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The origins of academic geography in the United States
REVIEWS
BRIAN W. BLOUET(Ed.) with the assistance of TERESAL. STITCHER,The Origins c?f Adetnic Geography in the United States (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 198 1. Pp. xii + 342. $37.50)
Of the 48 original members of the Association of American Geographers only one held a doctorate in geography: Martha Krug-Genthe, who received her Ph.D. under Hettner at Heidelberg in 1901. Ellen Semple, the other woman among the founders, held a first degree in sociology and her highest degree was a master’s from Vassar. H. H. Barrow’s highest degree was a bachelor’s in geology. This compendium of papers abounds in such titbits of information about our intellectual ancestors and is full of maxims and aphorisms from the leading pioneers of academic geography. Since the basic story is well known to American professional geographers, they at least need not read the book through from cover to cover; it can be dipped into a chapter at a time for enjoyment and edification. The 20 chapters are drawn from papers originally delivered at a conference held at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. in 1979 under the sponsorship of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on the History of Geographic Thought. It was an appropriate location. and Dean S. Rugg, under the title ‘The Midwest as a hearth area in American academic geography’, tells us, with the aid of statistics, why. The chapters are arranged in five sections: ‘Preacademic Origins’, ‘The Profession’, ‘The Scholars’, ‘The Schools’, and ‘The Ideas’. ‘Preacademic Origins’ contains three essays: Malcolm Lewis discusses ‘Amerindian antecedents of American academic geography’. especially in terms of maps and folklore; Herman Friis, in ‘The role of geographers and geography in the Federal Government: 1774-1904’, summarizes the applied aspects of geography, but his sketchy account is enlarged upon by Preston James who, in ‘Geographical ideas in America, 1890-1914’. mentions the earlier contributions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Perkins Marsh and John Wesley Powell. Under ‘The Scholars’ Gary Dunbar chronicles advances in professionalization, especially through the granting of doctorates in geography rather than geology. The leading cfranzutisprrso,rcrp in this section are few: W. M. Davis (two essays--one by Robert Beckinsale, the other by Richard Hartshorne), Nathaniel Shaler (by David Livingstone), Rollin Salisbury (William Patton) and Carl Sauer (David Hooson). The contributions in ‘The Schools’ section discuss the importance of individual Ph.D. supervisors and graduate departments, and the final section, ‘The Ideas’, contains an uneven mixture of topics ranging from a reminder by William Warntz of the use in colonial colleges of Newtonian redactions of Varenius’s Geogruphia Genera/is to an attack on Kuhnian paradigms and revolutions by R. J. Johnston. Those of us with the cumbersome mimeographed papers from the Lincoln meeting will welcome this handy volume, which is both readable and enjoyable. However, one wishes that they had been written by one author or at least more firmly edited with material to provide some continuity between the parts and to fill the gaps. Moreover. there are several irritating typographical errors but none of the maps and illustrations which both the contents and the price of the book demand. An index might have replaced the rather useless appendix. Nevertheless, the book is a step in the right direction. As Marvin Mikesell points out in the opening chapter, ‘Continuity and change’, “the trials and errors, novelties and relics, and above all the mixture of persistence and restlessness that are evident in the record of American geography call for a wide range of both specific and general inquiry” (p. 1). The volume provides much information for a critical examination of this gradual, cumulative venture which is American geography. This is a book for professional geographers with some prior knowledge of the growth ol geographic thought in North America and a wish to deepen their understanding. It is neither a textbook nor a comprehensive survey. As Brian Blouet points out in his preface. “no paper attempts to place the development of academic geography in a broad social. political, and economic context” (p. xi). There is little here on the origins of geographical journals, or the growth and influence of national, regional and local geographical
94
REVIEWS
societies. Nonetheless, our rich inheritance.
the book may illuminate,
refresh and inspire.
