Geography and the classical world : unearthing historical geography's forgotten past
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Geography and the classical world : unearthing historical geography's forgotten past
(Tauris historical geography series, 8)
I.B. Tauris, 2013
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In the eighteenth century a new subject emerged that was to capture the interest and imagination of scholars and the educated public for the next 150 years. Called 'ancient geography' or 'classical geography', its focus was the geographical study of the ancient Mediterranean, in particular the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Geographers, explorers, classicists and historians all contributed to its rise, as it flourished in both Britain and America. Yet in the 1920s the subject began to decline, so that its story has been lost. This pioneering volume is the first full-length study to explore the emergence of classical geography and its role in both the geographical and classical traditions. The author begins with the expeditions sponsored or undertaken by the members of the Society of Dilettanti in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Expeditions by such figures as Richard Chandler, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Sir William Gell, Robert Wood and William Martin Leake, marked a new and more serious study of Greek and Near Eastern landscapes.
At the same time, in post-Revolutionary America the Founding Fathers felt it important that Americans should know something of the history and geography of the ancient world, and leading figures such as Thomas Jefferson - a lifelong reader of the classics and a founding father of American geography - and Benjamin Franklin, ensured that classical geography became part of both the school and university curriculum. Professor Koelsch gives equal prominence to the story as it unfolded in both Britain and America. He explores the impact and influence of key figures and institutions over a period of almost two centuries. They range from William Ramsay, Edward Herbert Bunbury, John Linton Myres, Henry Fanshawe Tozer, William Gladstone, Edward Augustus Freeman, and Halford Mackinder in England, to Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Ellen Semple, and John Kirtland Wright in America.
The author relates the part that classical geography played in the rise of British geography, through the Oxford School of geography, and in the story of the early American institutions such as the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, Harvard University, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) as well as later universities such as the University of California, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. In recovering the trajectory of classical geography from its adventurous beginnings, through its heyday and later decline, the author restores this almost forgotten part of the geographical and classical tradition. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that will interest historical geographers, classicists, historians and all students of the classical tradition.
Table of Contents
I Introduction: the Search for a Source
Chapter 1 - The Society of Dilettanti and Ancient Geography
Chapter 2 - Classical Geography in the Colonial and Post-Revolutionary American College
Chapter 3 - Classical Geography in Thomas Jefferson's University
Chapter 4 - From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Professionalization
Chapter 5 - William E. Gladstone and the Reconstruction of Bronze Age Geography
Chapter 6 - British Historians, Classicists, and Classical Geography
Chapter 7 - Classics, History and Geography in Nineteenth-Century Harvard
Chapter 8 - Classical Geography in the Oxford School of Geography
Chapter 9 - Classical Geography in the Nineteenth-Century Classroom
Chapter 10 - Classical Geography in the New American Universities
Epilogue - Anglo-American Classical Geography since the 1930s
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"