumbed to recentism since 1980 I drew a random sample of fifty issues published between January 1916 and October 2008. (1) Content analysis of those issues involved perusal of all their human geography research articles, Geographical Record notes, and Geographical Field Notes, including methodological items oriented toward human geography. The analysis excluded book reviews, conference reports, editorials, correspondence, award announcements, obituaries, and articles dealing with purely mathematical cartography or biophysical phenomena, whether reporting on substantive research or on methodological research. I then categorized each item according to the presence or absence of analytic engagement with data predating 1800, the year that nominally signals the emergence of high modernity (Sluyter 2005b). For each issue, division of the number of items lacking pre-1800 analysis by the total number of items established its Recentism Index (RI). Theoretically, the RI can range from 0.00 up to 1.00, the latter indicating perfect recentism. The sample's actual RI, however, ranges from a low of 0.25 (n = 1) to a high of 1.00 (n = 12). Table I and Figure 1 demonstrate that the Review, like other leading geography journals, has been affected by recentism. Comparing the period before 1980 to the subsequent period, the mean RI increases from 0.74 to 0.86, the minimum RI increases from 0.25 to 0.71, and the standard deviation decreases from 0.20 to 0.10. As those summary statistics and the graph both make clear, since 1980 fewer articles in the average issue deal with the past beyond 1800, and fewer issues deviate far from the average. …