The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise

This is the first intellectual history of a subject which over the last five centuries has played a significant role in the development of Western civilization. The author describes the activities of the explorers and map–makers of Renaissance and early modern Europe; the role of geography during the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Darwinian Revolution; and the interactions between geography and empire building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Since 1945 activity in the subject has been intense: David Livingstone provides a critical account of the trends, developments and occasional revolutions by which geography has emerged as a multi–faceted discipline offering unique and revealing perspectives on a wide range of pressing social and environmental issues.
This is a book which all geographers will wish to have and to read.

Spis treści:
Preface.
1. Should the History of Geography be X–Rated? Telling Geography′s Story.
2. Of Myths and Maps: Geography in the Age of Reconnaissance.
3. Revolution, Celestial and Terrestrial: Geography nad the Scientific Revolution.
4. Naturalists and Navigators: Geography in the Enlightenment.
5. Of Design and Dining Clubs: Pre–Darwinian Geography.
6. The Geographical Experiment: Evolution and the Founding of a Discipline.
7. A ′Sternly Practical′ Pursuit: Geography, Race and Empire.
8. The Regionalising Ritual: Geography, Place and Particularity.
9. Statistics Don′t Bleed: Quantification and its Detractors.
10. The Geographical Tradition: A Conversational Conclusion.
Bibliography.
Index.

Nota biograficzna:
David Livingstone is the author of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science (1987), Darwin′s Forgotten Defenders (1987) and The Preadamite Theory (1992), and of many articles on the history of goegraphy and the history of science. He is Reader in the School of Geosciences, at the Queen′s University of Belfast.

Okładka tylna:
This is the first intellectual history of a subject which over the last five centuries has played a significant role in the development of Western civilization. The author describes the activities of the explorers and map–makers of Renaissance and early modern Europe; the role of geography during the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Darwinian Revolution; and the interactions between geography and empire building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Since 1945 activity in the subject has been intense: David Livingstone provides a critical account of the trends, developments and occasional revolutions by which geography has emerged as a multi–faceted discipline offering unique and revealing perspectives on a wide range of pressing social and environmental issues.
This is a book which all geographers will wish to have and to read.