Geographical Review Research Articles

Book Review of Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J.A. Talbert

Book Review of Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J.A. Talbert

Instructions For The Submission Of Manuscripts To The Geographical Review

Instructions For The Submission Of Manuscripts To The Geographical Review

Thirtieth Anniversary of African Geographical Review: History, Adoption, Institutionalization, and the Future of the Journal

This paper reflects on the 30th anniversary of the African Geographical Review (AGR) by looking at the history and future of the journal. It originated in a panel discussion organized by the current editors of the AGR at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Seattle. It synthesizes presentations made by participants of the panel including William Moseley, Florence Margai, Isaac Luginaah, Maano Ramutsindela, Padraig Carmody, Kefa Otiso, Bakama BakamaNume, and Ian Yeboah among others. The paper demonstrates how the East African Geographical Review (EAGR), a regional journal serving the East African region from 1963 to 1996, has grown into the mouthpiece of the Africa Specialty Group (ASG) of the AAG. The role of individual agency and the tenacity of the editors of the journal since its arrival in the United States have been central in growing it into the ASG's mouth piece. We anticipate that when the next stocktaking of the AGR occurs, the AGR will be a leading global geography journal on Africa.

Studying together, living apart: Emerging geographies of school attendance in post-apartheid Cape Town

Studying together, living apart: Emerging geographies of school attendance in post-apartheid Cape Town

Caribbean Islands in a Changing Climate

The Caribbean Sea is the second largest sea in the world, covering an area of approximately 2,515,900 kilometers. The region has the largest number of small island developing states (SIDS) and the ...

Controls for trout and char migratory/resident behaviour mainly in stream systems above and below waterfalls/barriers: a multidecadal and broad geographical review

Northcote TG. Controls for trout and char migratory/resident behaviour mainly in stream systems above and below waterfalls/barriers: a multidecadal and broad geographical review. Ecology of Freshwater Fish 2010: 19: 487–509. © 2010 John Wiley & Sons A/SAbstract – Controls for trout and char migratory and resident behaviour in rivers and streams for above and below natural and man‐made waterfalls/barriers are covered in a multi‐decadal (1950–2000) and wide geographical review (North America, UK, Europe, Japan) that includes reference to over 380 publications. These note 53 for rainbow trout, 61 for cutthroat trout, 104 for brown trout, 47 for bull trout, 41 for brook trout, 35 for Dolly Varden and 42 for white‐spotted char, plus a few general contributions of relevance on some. For each of these species, there has been a major increase in relevant decadal publications since the early 1980s, no doubt in large part because of the upsurge in micro‐genetic methodology for DNA and related technology, coupled with a broadening of interest in stream migratory behaviour of salmonids. Main mechanisms for the control of stream migratory versus resident behaviour appear to cover an interplay among both genetic and environmental factors; in some populations and locations, genetic controls seem to be more important than environmental ones, but in others the reverse. Habitat degradation by various human activities and their introductions of non‐native fish species are becoming causes of reduction in abundance of above and below waterfall stream populations for several of these salmonid species.

