History Of Geography
The history of geography begins to antiquity. The Greeks were the first civilization known to have studied geography, both as science and philosophy. Thales of Miletus , Herodotus (who wrote the first choreography ), Eratosthenes (first map of world famous - the ecumene - calculation the earth's circumference), Hipparchus , Aristotle , Ptolemy had made major contributions to the discipline. The Romans brought new techniques as they charted new areas.
The first "geographers" develop four branches of geography that will last until the Renaissance :
- discover and explore the continents;
- measure the area of land ( geodesy );
- locate the Earth in astronomical systems ( cosmography );
- represent space land ( mapping ).
After the Renaissance and the great discoveries , geography itself as a separate discipline in science. Between the nineteenth and twentieth century , several trends are developing attempting to demonstrate the interaction between man and nature , with varying degrees of success and rigorous approach.
Summary |
Ancient Geography
The environment of the ancient Greeks has influenced the way people respond to their needs and how culture develops. The Greeks regarded the poet Homer as the founder of the geography. His works, the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of literature, but both contain a large number of spatial information. Homer describes a world circular , surrounded by a huge ocean. The work shows that the Greeks in the eighteenth centuryBC. BC had a great knowledge of the geography of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Homeric poems contain many place names and descriptions, but many of them, it is unclear whether their actual location, if it exists, is properly identified.
Archaic and Classical Greece
Thales of Miletus is one of the first philosophers have questioned the shape of the world. He suggested that the world is based on the water, and that all things are born of it. He also provided a large number of rules of mathematics and astronomy which would examine the scientific geography. His successor, Anaximander , is the first person known to have attempted to create a scale map of the known world and have introduced the gnomon to ancient Greece.
Hecataeus launched a different kind of geography, avoiding the mathematics of Thales and Anaximander. He designed the world by gathering previous work and talking to sailors who came through the port of Miletus. From these stories, he wrote prose on what was known to the world. A similar work, which survives today mainly is Survey , the book of Herodotus. First, a work of history, the book actually contains a multitude of geographical descriptions covering much of the known world. The Egyptian , the Scythia , of Persia , and Asia Minor are described in detail. We know so little about other areas, and descriptions of areas such as the India are almost completely fanciful. Herodotus also made important observations on geography. It is the first to have noted the process by which the great rivers like the Nile , give rise to delta , and is also the first watch that winds tend to blow from colder to warmer.
Pythagoras may have been the first to suggest a spherical world, arguing that the sphere is the most perfect form. This idea is sometimes attributed to Parmenides. Anyway, it was adopted by Plato and Aristotle , who presented empirical data to verify this. He noted that the Earth's shadow during a lunar eclipse was bent, and also that the stars are higher as one moves northward. Eudoxus of Cnidus has used the idea of the sphere to explain the existence different climatic zones based on latitude, because of the Sun. This led the Greeks to believe in a world divided into five regions, each pole is a cold region. With the extrapolation of the heat of the Sahara , it was inferred that the area around the equator is unbearably hot. Between these two extreme regions, the northern and southern hemispheres have temperatures suitable for human habitation.
Period Alexandrian
Eratosthenes (276-194 BC.) is the author of a considerable work. His studies focused on the distribution of oceans and continents , the winds , areas climate and the altitudes of mountains. He is credited with creating the term geography. He left a general map of the ecumene was long the sole basis of geography: there gave the value of 47 42 'arc of the meridian between the two tropics, the correct value within a few minutes.
