Teaching historical geography in the field

This paper examines the pedagogical and practical challenges associated with teaching historical geography, and archival research specifically, in the context of the undergraduate field trip. In so doing, it draws upon students' own reflections on the experience of conducting archival research during a field trip to New York City and presents the results of an international survey of academics' views as to the current problems and future possibilities associated with the teaching of historical geography and the implications of these perspectives for future curriculum design.     

eBay and research in historical geography

The electronic trading forum eBay presents fascinating but under-examined possibilities for research in historical geography. With literally millions of items for sale and millions of users participating in on-line auctions there seems little limit to what one might find. In this essay, three authors briefly trace the history of auctions and of eBay, before explaining how eBay works, and then describing some of the ways that buying (or not buying) research materials on eBay has changed the ways that we think about our work. We further explore some of the implications—empirical, theoretical, methodological and ethical—that the availability of such items to the highest bidder presents, address some of the consequences for the socially constructed and place-specific nature of value that on-line auctioning reveals, and ponder some of the implications of this for contemporary consumption.     

Travels with feminist historical geography

We explore in this essay the relatively uneven "travels" of feminist historical geography within the academy in order to highlight the realized and potential intellectual productivity that can result from bringing together a feminist and historical approach to understanding place and space. We outline in what ways much of feminist geography is already historical and in what ways much of historical geography is already feminist, and then turn to a discussion of the unevenness of these intellectual journeys. We conclude by suggesting challenges for future research in feminist historical geography.     

The discourse of the past: phenomenology,structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.     

The historical dimension of French geography

In France, the study of history behind regional geography has suffered a long decline since the late nineteenth century, but a new historical dimension is beginning to emerge. In the nineteenth century, historians showed how much regional character owed to remains from antiquity while historical geographers traced the history of exploration and discovery from ancient to modern times. Vidal de la Blache integrated historical reconstruction with social analysis in the study of regions. Vidal's followers not only characterized the distinctiveness of regional features but also demonstrated that differences in regional ways of life were more pronounced before industrialization and urbanization than later. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, historical investigations by geographers were neither sufficiently comprehensive nor sufficiently rigorous to explain spatial patterns. Historians of the Annales school obtained deeper understandings of social and economic changes and took a broader view of long-term psychological, cultural and geographical changes. Their interpretations of agrarian structures illuminated problems fundamental to the development of European civilization. In the 1970s, reacting against mechanistic analyses of spatial organization, young scholars again turned to historical geography to examine problems of social evolution. At the moment, this revival of historical interest among geographers has not attracted much attention from historians.     

The historical geography of early Canada: A Review

The oil refinery/petro‐chemical complex at Grangemouth has played an important part in the rise of the United Kingdom petro‐chemical industry which has been one of the most dynamic elements of the nation's manufacturing sector.¹ The complex has a special significance within Central Scotland in view of the contrast between its rapid development and the declining fortunes of the traditional industrial base. This paper analyses its structure and development and also examines its role as the focus of official attempts to promote Grangemouth/Falkirk as a ‘growth centre’.     

The historical geography of islands Introduction: rethinking islands

The introduction to this special issue of five essays on the historical geography of islands considers the growing interdisciplinary interest in the material and metaphorical condition of islands. It explores how the physical and literal attributes of islands have a range of understandings such as the catalytic role of islands in shaping the modern disciplines of social anthropology and evolutionary biology. Thereafter, the Falkland Islands are used to illustrate how the complex interplay of physical and metaphorical meanings have profound implications for territorial nationalism in this case the South West Atlantic. Long viewed as an abstract territorial space, the history and geography of the Falklands reveals how islands should never be seen as simple or straightforward. The final section of this introduction details the five contributions and highlights how each author not only explores the geographical and cultural diversity of islands but also traces some of the implications for human understandings of these remarkable environments.