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Geography is the scientific study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on Earth. The word derives from the Greek words gê ("the Earth") and graphein ("to write," as in "to describe").
Geography is also the title of various historical books on this subject, notably the Geographia by Klaudios Ptolemaios ( 2nd century).
Geography is much more than cartography, the study of maps. It not only investigates what is where on the Earth, but also why it's there and not somewhere else, sometimes referred to as "location in space." It studies this whether the cause is natural or human. It also studies the consequences of those differences.
The Greeks are the first known culture to actively explore geography as a science and philosophy, with major contributors including Thales of Miletus, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Aristotle, Dicaearchus of Messana, StraboStrabo ("squinty") was a term employed by the Romans for anyone whose eyes were distorted or deformed. The father of Pompey was called " Pompeius Strabo. A native of Sicily so clear sighted that he could see things at great distance as if they were nearby, and Ptolemy. Mapping by the Roman60 and 400 with major cities. During this time only Dacia and Mesopotamia were added to the Empire but were lost before 300. The Roman Empire is the term conventionally used to describe the Roman state in the centuries following its reorganization under ts as they explored new lands added new techniques. One technique was the periplusA periplus in the ancient navigation of Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans is a manuscript document that lists in order the ports and coastal landmarks, with approximate distances between, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore., a description of the ports and landfalls a coastwise sailor would find along a coastline; two early examples that have survived are the periplus of the Carthaginian Hanno the NavigatorHanno the Navigator was a Carthaginian explorer, sent out with a fleet and many thousands of colonists, who founded or repopulated seven Carthaginian cities on the Atlantic shore of Morocco and explored the Atlantic coast of Africa, apparently deep into t and a Periplus of the Erythraean sea, which describes the coastlines of the Red Sea and the Persian gulf..
During the Middle AgesThe Middle Ages formed the middle period in a schematic division of European history into three 'ages': Classical civilization, the Middle Ages, and Modern Civilization. It is commonly dated from the end of the Western Roman Empire ( 5th century) until th, ArabThere are three factors which may assist to varying degrees in determining whether someone is considered Arab or not: Political: whether they live in a country which is a member of the Arab League (or, more vaguely, the Arab World); this definition coverss such as Idrisi, Ibn BattutaAbu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta ( February 24 1304 1377) was a Moroccan Berber traveller and explorer. His name is also sometimes spelled ibn Batuta . At the instigation of the Sultan of Morocco, Ibn Battuta dictated an account of his journeys to a scho, and Ibn Khaldun maintained the Greek and Roman techniques and developed new ones.
Following the journeys of Marco Polo, interest in geography spread throughout Europe. The great voyages of exploration in 16th and 17th centuries revived a desire for both accurate geographic detail, and more solid theoretical foundations. The Geographia Generalis by Bernhardus Varenius and Gerardus Mercator's world map are prime examples of the new breed of scientifc geography.
By the 18th century, geography had become recognized as a discrete discipline and became part of a typical university curriculum. Over the past two centuries the quantity of knowledge and the number of tools has exploded. There are strong links between geography and the sciences of geology and botany.
The Royal Geographical Society was founded in England in 1830. The National Geographic Society was founded in the USA in 1888 and began publication of the National Geographic magazine which became and continues to be a great popularizer of geographic information. The society has long supported geographic research and education.
In the West during the 20th century, the discipline of geography went through four major phases: environmental determinism, regional geography, the quantitative revolution , and critical geography .
Environmental determinism is the theory that a peoples physical, mental and moral habits are directly due to the influence of their natural environment. Prominent environmental determinists included Carl Ritter, Ellen Churchill Semple , and Ellsworth Huntington. Popular hypotheses included "heat makes inhabitants of the tropics lazy" and "frequent changes in barometric pressure make inhabitants of temperate latitudes more intellectually agile." Environmental determinist geographers attempted to make the study of such influences scientific. Around the 1930s, this school of thought was widely repudiated as lacking any basis and being prone to (often bigoted) generalizations. Environmental determinism remains an embarrassment to many contemporary geographers, and leads to skepticism among many of them of claims of environmental influence on culture (such as the theories of Jared Diamond).
Regional geography represented a reaffirmation that the proper topic of geography was space and place. Regional geographers focused on the collection of descriptive information about places, as well as the proper methods for dividing the earth up into regions. The philosophical basis of this field was laid out by Richard Hartshorne .
The quantitative revolution was geography's attempt to redefine itself as a science, in the wake of the revival of interest in science following the launch of Sputnik. Quantitative revolutionaries, often referred to as "space cadets," declared that the purpose of geography was to test general laws about the spatial arrangement of phenomena. They adopted the philosophy of positivism from the natural sciences and turned to mathematics—especially statistics—as a way of proving hypotheses. The quantitative revolution laid the groundwork for the development of geographic information systems.
Though positivist and post-positivist approaches remain important in geography, critical geography arose as a critique of positivism. The first strain of critical geography to emerge was humanist geography. Drawing on the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology, humanist geographers (such as Yi-Fu Tuan) focused on people's sense of, and relationship with, places. More influential was Marxist geography, which applied the social theories of Karl Marx and his followers to geographic phenomena. David Harvey and Richard Peet are well-known Marxist geographers. Feminist geography is, as the name suggests, the use of ideas from feminism in geographic contexts. The most recent strain of critical geography is postmodernist geography, which employs the ideas of postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists to explore the social construction of spatial relations.
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