But it is the study of Earth's circumference that scores the most work of Eratosthenes. He watched the shadows of two objects located in two places, Syene (now Aswan ) and Alexandria, June 21 (summer solstice) at local solar noon. He deduced that the angle between the sun in these places was 7.2 degrees. It then assesses the distance between Syene and Alexandria: the distance obtained was 5000 stadia, or 787.5 kilometers, a measure very close to reality, if he had used a stage (measuring length) worth 157.5 m. By the geometrical theory of alternate interior angles congruent , he calculated the circumference of the Earth was 39,375 km, extraordinarily precise to measure the time (the current measures provide 40075.02 km Roman Period The first geographer whose work has survived is almost entirely Strabo. Greek-born Amasea (current Amasya in Turkey ) to 57 BC. BC , died about 25 AD. AD , he wrote a geography, a detailed description of the known world. Strabo describes including the exploration of Pytheas of Marseilles beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to Thule (Greenland?) and the frozen sea. But this time, as the previous one, the science center is Alexandria, a city of Hellenistic Egypt. Ptolemy (circa 90 AD to 165 ) based on the work of Marinus of Tyre and extends the work of Hipparchus. He writes in turn Geography ( ), a work which has subsequently exercised a great influence on Islamic and European science. This is an insightful presentation on knowledge geographic the world Greco-Roman, with maps prepared in a way remarkable projections. The Chinese are responsible for mapping quantitative ... During the Middle Ages , just after the barbarian invasions in the sixth century, diminished interest in geography in the West. In the early Middle Ages, this discipline was the poor relation of education , which declined through the liberal arts. The quadrivium included much of astronomy , but not in geography. Isidore of Seville helped retain some heritage of knowledge. Nevertheless, the representation of the known world was very brief: we imagined the continents were placed inside a circle around an inverted T and to the right of Europe to be above the horizontal bar, the Africa in below, and Asia right. The horizontal bar represents the Mediterranean , the vertical bar separating the Asian (east) of Europe and of Africa (west) was formed by the Danube and the Nile , which is supposed connected (representing O / T). At the center point of intersection of the two bars, Jerusalem , the city religious , considered the center of the world. Nevertheless, capital and geographic information science from antiquity ( Euclid , Aristotle , Ptolemy , ...) was collected in the intellectual centers of Muslim civilization. The Muslim world was better placed geographically at the crossroads of civilizations, Greek, Mesopotamian, Indian, Egyptian, to gather knowledge of antiquity. Baghdad was established on a site near the place where he died Alexander the Great ( Babylon ). On the other hand, the requirements of prayer Muslim (five daily prayers, the faithful being oriented toward Mecca), required of geographical knowledge which the West did not need. Arab geographers, such that Idrisi (which should be the first major geography of the West, about 1150 ), Ibn Battuta (1304-1370) and Ibn Khaldun have therefore preserved and enriched the Greco-Roman. In the West, the encyclopaedia of Vincent of Beauvais (Speculum naturale, the sum of knowledge of the West in the thirteenth century) contain geographical information known in 1250. There was the thirteenth century several trips missionary Franciscans in Asia : These data were very useful for the preparation of the trip Marco Polo between 1271 and 1295. This trip allowed itself to specify the geographic information on Asia ( World Travels ). Other Franciscan missionaries went to Asia: All of these trips had greatly enriched the information on the Asia before the voyages of Marco Polo. The interest in geography has increased considerably in the West from that era, and the representation of the world has changed considerably, leading to a renewal of the mapping. In 1410 , Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly wrote the Imago Mundi , which will be printed in 1478. Columbus had a copy. For the fifteenth century and sixteenth century , of major expeditions have immensely increased maritime knowledge of the planet. These shipments were accompanied by a scrupulous work of astronomical observation and geographical. The portolan is the type of card this time. They include, among many others, shipments of Vasco da Gama (Africa and India), Columbus (Central America and Caribbean area), Magellan (South America and Pacific Ocean), Jacques Cartier (Canada, 1534). In the mid-sixteenth century, Francis Xavier begins the beginning of the evangelization of Japan. The mapping is progressing, both by the amount of new knowledge generated by exploration, dissemination of documents by the printing , and new methods and solid theoretical foundations ( Mercator in the sixteenth century). The maps of the world of Geographica Generalis of Bernard Varenius and those of Gerardus Mercator testify. In Italy, Giovanni Botero publishes Rome , from 1591 to 1592, the three volumes Relazioni Universali marking the birth of statistics or descriptive science of the state. This is an applied geography to the needs of new administrations. After the voyages of Marco Polo , interest in geography is increasing throughout Europe. Around 1400, the writings of Ptolemy and his successors Islamic provided a systematic plan to organize and display geographic information. The great voyages of exploration of the