Fieldwork and the Geographical Review: Retrospect and Possible Prospects*

For the 100 the volume of the Geographical Review its editors, Editorial Board members, and American Geographical Society Counselors received invitations to pen essays reflecting on the journal's past, present, and future. Because of my work as guest editor with Paul Starrs on the 2001 Doing Fieldwork special double issue of the journal (DeLyser and Starrs 2001a, 2001b), I took on the task of writing about fieldwork. In this essay for the centennial volume, Paul Karolczyk and I review how geography as a field-based discipline has actually been written in the Geographical Review and offer some thoughts on how we might do it, and write it, in the future. THE FIELDWORK TRADITION IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW Research based on fieldwork, especially research based on explicit discussions of fieldwork, seemed to us a strong tradition not just in the Geographical Review but in all of geography (see Platt 1959; Parsons 1977; Rundstrom and Kenzer 1989; Katz 1994; Nast 1994; PG 1994; Driver 2000; Gerber and Goh 2000; DeLyser and Starrs 2001a, 2001b; Sundberg 2003; Abbott 2006). But is it now, and has it really ever been? In 1989 Robert Rundstrom and Martin Kenzer attempted to answer this question for human geography using three journals: the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, the Professional Geographer, and the Geographical Review. They surveyed articles published between 1945 and 1988 and found that fieldwork was widely used but, as of the 1980s, in decline. Our efforts were somewhat different: Using criteria narrower than those used by Rundstrom and Kenzer, we examined every article published in the Geographical Review between 1916 (when the journal was given its present name and replaced the long-running Bulletin of the American Geographical Society) and 2009 in search of articles based on and including descriptions of fieldwork. We built two lists, one of articles that briefly mentioned fieldwork in the main text or confined discussion of fieldwork to its notes, and another of articles that provided readers with much richer detail about field methods, experiences, funding sources, and regional field focus. Articles in the latter list were the ones that really described and engaged the fieldwork undertaken, and many of them were written in the first person. Together, the two lists likely account for the majority of articles published in the Geographical Review that detail their fieldwork. (1) Although, according to Rundstrom and Kenzer (1989), a mean of 81 percent of articles published in the Geographical Review between 1945 and 1985 had some form of field component to their research, our research both broadened that time span and sharpened the field focus. To our surprise, when we focused on published works that actually detailed the fieldwork undertaken, of some 3,100 articles published in the journal since 1916, we found that only 648--or about 21 percent--actually described doing fieldwork or reflected on that fieldwork. Of those, only 403--or about 13 percent--engaged that fieldwork in detail. Many of the 79 percent of the articles published that did not engage an author's fieldwork either described a region (or a regional issue) without detailing any fieldwork in the region or relied on the fieldwork of others. (2) Of all the articles, only the fifty-six in the 2001 Doing Fieldwork double issue and twenty-one others could be called methods or methodological pieces--articles that focused heavily, or centrally, on issues of fieldwork. (3) With the exception of the Doing Fieldwork double issue (DeLyser and Starrs 2001b), graphing the total number of fieldwork-engaged articles along with the total number of articles in each issue of the journal shows a persistent and prominent gap between the total number of articles published in the journal and those published that actually describe their fieldwork in any detail (Figure 1). This finding points to an issue for the past, present, and future of field-based work that raises important questions for field-based geography--in the Geographical Review and elsewhere. …

Wither Physical Geography: 100 Volumes of the Geographical Review*

The centennial volume of Geographical Review marks a distinct milestone for the discipline of geography in North America. Great editorial leadership, landmark articles, recognition as a flagship journal: all traditions tagged to the Geographical Review. It has been my privilege, as a member of the Editorial Board, to have been part of that enterprise for most of the last quarter-century. I have worked with inspirational editors--Doug McManis (still my favorite, with apologies to), Paul Starrs, Douglas Johnson and Viola Haarmann, and Craig Colten--and learned much from them. But, a la Christopher Keylock (2007), I already knew the difference between whither and wither. Many of the legendary physical geographers and several leading geologists of the twentieth century published in the Geographical Review. The honor roll includes such luminaries as William Morris Davis (both in the Geographical Review and in its predecessor, the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society; see, for example, Davis 1919, 1934), Harlan Bretz (1928), Richard Joel Russell (Russell and Howe 1935), John Hack (1941), Warren Thornthwaite (1948), Luna Leopold (1951), and Kenneth Hare (Hare and Ritchie 1972). However, the work of physical geographers, as the central focus of a research article, has been virtually missing from the pages of the Geographical Review for the last several decades. By my quick count, using titles or abstracts, only 19 of the 382 articles in volumes 86-99 (1986-2009) are on physical geography. Surprisingly, even in the special issue on Doing Fieldwork (DeLyser and Starrs 2001), only one of the fifty-six essays deals primarily with physical geography. Slightly more contributions by physical geographers appeared in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, as Doug McManis supported a thematic issue on Coastal Geomorphology in 1988 and a short-lived series of essays on philosophy and concepts in physical geography (Sherman 1988; see, for example, Nordstrom 1993). And for most of the last twenty-five years only one or two physical geographers at a time have served on the Editorial Board, which currently comprises thirteen members, not including the editor, the two associate editors, and the book review editor, all of whom are human geographers. So the modern circumstance raises several questions that I will attempt to address here: Was there once a stronger presence of physical geography in the Geographical Review? If so, why has that presence waned? And what might the answers to the preceding questions portend for the journal's future? Much of the change of content in the pages of the Geographical Review is reflected from larger disciplinary forces that altered the landscape of North American geography through the mid-twentieth century. This stems from the disciplinary autophobia espoused by Richard Hartshorne in 1939 under the guise of chorography and regional geography (neatly, but unfortunately not fatally, taken to task in Sauer 1956, 294-295). The decades-long focus on regionalism did great damage to the discipline as a whole (see, for example, Hartshorne 1962), but it dramatically undermined physical geography in general and geomorphology in particular (Butzer 1989). For instance, Hartshorne rejected the study of geomorphological processes as being nongeographical ([1939] 1961, 423-424), and many geography departments in the United States endorsed that rejection via their hiring policies. Therefore, that part of the physical geography community that might have been especially well poised to exploit the quantitative revolution was largely absent from academic geography. It is noteworthy that Hartshorne considered both climatology and biogeography--plant geography in the original--to be safely in the realm of his systematic geography ([1939] 1961, 78-79). Nevertheless, the middle of the twentieth century must be considered a dark period for physical geography in general. Certainly there was a marked distinction in the content of academic geography journals, including the Geographical Review and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, as physical geography appeared less and less often in their pages. …

