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Historical Geography
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Historical Geography is an annual journal that publishes scholarly articles, book reviews, conference reports, and commentaries. The journal encourages an interdisciplinary and international dialogue among scholars, professionals, and students interested in geographic perspectives on the past. Concerned with maintaining historical geography's ongoing intellectual contribution to social scientific and humanities-based disciplines, Historical Geography is especially committed to presenting the work of emerging scholars.
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Historical Geography has been funded by major awards from the AHRC, ESRC, Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Paul Mellon Centre, the Carnegie Trust and DEFRA. The theme attracts a large number of high calibre postgraduate students, with funding sources including AHRC and ESRC. Staff associated with the research theme deliver the School’s MA in Landscape and Culture, and MSc in Environmental History. The research environment is enhanced by a research theme seminar series, and the hosting of a number of visiting international scholars, including WJT Mitchell (Chicago) as Leverhulme Visiting Professor in summer 2007/summer 2008.
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Historical geography is the study of the human, physical, fictional, theoretical, and "real" geographies of the past. Historical geography studies a wide variety of issues and topics. A common theme is the study of the geographies of the past and how a place or region changes through time. Many historical geographers study geographical patterns through time, including how people have interacted with their environment, and created the cultural landscape.
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The American geography of today is essentially a native product; predominantly it is bred in the Middle West, and, in dispensing with serious consideration of cultural or historical processes it reflects strongly its background. In the Middle West, original cultural differences faded rapidly in the forging of a commercial civilization based on great natural resources. Perhaps nowhere else and at no other time has a great civilization been shaped so rapidly, so simply, and so directly out of the fat of the land and the riches of the subsoil. Apparently here, if anywhere, the formal logic of costs and returns dominated a rationalized and steadily expanding economic world. The growth of American geography came largely at a time when it seemed reasonable to conclude that under any give situation of natural environment there was one best, most economical expression of use, adjustment, or response. Was not the Corn Belt the logical expression of soil and climate of the prairies?
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Let no one consider that historical geography can be content with what is found in archive and library. It calls, in addition, for exacting field work. One of the first steps is the ability to read the documents in the field. Take into the field, for instance, an account of an area written long ago and compare the places and their activities with the present, seeing where the habitations were and the lines of communication ran, where the forests and the fields stood, gradually getting a picture of the former cultural landscape concealed behind the present one. Thus one becomes aware of the nature and direction of changes that have taken place. Questions begin to take shape as to what has happened to local site values.
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In this book, Xavier de Planhol and Paul Claval, two of France’s leading scholars in the field, trace the historical geography of their country from its roots in the Roman province of Gaul to the present day. They demonstrate how, for centuries, France was little more than an ideological concept, despite its natural physical boundaries and long territorial history. They examine the relatively late development of a more complex territorial geography, involving political, religious, cultural, agricultural and industrial unities and diversities. The conclusion reached is that only in the twentieth century had France achieved a profound territorial unity and only now are the fragmentations of the past being overwritten.
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