contribution of European scholars in the field of geography
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Geography’s 19th-century research directions were set by a few influential individuals, although not all of them were even formally associated with the discipline. Many of its roots emanated from several continental European geographers, some of whom owed their inspiration to the teaching of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who wrote about geography in Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Especially influential were the German scholars Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Carl Ritter (1779–1859), and Friedrich Ratzel .
European scholars considerably influenced the emerging discipline in the United Kingdom and North America, where institutionalization into the academic structures came somewhat later. Scholars, some of whom studied in Germany or France, promoted different aspects of the discipline. Foremost in the United States was William Morris Davis, a geologist at Harvard University who published prolifically on landscape evolution (later called geomorphology, or the study of landforms). He argued strongly for education in geography, promoting an approach derived from German environmental determinism: human behaviour is strongly conditioned by environmental factors, so the study of physical geography should be the basis for understanding human activity. Davis was the principal author of an 1892 report on the teaching of geography, which recommended replacing the rote learning that characterized the discipline in American schools at that time with a more scientific approach based on physical geography but including “the physical influences by which man and the creatures of the Earth are so profoundly affected.”
Although regional geography dominated U.S. geographical practices in the first half of the 20th century, it was not universally adopted. Its major challenge was an approach—widely known as cultural geography—associated with Carl Sauer (1889–1975), a University of Chicago geography graduate, and the associates and students whom he led at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1923 to 1957. Sauer was also strongly influenced by the Germans, but he emphasized the study of landscape changes produced by the impress of different cultural groups on environments, with particular reference to rural Latin America. What became known as the Berkeley school used field, documentary, and other evidence to explore societal evolution in its environmental context, much of which apparently involved diffusion from core “culture areas.”
By the end of the 1930s, the links between geographers in continental Europe and the English-speaking countries were weakening. This in part reflected the political situation, but it also resulted from the growth of the discipline and the development of particular approaches to the subject in Britain and the United States, as well as postwar transatlantic contacts. After 1945 European links were not strongly renewed, and for some decades there was relatively little contact between English-speaking and other geographers. The main exceptions were with the four Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, where human geography has long had a close link with the professional planning discipline; much of the geographical research produced in those countries has been published in English. Meanwhile, British and North American geographers came closer together. Many students from the United Kingdom undertook graduate work in North America, for example, with a considerable number of them taking university posts there, including in Canada, which had only a few geography departments before the Canadian Association of Geographers was founded in 1950.
Scholars such as Humbolt and Ritter gave theories in the field of geography.
- Humboldt was a multi-talented genius who travelled far and established a positive relationship between the forests and rainfall.
- He also examined air and ground temperature, pressure, atitudes, longitudes, winds. elevations above sea level, and their relationships to climate, altitude, and human attitudes.
- Ritter is regarded as one of the forefathers of modern geography. He was a firm believer in scientific research and emphasised that geography is concerned with the interplay between man and nature.
- He coined the phrase Unity in Diversity and dubbed geography Erdlande, or earth science, since it deals with local circumstances and encompasses a place's features in terms of topical, formal, and material aspects.