sixteenth century and seventeenth century revived the desire for greater accuracy and detail specific geographic stronger theoretical foundations. The book Geographia Generalis of Bernhard Varenius and the world map of Gerardus Mercator are excellent examples of the new generation of geographers. The Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis created navigation charts that outlined in Kitab- Bahriye. The work includes an atlas of maps of small areas of the Mediterranean , accompanied by information on the sea In the second version of the work, he included a map of the Americas . In the eighteenth century,James Cook and La Perouse explored the area of the Pacific. In the eighteenth century , geography is emerging as a scientific discipline. But it was not until the nineteenth century for it to take a real place in education in France. Following the defeat of France in 1870 against the Prussia , it is taught in primary schools, particularly through reading a book, The Tour de France with two children. His teaching in higher education is initiated at the Ecole Normale Suprieure in the Rue d'Ulm, by Vidal de la Blache , French geographer marking the end of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century , geography was recognized as a distinct discipline and was part of a typical university curriculum in Europe (especially Paris and Berlin ), but not the United Kingdom where geography is generally taught as a sub-discipline in other areas. One of the great works of this period was Kosmos: a sketch of a physical description of the Universe, by Alexander von Humboldt , whose first volume was published in German in 1845. In the nineteenth century , Thomas Henry Huxley adopted the philosophy of universality as an integrated approach in studying the natural environment. The philosophy of universality in geography is not new, but it can be seen as the evolution of the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Immanuel Kant. A publication of Huxley introduced a new kind of geography that has analyzed and categorized the causes and effects at the micro level and then applied these to the macro-scale (because of the opinion that the microphone is part of the macro, and therefore an understanding of all micro-scales is necessary to understand the macro level). This approach has emphasized the collection of empirical data on the theoretical level. The same approach was also used by Halford John Mackinder in 1887. Over the last two centuries, the amount of knowledge and the number of tools has exploded. There are strong links between geography and the sciences of geology and botany as well as economics, sociology and demography. The Royal Geographical Society was founded in England in 1830. The first real geographical spirit to emerge in the United Kingdom was Halford John Mackinder , appointed to the University of Oxford in 1887. The National Geographic Society was founded in the United States in 1888 and began publishing the magazine National Geographic , which became and remains a great popularizer of geographic information. The company has long supported geographic research and education. In the West, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century , the discipline of geography has gone through four major phases: environmental determinism, regional geography, the quantitative revolution, and critical geography. Environmental determinism is the theory that the physical, mental and moral, as well as the habits of a people are due to the influence of their natural environment. It may be mentioned among the theorists of environmental determinism most famous Carl Ritter , Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington. We meet popular beliefs as "heat makes inhabitants of the tropics lazy" and "frequent changes in barometric pressure make inhabitants of temperate latitudes more intellectually agile. . Geographers related environmental determinism have tried to the scientific study of these influences. Towards the 1930s , this thinking has been widely denounced as unfounded and likely generalizations. Environmental determinism remains an embarrassment to many geographers, and leads to a lot of skepticism among the claims of environmental influence on culture (such as theories of Jared Diamond ). The regional geography represents a reaffirmation of the fact that the real subject of geography was the study sites (regions). Regional geographers focused on gathering descriptive information about places, and on the proper methods for dividing the Earth into regions. A well known geographies of this period was Paul Vidal de la Blache. The philosophical foundation of this area has been posed to the United States by Richard Hartshorne who defined geography as the study of territorial differentiation, which later led to criticism of this approach was considered too descriptive and not scientific. The quantitative revolution was an attempt to redefine the geography as a science , in the wake of the revival of interest in science after the launch of Sputnik. Quantitative revolutionaries, often referred to as "space cadets", said the purpose of geography was to test general laws about the spatial organization of phenomena. They adopted the philosophy of positivism of natural science and turned to mathematics , including statistics, to find a way to prove the hypothesis. The quantitative revolution laid the groundwork for the development of geographic information systems. Of geographers are well known from this period are Waldo Tobler, William Garrison, Peter Haggett, William Bunge and Torsten Hgerstrand. While positivist approaches and post-positivist remain important in geography, critical geography