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With reference to: "'The importance of the geographers' role in
planning can't be underestimated,' Crampton said. 'Not many people have
looked at this period in geography'".
Actually, in the immediate postwar period the Annals of the Association
of American Geographers and Geographical Review of the American
Geographical Society were filled with many articles describing and
analyzing how many kinds of maps were created and classified, in an
archival sense, if not "classification" as such, and also the explosion
in terrain modeling and systems to do this.
The AGS connection to all this is also critical. In both WWI and WW
II,the American Geographical Society essentially donated its entire
cartographic archives to the war effort for free.
Finally, there's the impact of war geography/cartography work on these
disciplines and their practitioners, including A.H. Robinson. There was
another American geographer whose names escapes me at present (my
dissertation was a long time ago, thankfully) who published a revealing
article in an early postwar Annals of the AAG. He contrasted the
approach of geography as specialist fields applied to certain spaces to
the then still popular regional studies approach. In essence, he said
that virtually none of the American regional studies that had happened
to be carried out in prewar Europe in what had become the theatre of war
were very useful at all, whereas specialist studies like the
distribution of mollusk species on specific tide flats on the French
coast, for example, yielded invaluable data and insights for planning
amphibian assaults, etc. He used this as evidence that regional studies
had become bankrupt intellectually, and urged their elimination.
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John Cloud
Geographer/Writer/Editor
NOAA Central Library
1315 East-West Highway
SSMC-3, 2nd Floor, E/OC4
Silver Spring, MD 20910
301-713-2607, ext. 126
[email protected]
aussi:
Chez Cloud Urbanique
1915 Kalorama Rd. NW
Apt. 603
Washington, DC 20009
202-277-4931
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