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[Sorry for the delay in this reply. My original was bounced.]
Thanks John. As you may know for much-compressed interviews in
non-specialist outlets, sometimes the full story cannot be included! I'm
indeed aware of that post-war work, and Trevor Barnes and I discuss it in a
forthcoming book chapter on the OSS.
I totally agree about the AGS, and have drawn on their (and Bowman's)
archives for my work on the American Inquiry.
The 1945 paper you reference is by Ed Ackerman and I think your summary is
spot on. Importantly, Richard Hartshorne, who headed the gate-keeping
Projects Committee at OSS, had organised the R&A branch into regional desks.
Ackerman and Ullman chafed at this and critiqued it (long before the
Schaefer-Hartshorne debate or the Quant Rev.). Ullman noted memorably in one
1944 OSS memo "a beach is a beach and a port is a port" ie meaning we didn't
need regional reports on all of them but rather systematic approaches.
Interestingly, I'd add that Robinson himself had the same unsanguine view of
cartographers and cartographic training. It's easy to see why he wrote his
textbook, and why his own dissertation (not all of which was published as
the Look of Maps) was groundbreaking.
Message: 10
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:19:43 -0500
From: John Cloud <[email protected]>
Subject: [MapHist] Re: American Cartographic Planning
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
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.
--
Jeremy W. Crampton
Editor, Cartographica
Associate Professor & Graduate Director
Dept. of Geosciences
Georgia State University
(404) 413-5771
[email protected]
My new book: Mapping, A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. 2010
(Wiley-Blackwell)
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