Nature - autonomous learning

48 the ‘nature’ of geographythe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period when anglophonegeography was instituted as a university (and school) discipline.During this period three related things happened: the first professionalgeographers were appointed (like Halford Mackinder, Reader in Geographyat Oxford University from 1887); the first geography departmentswere created (like that at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1898);and the first geography degrees were awarded to undergraduates andpostgraduates (like the PhD granted by the University of Chicago in 1903).Establishing geography as a university subject was a slow, precariousbusiness. However ancient the subject’s lineage might be claimed to be, itrequired persistence and proselytisers to persuade universities to create aformal place for it within the academic division of labour. During geography’searly years, a few key people – those with energy and vision – wereable to shape the identity of this nascent discipline.That so few individualscould be so influential was a function of the simple fact that geographywas a very small subject at this time.So who were these individuals? How did they define geography? Andwhy did they need to persuade universities that geography could be a‘proper’ discipline, entitled to the same status as established subjects?Following Livingstone (1992), I want to focus briefly on three earlygeographers and situate their visions of the subject within a wider intellectualand socio-economic context. As we’ll see momentarily, what theyhad in common was the belief that geography was an integrative subject.In Chapter 1, I discussed geography in terms of its three constituentcommunities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though,it’s fair to say that geography was conceived as a holistic or syntheticuniversity discipline. In other words, its early advocates did not see anysharp divide or difference between human and physical geography.Consequently, the label ‘environmental geography’ was not in currencysince there was no perceived need for a ‘middle ground’ that would fillthe gap vacated by the subject’s two ‘halves’. As Livingstone (1992: 173)puts it, ‘This theme of connectedness, of the hanging-togethernessof-things[:]. . . if geography had an independent disciplinary identityit was to be found here, in its capacity to integrate the disparate elementsof world and life into a coherent whole’. As evidence of this, even someof the early publications that used the terms ‘human’ and ‘physical’geography did not do so in any absolute or exclusive way. For instance, MarySomerville’s pioneering book Physical Geography (1848) belied its title by