arose as a critique of positivism. The first strain of critical geography to emerge was humanist geography. Based on the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, humanist geographers (such as Yi-Fu Tuan ) focused on the feeling of peoples and their relationship with places. More influential was Marxist geography, which applied the social theories of Karl Marx and his followers to geographic phenomena. David Harvey and Richard Peet are quite famous Marxist geographers. The geography of gender is the use of ideas from feminism in geographic contexts. The most recent strain of critical geography is postmodernist geography, which uses the ideas of theorists postmodern and post-sructurels to explore the social construction of spatial relations. The new geography is developed from the 1960s to the United States and wins in France, Switzerland and especially Germany in the 1970s. It is directly influenced by Anglo-Saxon geographies, specifically American and Scandinavian. Inspired by mathematics ( statistics ) and the rules of the economy , the geography is trying to establish "laws" universal (nomothetic science). Geography is the discipline to highlight the regularities, similarities between the spaces in order to formulate general explanatory laws. So we move from specific to general, from description to explanation and inductive to the hypothetico-deductive. The conventional approach (description of each regional industry, type, mapping, explanations of the specific presence of certain industries in certain places emphasis on natural factors, local particularities and the historical dimension) is being replaced by a "new". This simplifies the reality by beginning with assumptions of the basic assumptions of research and a mechanism to test. Data collection, statistical analysis and production of a map "theory" can then accept or reject the hypothesis, which may subsequently be modified if necessary. At the end of the process, it has a series of proposals which can be accounted for by a model (simplified and symbolic). The model can be a mathematical relationship, a series of proposals or mapping. We change and methods and scale of work, it combines with other sciences, and it raises other underlying assumptions. New Geography emerges in a specific context: the prestige of science, the needs of growth, where the traditional geography, social problems and those of minorities and the new role of government to affect expectations about the geography, just as the needs of reconstruction in Europe. It was then that develops mass production ( Fordism , etc..). The social problems of the day are mainly the transformation of the economy (from war to peace) and the jobs and housing. Small farmers are bad, you're against union problems and difficulties with minorities. For young geographers, this revival of geography is a challenge and a matter of survival. There is thus a change in the role of geography, which should enable governments to understand, predict leading e social phenomena in space. Its consequences are the double alliance with the sciences of geography and planning, its revival oriented economy (location, regional growth, urbanization, flow and interactions), securing funding, recognition and development of symbolic applied geography. Location models are typical of this paradigm. They are based on two main explanations: the heterogeneity of space, which refers to the fact that space is differentiated and that some places are more conducive to certain activities, and opacity, which refers to the fact that it is difficult to cross due to the friction of distance (distance thus having a cost). See theories of agricultural location (von Thnen), industrial (Launhardt and Weber) and tertiary (central squares) of G. Fisher. Strengths are its spatial analysis and its theoretical framework consistent rigorous approach, the cumulative process of knowledge it is in place, but also the tangible successes that she won and that it accommodates phenomena complex. However, it may address several criticisms: the forgetting of the content, the disappearance of the men me, simplification of reality, lack of critical thinking, forgetfulness of power relations, and the side falsely objective of his approach. The paradigm runs out of steam: the social unrest persist, the Vietnam War and social unrest disrupt society, the prestige of science is decreasing. The behavioral geography attempts to analyze the individuals, their individual and collective behavior through their relationship with their territory. Behaviorists are looking therefore also on the psychology of human beings, their report to the group and space, his mental functioning. It's all about the question "who does what? 'And' why? "(Or" Who said what? "And" why? ") Also called Marxist or critical geography, the geography is strongly influenced by other social sciences. Antoine Bailly defines the problem radically: "A vision of geography that focuses on the problem of historical materialism and dialectical approach in the socio-economic social practices "(2001) It comes at a time of social unrest and social protest during the Vietnam War when the prestige of science is declining. Found geographers as Yves Lacoste and the team of the journal Herodotus , Guy Di Meo (Man, society, space, 1991 ) or English David Harvey (Directions in Geography, 1973 and Social Justice and The City, 1977 ) 
In China
Middle Ages
The Renaissance
Early modern times
XVIII century
XIX century
XX century
Environmental Determinism
Regional Geography
The quantitative revolution
Geography critical
Other approaches
The New Geography
Geography behavioral
Geography radical
References
See also
Loading ...