Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 65raphy department was closed shortly thereafter. More generally,Americanphysical geography had, by the mid-twentieth century, failed to win thebattle for independence with geology and other disciplines (Leighly 1955).POST-WAR RUCTIONSTwo geographies?After the Second World War the nature of geography swiftly altered.Post-1945 there was a generation of new and established geographers whohad lived through one of the most destructive wars in human history andwho, especially in Europe, inhabited societies in desperate need of physicalreconstruction and economic revival. Many of these geographers hadworked in the military and intelligence services during the war years.Theirexpertise in cartography, land-use inventory, resource classification andregional taxonomy was useful in everything from logistics to battleplanning. But by the late 1940s, geographers like Edward Ackerman (1945)came to the conclusion that their pre-war geographical education had failedthem.The perceived failings were twofold. First, geographers lacked topicalexpertise, while their regional expertise was topically shallow. Second,wartime geographers lacked the technical and methodological skills toprecisely measure real-world phenomena – a weakness when it cameto meeting the demands of military and civil planning.It was in this context that a post-war cohort of geographers set aboutreinventing the discipline – but not before a University of Wisconsingeographer, Richard Hartshorne (1939), had sought to cling to the past.Hartshorne’s enormously influential The Nature of Geography set about tellinggeographers just exactly what their discipline should be (as its stentoriantitle suggests). It was the most sophisticated attempt to define geographyto date and drew, in a way Hartshorne’s predecessors had not, upon a loftyphilosophical literature to justify its arguments. In keeping with the prewarregionalists, Hartshorne defined geography as the study of ‘arealdifferentiation’. Geography, for him, was the study of the unique andparticular, whereas most other disciplines examine general patterns andprocesses. Downplaying the human–environment theme (no doubt becauseof environmental determinism’s poor credentials), he strategically emphasisedthe conjunction of phenomena in different places as geography’skey focus (cf. Entrikin 1981).