ABSTRACT
When professors and students began or resumed their studies after the end of the Second World War, geography in North America displayed the evidence of national and international influence that is characteristic of the discipline as a whole. For some members of the American geographical profession their calling could be seen as a home-grown enterprise, a product of American minds stimulated by the vast and varied American environment (Colby, 1936) . For others the scholarly tradition followed or adopted had deeper and more extensive roots and could be regarded as a product of European as well as American influence. For example, in the most successful textbook of the pre-war decade , James (1935) used the bio-elimatic realms of Siegfried Passarge's Landschaftsgiirtel der Erde (Breslau, 1923) as an organising theme and treated problems of human-environmental relationship within the framework of possibilisme that had been erected by French geographers and historians. Similarly , Sauer's attempt in 1925 to redefine human geography as an enterprise devoted to study of how 'natural landscapes ' evolve into 'cultural landscapes' was an elaboration of ideas expressed previously by German geographers. Moreover, in at least one American department (Berkeley: Leighly, 1979) Walther Penck's Die morphologische Analyse (Stuttgart, 1924) was regarded as a more convincing foundation for geomorphology than the writings of the doyen of the Association of American Geographers (Davis, 1909). In addition , it is probably safe to state that the aspect of geographical lore that was best known among American undergraduates immediately after the war was the climatic classification presented in Wladimir Koppen's Grundriss der Klimakunde (Berlin, 1931). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography (1939), which had served as a 'declaration of independence' for American geographers , entailed adoption of Alfred Hettner's vision of the place of geography among the sciences.
