This project seeks to reveal the forms and content of geographic thinking and accomplishment in the United States c. 1870-1960, tracing the processes involved from subject matter to discipline and then to science. The hitherto unknown data needed to complete this investigation has been drawn from 123 archival collections located in more than a dozen countries. The material collected is complemented by extensive correspondence available to the investigator from geographers with personal recollections of what was happening in both American academic and governmental geography in those decades. A collection of nearly 51,000 archival sheets will be classified and utilized in the course of this project.
Geography is the last remaining large field of learning in America that does not have a published history of its record and performance. With this work will come new insights concerning the contributions of geographers as they developed hypotheses and laws on a multiplicity of matters: innovation and criticism facilitated new insights concerning the ways in which geographers and geologists, anthropologists, demographers, conservationists, sociologists and others exchanged with, or learned from, each other. Examples include geographers' contributions to matters involving agriculture on the High Plains, evaluating the Isthmian (Panama) Canal Route, the relevance of mapping and aerial photography with regards to both World Wars, conservation undertakings, and the coming of numeracy to the field. This research effort will provide a new synthesis of geographic knowledge, mediating science, history, and philosophy. In that fashion it provides an evolving design for geographical science, demonstrates the multitudinous ways in which science makes its advances, and provides paradigmatic divides that initiate new sequences of scientific advance. This study will almost certainly generate further investigations in the scientific advance of the field of geography. It will also provide a work of reference of value to both faculty and students, with details provided on little known archival sources, including the relevance of each major archival deposit.