Reflections on Regional Research in the Geographical Review

Regional studies, concepts, and delimitations are regularly found on the pages of the Geographical Review. This is no surprise, given the profession's strong orientation toward regional studies in the first half on the twentieth century and the ongoing concern about the formation of different scalar frameworks today. A survey of the pages of the Geographical Review reflects important shifts in regional approaches, from outlining formal or to discussions of functional based on transportation networks or regional development policies, to more humanistic approaches concerned with regional identity and meaning. Social processes and political problems associated with regionalism have also been discussed in articles ranging from localities such as the Balkans (Cvijic 1918, 1920) to Nigeria (Prescott 1959), Sudan (Roden 1974), and Costa Rica (Hall 1984). Any naturalist notion that are out waiting to be discovered has long been replaced by a more constructivist one in which are understood as social constructs that are formed, shaped, and even created by different agents for distinct purposes (Murphy 1991b). Although regional analyses have played an important role in the journal's offerings, they have never dominated. A search of Geographical Review titles and abstracts from the 1916 to 2004 found nearly 300 articles that contain the word region, regions, regional, regionalism, or regionalization--no more than 10 percent of all the articles published. For comparative purposes, Figure 1 shows only the number of regional articles by decade from 1920 through 1999. Admittedly, this methodology may overlook some articles with a strong regional focus, but certain trends are clear: Regional articles have persisted, but they have never dominated the pages of the Geographical Review; regional approaches and understandings have evolved; and after a decline in the 1940s and 1950s, regional analysis, be it humanistic or functional in orientation, has been a constant feature of the journal. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] A brief essay such as this cannot do justice to the many articles presenting regional perspectives. In selecting articles or issues of the journal, I have been drawn to those regional writings that provoked or challenged orderings of space. What follows is a brief discussion of the kinds of regional approaches displayed in the Geographical Review over almost a century. In particular, I will focus on two special issues of the journal--Oceans Connect (Wigen and Harland-Jacobs 1999); New Geographies of the Middle East (Stewart 2005c)--as exemplars of the vibrant regional research offered. I will conclude with suggestions of promising avenues for future regional work. WRITING REGIONS early years of the journal witnessed concerted attempts to describe the world's regions as part of a basic effort to fill in the map with particularistic place-based information. In this empirical approach to science, natural were delimited and described. In the 1920s articles such as The Regions of the French Alps (Blanchard 1921), The Regions of Mexico (Sanders 1921), or Natural Regions of Czechoslovakia (Moscheles 1924) represented this approach. Depictions of natural boundaries, such as The Region of Maximum Inaccessibility in the Arctic (Stefansson 1920) concerned a natural boundary in the polar where the American Geographical Society (AGS) actively supported exploration. notion that writing such regional depictions actually created spatial units that might not otherwise exist was not addressed. Interestingly, the use of the term region gave way to geographical region by the 1930s, perhaps because the scholars who were producing these works were surely aware that there was nothing about the process of regional delimitation. …