and remind
us of
PETERH. NASH
Universit?> of’ Wutcrloo
PETER WILSON COLDHAM, Bon&d
Passengers to America (Baltimore: Genealogical 1983. 3 ~01s. Pp. 1,426. $75.00) MICHAEL H. TEPPER(Ed.), Passenger Arrivals at the Port qf’ Baltimore, /82&1834 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1982. Pp. xxiii + 768. $38.50) Publishing
Company,
Bonded Passengers is a useful collection of historical information, most of it published for the first time. It is really nine volumes printed in three: two of those nine were previously published as English Convicts in Colonial America (1974 and 1976). Mr Coldham has added six more lists (each a separate volume) and a prefatory essay entitled ‘History of Transportation, 161551775, published as volume 1. Altogether, this series is the largest collection of names of immigrants to the American colonies up to the time of the American Revolution; about 50,000 men, women, and children. It is extremely easy to use. Each list or volume covers an English judicial district, or circuit. The names of everyone sentenced to transportation from that district is then arranged alphabetically. Beside the name, we have the date of sentencing, the name of the ship of transport, sometimes a description of the crime for which the sentence was pronounced, and sometimes the place of arrival in the colonies. Volume 5. Western Circuit: 1664-1775 includes the political rebels of 1685. The lists are valuable for both demographers and genealogists, and Coldham’s opening essay on the history of transportation is a mine of information, with superb reference materials. Records from the Assize Courts, and State Papers, as well as uncalendared transportation bonds, landing certificates, and many other lesser-known documents form the basis of the lists. The record grew more voluminous after 1718, when the Assize Courts were empowered to sentence the guilty to transportation for all but the most serious and slight offences. Taken as a whole, these volumes should remain a standard reference source for future scholarship. Passenger Arrivals is similar to Bonded Passengers, and equally important. It is the first of a series of lists condensed from the Federal Government’s Customs Passenger Lists. The series will concentrate on the five major ports through which European immigrants poured into the United States during the nineteenth century: Baltimore, Boston. New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The list is arranged alphabetically by last name of the passenger; then follows their age, sex, occupation, and country of citizenship, the country that they intend to inhabit, the name of the ship that brought them, and the date of their arrival. While families are thus not always listed together it is fairly easy to reconstruct family units. The series promises to open up a major source of American history during the nineteenth century. About 50,000 immigrants into Baltimore from 1820 to 1834 are contained in this one volume alone. Passenger arrival records have been little used because they have been only partially indexed. These volumes will make accessible one of the largest and continuous group of records of nineteenth-century America, and one which is absolutely vital to any study of immigration to America during that period. Uiniversit>* qf’ Mq’land,
Baltirrme
J. P. DICKENSON,Brazil (Longman:
GARY L. BROWNE
Country
London
and New York,
1982. Pp. xii + 219. f6.95)
The author starts with a brief description of the main elements of the natural and then turns to the pre-colonial Indian population. The second part describes the main activities of the colonial period such as the cultivation exploration of Brazil’s interior, the work of missionaries. the mining of
environment of the book of sugar, the gold and the
BRIAN W. BLOUET(Ed.) with the assistance of TERESAL. STITCHER,The Origins c?f Adetnic Geography in the United States (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 198 1. Pp. xii + 342. $37.50)
Of the 48 original members of the Association of American Geographers only one held a doctorate in geography: Martha Krug-Genthe, who received her Ph.D. under Hettner at Heidelberg in 1901. Ellen Semple, the other woman among the founders, held a first degree in sociology and her highest degree was a master’s from Vassar. H. H. Barrow’s highest degree was a bachelor’s in geology. This compendium of papers abounds in such titbits of information about our intellectual ancestors and is full of maxims and aphorisms from the leading pioneers of academic geography. Since the basic story is well known to American professional geographers, they at least need not read the book through from cover to cover; it can be dipped into a chapter at a time for enjoyment and edification. The 20 chapters are drawn from papers originally delivered at a conference held at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. in 1979 under the sponsorship of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on the History of Geographic Thought. It was an appropriate location. and Dean S. Rugg, under the title ‘The Midwest as a hearth area in American academic geography’, tells us, with the aid of statistics, why. The chapters are arranged in five sections: ‘Preacademic Origins’, ‘The Profession’, ‘The Scholars’, ‘The Schools’, and ‘The Ideas’. ‘Preacademic Origins’ contains three essays: Malcolm Lewis discusses ‘Amerindian antecedents of American academic geography’. especially in terms of maps and folklore; Herman Friis, in ‘The role of geographers and geography in the Federal Government: 1774-1904’, summarizes the applied aspects of geography, but his sketchy account is enlarged upon by Preston James who, in ‘Geographical ideas in America, 1890-1914’. mentions the earlier contributions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Perkins Marsh and John Wesley Powell. Under ‘The Scholars’ Gary Dunbar chronicles advances in professionalization, especially through the granting of doctorates in geography rather than geology. The leading cfranzutisprrso,rcrp