Ellen Semple's Influences of Geographic Environment (1911) -- a treatise on what would later be called environmental determinism -- coincided with the emergence of geography as an independent academic discipline in North America and Britain. Highly controversial and written by one of America's first female professional geographers, it was considered by some a monument to Semple's scholarship and erudition, while for others it was conceptually flawed. And yet its influence on the development and direction of the new discipline of geography was profound. Innes Keighren explains why...

Scientific culture was one of the defining characteristics of the English Enlightenment. The latest discoveries were debated in homes, institutions and towns around the country. But how did the dissemination of scientific knowledge vary with geographical location? What were the differing influences in town and country and from region to region? Enlightenment, Modernity and Science provides the first full length study of the geographies of Georgian scientific culture in England. The author takes the reader on a tour of the principal arenas in which scientific ideas were disseminated,...

Geography and the Classical World is the first full-length study to explore the emergence of classical geography - the geographical study of the ancient Mediterranean, in particular the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. With adventurous beginnings in the Society of Dilettanti, the subject flourished in both Britain and America, as geographers, explorers, classicists and historians all contributed to its rise. But in the 1920s it went into decline, and an important part of the geographical and classical tradition was lost. In recovering this field of inquiry that once lay at the heart of...