Political Geography in the Geographical Review: Volumes 1–99*

Editors' Note: This essay by Alexander Murphy begins the final set of retrospective works commissioned to celebrate the centennial volume of the Geographical Review. In this group, American Geographical Society Councilors undertake the challenge of reviewing major conceptual approaches or topical fields as presented in the journal's first ninety‐nine volumes and to muse about how those approaches will contribute to the field in its second century. In addition to Murphy, the contributors comprise Councilors Marie Price and Douglas Sherman, as well as a review of fieldwork by Associate Editor Dydia DeLyser and her coauthor, Paul Karolczyk. As much as retrospective views, we hope these essays point the way for scholarship in the coming years.

River Blindness Revisited*

My hypothesis on onchocerciasis, or river blindness, appeared in the Geographical Review of 1966. It led to an invitation from the World Health Organization in 1972 to revisit the problem area for two months to provide information to assist in the planning of a twenty‐year program of intervention. This article presents unpublished maps selected from my 1972 report. The issues discussed have relevance today regarding international health projects, air‐mass climatology, and human geography.

Inspirations from the Geographical Review: Jean Gottmann's “Why the Skyscraper?”

Editors' note: Larry lost his battle against pancreatic cancer in September 2009. When we invited him, some months before his death, to prepare this essay he eagerly agreed, despite his worsening health. We acknowledge with gratitude his longtime service as a member of the Geographical Review Editorial Board, as a Councilor of the American Geographical Society, and as a professor of geography at San Diego State University. In many ways he was himself an inspiration.

The Lasting Scientific Impact of the Thornthwaite Water–balance Model

Warren Thornthwaite's 1948 article in the Geographical Review unveiled the rationale for a new climate classification system (as opposed the widely used climate classification devised by Wladimir Koppen [1900]). The underlying principle of Thornthwaite's classification included analysis of the interaction between energy and moisture at the earth's surface, rather than analyzing temperature and precipitation as separate variables. Although Thornthwaite's classification system never achieved as much popularity as Koppen's classification, the article became a classic because of the methods implemented in the classification scheme. In particular, Thornthwaite's formulation of potential evapotranspiration (PET) as a component of the climate system was revolutionary, with applications well beyond the realm of climate classification. THORNTHWAITE'S INSPIRATION Koppen produced the most widely used climate classification system of the twentieth century. He introduced his initial classification in 1900 and continued refine it for decades (Koppen 1900, 1923, 1936). Koppen took regions of common vegetation and then quantified the climate of those regions in terms of average temperature and precipitation. Thornthwaite and other American climatologists saw the shortcomings of the Koppen system, especially as applied the United States. At the time--the 1930s--Thornthwaite and Koppen interacted professionally, and the two occasionally corresponded about climate classification issues. Russell Mather and Marie Sanderson even presented a translated letter from Koppen Thornthwaite (1996). CLIMATE CLASSIFICATION Although Thornthwaite was not troubled by Koppen's use of vegetation boundaries, he took the approach that, to achieve a rational quantitative classification of climate, definite and distinctive break points must be discovered in the climatic series themselves (1948, 73). He further noted that distinctive breaks did not occur in precipitation, or in PET, where breaks in vegetation boundaries existed. Therefore, some new way of analyzing climatic data was needed find the break points that coincide with changes in vegetation. Thornthwaite clearly believed that interpretations of evaporation and transpiration were the key cracking the climate classification code. Part of his rationale for this thinking was because the same amount of annual rainfall results in lush forest in Scandinavia but desert vegetation in Africa (Mather and Sanderson 1996), raising the notion of the effectiveness of temperature and precipitation. Thornthwaite discussed these concepts in an even earlier article published in the Geographical Review (1931). There he noted that the effectiveness of temperature is how it translates plant growth and that the effectiveness of precipitation is related the amount of evaporation of that rainfall. As a result, a region cannot be designated as either wet or dry using precipitation alone. Utilizing these concepts, Thornthwaite laid out a way determine PET based on empirical relationships of weather data (1948). PET represents the amount of water that would evapotranspirate if no shortage of soil moisture available in the rooting zone existed (Muller and Grymes 2005). In other words, it is the demand for moisture by the atmosphere, but that demand is not always met. To determine the PET values, all that is needed are temperature data and latitude (as a surrogate for day length) for the location or region. From this concept, Thornthwaite developed a water balance that estimated the timing of high and LOW PET, soil-moisture recharge, utilization of soil moisture, moisture deficits, surplus, and runoff (see Figure 1 for an example). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Using this approach, Thornthwaite devised his classification of moisture regions across the United States (Figure 2). The 0 line delineating positive from negative values represents the break from wet dry climates according Thornthwaite's moisture index. …

