ABSTRACT
The historical mind surveys the expanding horizon, the intertwining of values and landscape, enthralled by the connections that open before it but finding them within a particular context: British overseas migration during industrialization, the North American frontier, and the ideological assumptions of contemporary North Americans. For the historical mind, the human landscape is the direct result of human action and, therefore, a product of thought, values, and feelings. Nurtured in the environment, North American academic geography might be expected to emphasize production before culture and to diminish the past. As an approach to thinking about and studying the world, the historical mind seems to have shaped much of the best geographical writing and represents one clear approach to the writing of humanistic geography. The new humanists have not discovered historical geography so much as phenomenology, structuralism, marxism, or even theology.
