ABSTRACT
“History without geography, like a dead carcass, hath neither life nor motion at all, but moves at best but slowly on the understanding.” On the material side, history is the story of man’s increasing ability to control energy. Thus man and environment act and react upon one another, and every advance in science, invention, and technology affects the force and pattern of the interaction. The subtle and often arresting ways in which geographical controls are established, broken down, and reshifted by man’s capacity to seek out many inventions, present a challenge to the imagination and penetration of the historian. The complementary roles of the plain, the mountain range, the desert, and the sea in the history of various nations is a subject full of illumination. An interesting but more detailed and less significant part of the application of geography to history lies in the study of the effects of weather upon events.