John Borchert's “American Metropolitan Evolution”

John Borchert's 1967 classic Metropolitan Evolution is the article that had the greatest influence on my conceptualization of urban geography. article appeared during my first year as a graduate student and immediately became a kind of text in a very popular two-quarter sequence on The Geography of American Cities at the University of Minnesota. It presented a cogent organizational structure for the relative growth and decline of cities in the United States related to three technological/transportation innovations: the application of the steam engine to water and land transportation; the installation of steel rails, which, along with the widespread use of electric power, permitted more powerful railroad traffic; and the introduction of the internal-combustion engine to transportation and the shift to a service economy. Urban growth was thus divided into four epochs: the Sail-Wagon Epoch, 1790-1830; the Iron Horse Epoch, 1830-1870; the Steel Rail Epoch, 1970-1920; and the Auto-Air-Amenity Epoch, 1920-As each succeeding innovation took hold, new conditions for growth or decline emerged, the results of which could be observed in the relative increase or decrease in metropolitan population size. Borchert recognized that the periods neither were homogeneous nor had sharp boundaries. In fact, a Canal Epoch (1820-1840) affected some cities--notably in upstate New York--during the early Iron Horse Epoch, and the Electric Interurban Railway Epoch (1900-1930) affected some during the Steel Rail Epoch and the early Auto-Air-Amenity Epoch. These examples complicate any simple classification. Furthermore, many short-term effects at individual locations were constantly superimposed on the overall pattern, causing even more variability. Among the very interesting data summaries were Borchert's map and chart of the percentage of 1960 population accumulated in the various historical epochs (1967, 326, 329). For example, by the end of the Sail-Wagon Epoch--1830-the population of New York City was only 3 percent of what it had become by 1960. New York metropolitan area grew by an additional 11 percent of the 1960 population in the Iron Horse Epoch, by 44 percent in the Steel Rail Epoch, and 42 percent in the Auto-Air-Amenity Epoch. Albany-Schenectady-Troy has a very different profile: in each of the four epochs the metropolitan area accumulated an additional 25 percent of the total 1960 population. This profile is in sharp contrast with that of both Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Las Vegas: Each of these metropolitan areas had accumulated only 4 percent of its 1960 population before the auto-air-amenity period began in 1920. Because the different epochs are also characterized by buildings of various densities and architectural types, the street layouts, urban densities, and building ages and styles are very much a function of the epoch in which the greatest population growth occurred. Metropolitan Evolution appeared at a time when geography itself was struggling over whether it was to evolve as nomothetic--a spatial science that sought general laws to describe objective phenomena--or as idiographic--place specific or contingent and subjective (Lukermann 1964,1965; Bunge 1966; Harvey 1969). In those days many geographers considered the Geographical Review to lean more toward historical/cultural/contingent geography than did journals such as Geographical Analysis, founded in 1969 as an outlet for more abstract, quantitative analyses. What John Borchert accomplished in his article was a model for the integration of the two approaches: a highly empirically based analysis with fundamental process principles that have stood the test of time. He analyzed the relative growth and decline of individual cities as related, at least partly, to changes in technology, particularly transportation technology. He also suggested the applicability of this force to the internal evolution of the metropolitan area. …

Personality, Geographical Art, and Lessons From Sauer's Mexico

Editors' note: This essay by Dan Arreola begins the second set of retrospective pieces commissioned to celebrate the centennial volume. Members of the Editorial Board responded to our request to prepare brief commentaries on landmark Geographical Review articles that were influential in their professional careers. Although many other articles touched the minds of emerging scholars, this small sampling covers a fairly wide swath of the fabric of American geography. It also reminds us that each future article has the potential to have a similar enduring value and help open new intellectual vistas. In addition to Arrreola's piece, the short essays include the musings of Barry Keim, Susan Walcott, Larry Ford, and Risa Palm.

