Reading the Messy Reception of Influences of Geographic Environment (1911)

For much of the early twentieth century, geographical inquiry in the United States was characterized by questions of environmental influence. ¹ Scientific efforts to describe and explain the ways in which environmental circumstances conditioned and constrained human societies – an approach interchangeably termed anthropogeography and environmentalism – unified the discipline’s intellectual focus and thus facilitated its academic institutionalization. The principal spur to geography’s engagement with what would later be termed, pejoratively, “environmental determinism”, was the work of American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863–1932), particularly her 1911 volume Influences of Geographic Environment. ² In the opinion of one of Semple’s contemporaries, her book shaped ‘the whole trend and content of geographic thought in America’. ³ The history of geography in the United States is, in this respect, intimately connected with Semple’s work. For a brief time, in an American context at least, Influences was geography and was implicated in the discipline’s ‘scramble for intellectual turf’. ⁴