in this section are few: W. M. Davis (two essays--one by Robert Beckinsale, the other by Richard Hartshorne), Nathaniel Shaler (by David Livingstone), Rollin Salisbury (William Patton) and Carl Sauer (David Hooson). The contributions in ‘The Schools’ section discuss the importance of individual Ph.D. supervisors and graduate departments, and the final section, ‘The Ideas’, contains an uneven mixture of topics ranging from a reminder by William Warntz of the use in colonial colleges of Newtonian redactions of Varenius’s Geogruphia Genera/is to an attack on Kuhnian paradigms and revolutions by R. J. Johnston. Those of us with the cumbersome mimeographed papers from the Lincoln meeting will welcome this handy volume, which is both readable and enjoyable. However, one wishes that they had been written by one author or at least more firmly edited with material to provide some continuity between the parts and to fill the gaps. Moreover. there are several irritating typographical errors but none of the maps and illustrations which both the contents and the price of the book demand. An index might have replaced the rather useless appendix. Nevertheless, the book is a step in the right direction. As Marvin Mikesell points out in the opening chapter, ‘Continuity and change’, “the trials and errors, novelties and relics, and above all the mixture of persistence and restlessness that are evident in the record of American geography call for a wide range of both specific and general inquiry” (p. 1). The volume provides much information for a critical examination of this gradual, cumulative venture which is American geography. This is a book for professional geographers with some prior knowledge of the growth ol geographic thought in North America and a wish to deepen their understanding. It is neither a textbook nor a comprehensive survey. As Brian Blouet points out in his preface. “no paper attempts to place the development of academic geography in a broad social. political, and economic context” (p. xi). There is little here on the origins of geographical journals, or the growth and influence of national, regional and local geographical
94
REVIEWS
societies. Nonetheless, our rich inheritance.
the book may illuminate,
refresh and inspire.
and remind
us of
PETERH. NASH
Universit?> of’ Wutcrloo
PETER WILSON COLDHAM, Bon&d
Passengers to America (Baltimore: Genealogical 1983. 3 ~01s. Pp. 1,426. $75.00) MICHAEL H. TEPPER(Ed.), Passenger Arrivals at the Port qf’ Baltimore, /82&1834 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1982. Pp. xxiii + 768. $38.50) Publishing
Company,
Bonded Passengers is a useful collection of historical information, most of it published for the first time. It is really nine volumes printed in three: two of those nine were previously published as English Convicts in Colonial America (1974 and 1976). Mr Coldham has added six more lists (each a separate volume) and a prefatory essay entitled ‘History of Transportation, 161551775, published as volume 1. Altogether, this series is the largest collection of names of immigrants to the American colonies up to the time of the American Revolution; about 50,000 men, women, and children. It is extremely easy to use. Each list or volume covers an English judicial district, or circuit. The names of everyone sentenced to transportation from that district is then arranged alphabetically. Beside the name, we have the date of sentencing, the name of the ship of transport, sometimes a description of the crime for which the sentence was pronounced, and sometimes the place of arrival in the colonies. Volume 5. Western Circuit: 1664-1775 includes the political rebels of 1685. The lists are valuable for both demographers and genealogists, and Coldham’s opening essay on the history of transportation is a mine of information, with superb reference materials. Records from the Assize Courts, and State Papers, as well as uncalendared transportation bonds, landing certificates, and many other lesser-known documents form the basis of the lists. The record grew more voluminous after 1718, when the Assize Courts were empowered to sentence the guilty to transportation for all but the most serious and slight offences. Taken as a whole, these volumes should remain a standard reference source for future scholarship. Passenger Arrivals is similar to Bonded Passengers, and equally important. It is the first of a series of lists condensed from the Federal Government’s Customs Passenger Lists. The series will concentrate on the five major ports through which European immigrants poured into the United States during the nineteenth century: Baltimore, Boston. New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. The list is arranged alphabetically by last name of the passenger; then follows their age, sex, occupation, and country of citizenship, the country that they intend to inhabit, the name of the ship that brought them, and the date of their arrival. While families are thus not always listed together it is fairly easy to reconstruct family units. The series promises to open up a major source of American history during the nineteenth century. About 50,000 immigrants into Baltimore from 1820 to 1834 are contained in this one volume alone. Passenger arrival records have been little used because they have been only partially indexed. These volumes will make accessible one of the largest and continuous group of records of nineteenth-century America, and one which is absolutely vital to any study of immigration to America during that period. Uiniversit>* qf’ Mq’land,
Baltirrme
J. P. DICKENSON,Brazil (Longman:
GARY L. BROWNE
Country
London
and New York,
1982. Pp. xii + 219. f6.95)
The author starts with a brief description of the main elements of the natural and then turns to the pre-colonial Indian population. The second part describes the main activities of the colonial period such as the cultivation exploration of Brazil’s interior, the work of missionaries. the mining of
environment of the book of sugar, the gold and the