Avifaunal Research and Geographical Perspectives

Birds are geographical creatures. In fact, we can map connections between birds and politics, recreation, economics, global health, mythology, aviation, and even professional sports. In other words, birds are a pervasive presence in various geographies. Birds have been symbols in past and present cultures. Ancient cultures considered some birds deities; modern nations and states elevate birds as national and international symbols (Houlihan 1987; Demarest 2004). Birds also make up a significant number of mascots for professional sporting teams in North America. Outdoor sports enthusiasts also spend literally tens of millions of dollars on activities such waterfowl hunting and bird-watching (Kerlinger, Payne, and Eubanks 1997; Vivanco 2001; Henderson 2005; Grado 2008). Although the end results of these two activities are seemingly disparate--dead birds versus live ones--both are driven by desire for and appreciation of birds. Scholars in fields such as ornithology and biology conduct most of the bird-oriented research, but social scientists, particularly geographers, have made important contributions to avifaunal research. Ornithologists play a leading role regarding studies focused on avian genetics, evolutionary history, and behavior; however, these areas of inquiry cover only part of the overall research landscape related to birds. People profoundly influence bird evolution, bird behavior, bird genetics, and bird numbers. Humans hunt, watch, house, feed, or value birds based on cultural constructs such as beauty, power, pests, and food (Doughty 1975; Hobbs 2004; Steinberg 2008). And these constructs impact key biological research topics. Indeed, culturally influenced activities such as hunting or feeding birds certainly influence avian behavior, population size, disease transmission, and, over time, evolution (Yaukey 1996; Doughty and Fergus 2002). This special issue of the Geographical Review highlights avian research conducted by geographers by examining such topics as cultural perception of specific birds, bird conservation and population trends, human impacts on birds through habitat alteration, and bird exploitation in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. But the issue is not intended merely to highlight current research; its purpose is also to stake a claim in avifaunal research for geographers and by doing so also point to the potential for other research to be led by geographers. Can anyone argue that topics such as the diffusion of global disease, often with birds as vectors, or the role played by birds in ecotourism does not fall squarely within the realm of geography (Donaldson and Wood 2008)? This special issue is informally divided into two sections: the first is more cultural and human-environment-oriented; the second focuses on bird biogeography. Given our discipline's long research traditions in cultural, human-environmental, and biological geography, I think this division is appropriate. Being geographers instead of ornithologists influences how we contextualize birds and overall avian research. We often see birds at different scales than ornithologists do: as part of a larger human-environmental landscape, whose presence and status are greatly influenced by history, politics, economics, and, of course, local culture. Thus geographical research focused on birds often provides a broader, more complete portrait of birds in and part of a landscape, not simply birds as single units in an ecosystem. The material in this issue is important because, as humans continue to alter the natural world on an unprecedented scale, geographers and our often interdisciplinary research approach can and will shed light on the underlying, often diverse causes of environmental degradation. …

