ABSTRACT
In historical perspective, doctoral dissertations afford one important source of insight into continuity and change within any scholarly tradition. A selective focus on those written by individuals who were accorded docent status from 1880 through 2000 revealed striking evidence of changes by decade in predominant orientations of meaning, metaphor, milieu, and horizon. The profiles presented in this chapter should be regarded as indicative of dominant trends rather than as unequivocal judgements on practices down the decades. The vocational appeal of geography for the first generation lay in its obvious importance for the development of the country. The conflation of organicist political geography and Geopolitik offer another major explanation for the early dismissal of organism as root metaphor. Physical geographers examined the impacts of glaciation on the evolution of landscapes, while human geographers traced the evolution of settlements, transport systems and ways of life.
