• instead, specialized academic disciplines emerged

• each discipline focused its attention on a coherent portion of reality, sometimes called the logical systems
  -physical sciences (physics, geology, geomorphology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, etc.)

  -biological sciences (biology, botany, zoology, etc.)

  -social sciences (political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc.)

  -humanities (art, literature, etc.)

• geography did not find a clearly designated place in this breakdown; it never has
  -some considered geography a physical science, while others felt it was a social science

  -despite its "identity crisis," geography sought answers to questions about reality left unanswered by the main logical systems

  -questions of place, distribution, human/environmental interaction

  -geographical questions

  -because of this, geography also emerged in the mid- to late-1800s as a separate discipline

The Legacies of von Humboldt and Ritter

One of the reasons we cite von Humboldt and Ritter as both the end of the ancient period and the beginning of the modern period of geography is because of their legacies

• both men practiced geography in the classical sense; they were unspecialized

• however, their legacies lived on after their deaths giving them both impacts on the beginning of the modern era in geography

• von Humboldt, for instance, left a subtle legacy
  -true, he was unspecialized, probing many areas of geographical inquiry

  -he foreshadowed the specialization of various disciplines by asking very specific questions about plant geography and climatology

• Ritter, on the other hand, had a very tangible legacy--his students
  -Élisée Reclus, for example, wrote a "new universal geography" in the tradition of Ritter, though without the teleological element
  -though he was an eccentric individual, this French geographer was a great scholar

  -Arnold Guyot, another of Ritter's students, was also very important, perhaps more important than Reclus
  -he studied with Ritter in Germany

  -but, he came to the United States in 1848 to conduct a lecture series on the "new geography"

  -he had a great impact in this country

  -1854-1880, he taught physical geography at the College of New Jersey--Princeton

  -he published textbooks that became the standard in many schools for years

  -unfortunately, he accepted the teleological view of Ritter
  -was eventually discredited for this

Geography in America

At roughly the same time as it was in Europe, geographic thought was developing on its own in the United States.

• a good example of this is found in the work of George Perkins Marsh
  -Marsh was actually a lawyer from Vermont, but his interests ran far deeper than the law

  -he was also interested in languages, for instance

  -he could read 20 different languages besides English

  -most important to geography, he was interested in the interactions of people and nature
  -his observations began in Vermont, where he lived very near to the American settlement frontier

  -as he witnessed the wholesale conversion of America's forested wilderness to humanized farmland, he hit on a remarkable new interpretation of the man/land relationship

  -previously, scholars like Aristotle, Bodin, and Montesquieu had emphasized nature's impact on people
  -somehow nature controlled or influenced the actions of human beings

  -Marsh, however, recognized just the opposite relation--man's effect on nature
  -human beings, he realized, had a profound impact on nature

  -he saw this in Vermont and also in the Mediterranean, where he travelled as U.S. minister to Turkey and later Italy

  -Marsh left geographers a great masterwork summarizing his ideas
  -Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864)

  -unfortunately, his ideas were far ahead of their time, and most Americans failied to heed his warnings of environmental destruction

• another American contributor to geography was Matthew Fontaine Maury
  -Maury, a Virginian raised in the Appalachians of Tennessee, pursued the unlikely career of sailor in the U.S. Navy

  -his world-wide voyages, however, posed more questions to him than they answered

  -his most important questions concerned the characteristics of the world's oceans

  -he was especially interested in winds and currents

  -as a prominent naval director, he had ship captains record wind and current data with specific place locations on virtually every voyage

  -not content to just collect this data, he developed generalizations based on these collections, especially his model of atmospheric circulation

  -equatorial calm (doldrums)
  -easterlies or trade winds
  -mid-latitude calm (horse latitudes)
  -westerlies
  -polar calm

  -his pattern was widely accepted, and the basic idea of alternating wind and pressure belts by latitude is still taught in introductory meteorology and climatology courses throughout the world

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