Landscape and Place in the Geographical Review

As part of the 2007 Wrigley-Fairchild award session during the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, former Geographical Review Editor Paul Starrs dramatically unveiled the most influential articles to have appeared in the journal (Starrs 2007) (Table I). Among them are true landmarks; and what caught my attention was the number that touched on the concepts of place and landscape. These topics have been a mainstay of twentieth-century geography and likewise prominent among the titles in the Geographical Review. I want to use Starrs's ten list to frame a brief discussion about the evolving approaches to the study of landscape and place in the Geographical Review. My comments touch on only a pair of research themes and a highly selective set of contributions to this journal; the larger body of articles that address landscape and place exemplifies much of what is good about the Geographical Review--namely, continuity and the journal's role as a forum for ongoing discussions about enduring geographical subjects. TABLE I--TOP TEN ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW AUTHOR TITLE YEAR OF VOLUME, PUBLICATION ISSUE, AND PAGE NUMBERS Yi-Fu Tuan Place: An 1975 65 (2): 151-165 Experiential Perspective Carl O. Sauer The Personality of 1941 31 (3): 353-364 Mexico Mark Jefferson The Law of the 1939 29 (2): 226-232 Primate City David Lowenthal Past Time, Present 1975 65 (1): 1-36 Place: Landscape and Memory Isaiah Bowman Scientific Study of 1926 16 (3): 647-653 Settlement Edward L. Ullman Amenities 1954 44 (1): 119-132 as a Factor in Regional Growth Larry R. Ford Continuity 1995 85 (3): 552-568 and Change in the American City Dan Stanislawski Spanish Town 1947 37 (1): 94-105 in the New World Wilbur Zelinsky The Hypothesis 1971 61 (2): 219-149 of the Mobility Transition Fred B. Kniffen Building in Wood in 1966 56 (1): 40-66 and Henry Glassie the Eastern United States: A Time-Place Perspective Jean Gottmann Why the Skyscraper? 1966 56(2): 190-212 James J. Parsons A Geographer Looks 1986 76 (4): 371-389 at the San J oaquin Valley Source: Starrs 2007. Starrs's ranking of articles drew on a two-stage survey of selected journal readers: The first stage solicited personal lists of the most influential articles; the second allowed respondents to rank the top titles from the larger preliminary inventory. Methodology and specific rankings aside, Starrs captured an unquestionably prominent set. I touch on several articles from the list to showcase their position and influence in the ongoing discussions of landscape and place. Dan Stanislawski and Edward Price's inclusion in the Geographical Review hit parade denotes a powerful influence on the traditional approaches to landscape. Stanislawski's 1947 Early Spanish Town Planning is a prime example of work that influenced subsequent scholars and indeed provided a touchstone for numerous articles appearing here. It focused on the material etching of a street grid into the colonial soil of Latin America, using a diffusionist model. Another classic on town planning was Price's 1968 examination of the American courthouse square. …

The 100th Volume

This issue represents a landmark in the American Geographical Society's long history: It is the centennial number of the Geographical Review. First published in 1859, the venerable journal went through a series of name and format changes through the years. With its most recent, and enduring, name change in 1916 it moved forward into the twentieth century and now stands upon a proud publication record (Wright 1952,194-195). (1) We want to pause in this special volume to highlight some of the journal's traditional strengths, and also to ponder its future. The Geographical Review editors, the members of its Editorial Board, and the AGS Councillors have composed short essays that will appear throughout the year. In this first issue we feature a pair of essays that consider how the Geographical Review has showcased landscape and place and the importance of the long-term perspective. These topics reflect on a few of the journal's more potent contributions to geographical scholarship and allow us to offer a retrospective view as we launch the centennial volume. The first essay showcases prominent publications on place and landscape that appeared in the journal during the past century and introduced some of the intellectual genetic material that runs through the DNA of more recent contributions. Our authors have also demonstrated the value of a longer-term perspective on geographical phenomena, although, as Andrew Sluyter observes, since the 1980s emphasis has shifted toward the recent past. Our Editorial Board has selected articles that proved particularly formative in their careers, and they offer observations on these influential works in a later issue. In the final issue of the year AGS Councillors will consider established geographical concepts and approaches and speculate on their place in future geographical scholarship. We are confident that a journal like the Geographical Review has a leadership role to play in the years ahead. As we begin a new century under this title, it makes sense to build on our established strengths while embracing new approaches and engaging fresh perspectives. At the seventieth anniversary of the Geographical Review, Editor Douglas McManis noted that hallmarks developed by his predecessors showed highest caliber scholarship, broad-ranging topical coverage, and accessible style of presentation (1976, 1). We seek not only to continue each of those qualities but also to expand the inventory of prominent attributes. In addition, we note the journal's dedication to empirically rich, field-based, and historically deep scholarship. The need for ground-truthed research, with temporal depth and drawn from countries around the globe, remains great. …

The Geographical Review's Historical Dimensions and Recentism*

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. …

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Text as it happens – literary geography