ABSTRACT
The principal spur to geography's engagement "environmental determinism", was the work of American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, particularly her 1911 volume Influences of Geographic Environment. Ellen C. Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment on the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthro-pogeography. The chapter examines the locational particularities of Influences' reception revealed by its incorporation into, and excision from, the geographical curricula of various academic institutions in the United States. The dissimilarity in responses that Semple's text provoked at the various sites of its reading is striking. Whilst the response of Semple's various audiences defined, variously, by discipline, political orientation, or nation tell different stories of the book's reception, shows how Influences was read and understood by its academic and geographical audience in the United States. Semple was introduced to environmentalist thought in the libraries and parlours of postbellum Louisville, Kentucky. Ratzel's death in 1904 was a prompt to Semple's long-standing ambition to communicate the full scope of his anthropo-geography.
