Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past 9780755693528, 9781780760643

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[I]f there is an Ancient History, so must there be an Ancient Geography, which helps to make clear the events of history. Immanuel Kant, as paraphrased by George Tatham.

Illustrations

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A Geographer, School of Caravaggio, Italian, seventeenth century. Reproduced with permission: The Norton Simon Foundation 2 Monument of Philopappos, Athens. Reprinted from Willey Reveley (ed.), Antiquities of Athens, Volume 3 (London, 1794) 3 Temple of Athena Polias, Priene. Author photograph (April 1995) 4 Francis Alison. Reproduced with permission: E. F. Smith Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania 5 Pavilion V, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Academical Village’, University of Virginia. Author photograph (June 2007) 6 Major James Rennell, frontispiece to his Geographical System of Herodotus (London, 1800 and Volume 1, 1830) 7 Henry Fanshawe Tozer 8 Henry Fanshawe Tozer. Map from Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (London, 1879), as modified by David Deis, Cartographer, Department of Geography, California State University/Northridge. Reproduced with permission: James Craine, editor of the Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 9 William E. Gladstone. Map of The Outer Geography of the Odyssey. Reprinted from Gladstone, Homer and the Homeric Age (Oxford, 1858), Volume 3, inside back cover 10 Drawing of Edward Augustus Freeman, 1876. Reprinted from W. R. W. Stevens, Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, 2 volumes (London, 1895)

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11 Sir John Linton Myres. First published in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 41 (London, 1955), p. 348. Reproduced by permission: British Academy 12 Cornelius Conway Felton. Reprinted from Edward W. Emerson (ed.), Early Years of the Saturday Club (Boston, 1918) 13 Arnold J. Toynbee, Map of Attica, c. 1914. Reprinted from Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (2nd edition, Oxford, 1915) 14 ‘Spy’ cartoon of Eton Master (Reverend J. L. Joynes) wielding birch rod. From Vanity Fair (London), Issue 976 (16 July 1887) 15 William Hughes and George Long, An Atlas of Classical Geography (Blanchard and Lea, Philadelphia, 1857). Cover, Long’s Classical Atlas 16 President Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins University, c. 1885. Reproduced with permission: Ferdinand Hamburger Archives, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University 17 Ellen Churchill Semple at Clark, 1920s. Reprinted from Snapshot, Clark University Archives. Reproduced with permission: Mott Linn, Director, Special Collections and Archives, Goddard Library, Clark University

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Acknowledgements

This book perpetuates a dual interest I can trace back more than 60 years. At some time in the late 1940s my great-aunt, Emma Boniface, an artist and omnivorous reader, gifted me with a copy of Carl van Doren’s selection of 12 of Plutarch’s Lives. (She also began my interest in the history of geography with the gift of Elaine Sanceau’s then new biography of Henry the Navigator.) As a Senior at Bucknell University in 1954–5, I attended a lecture given by an elderly alumnus, a blind attorney, on Plato, whom he had read from an early age. I sat fascinated as he recited large chunks of Plato from memory, including Plato’s discussions of the immortality of the soul embodied in the swan metaphor, and of the death of Socrates, both from the Phaedo. I do not remember the speaker’s name, and he has surely died long since. But with the Plutarch book and Plato lecture I began a life-long interest in ancient Greek history, architecture, and sculpture. I therefore offer this libation to their memories. During my military service (1955–7) I read the then new Penguin paperback entitled The Last Days of Socrates and the Modern Library editions of Plato’s Republic, Herodotus’ Persian Wars, and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, purchased in the little Doubleday bookshop, now long gone, in the lower level of Pennsylvania Station, New York. All of these books still grace my bookshelves. During my time (1957–9) as a graduate student in geography (and, with Dwight Lee, in modern European history) at Clark University, I pursued my personal interests in historical geography and the history of geography, which had been represented neither in the Bucknell curriculum nor at Clark, and on which I wrote a master’s thesis under Henry Warman.

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While a Clark graduate student I serendipitously discovered Ellen Churchill Semple’s The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History on a library shelf. When I spoke of it to Samuel Van Valkenburg, then Director of the Graduate School of Geography and a former colleague of Semple, he opined that in his view it was ‘her best book, and unfortunately neglected’. Rummaging further in the stacks revealed a number of classical titles that (according to the now discarded charge cards, then still retained in the backs of library books) she had used or had placed on reserve for her ‘Geography of the Mediterranean’ course in the 1920s. As a doctoral student in history (with some geography) at the University of Chicago, I concentrated in American (under Daniel J. Boorstin and others) and (under John Clive) modern British history. I also read historical-cultural geography with geographer Marvin Mikesell, who took me through the work of Carl Sauer and the ‘Berkeley School’. As part of my language requirement I read and wrote a paper on Fernand Braudel’s then untranslated La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’Époque de Philippe II (1949). At Marvin’s suggestion, I also read Roger Dion’s great Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France des origines au XIXeme siècle (1959), which remains untranslated. (I must take some responsibility for that. Hearing me wax enthusiastic about Dion’s book, a French major I knew offered to translate it in return for an offer of marriage, an invitation I declined as gracefully as possible.) Stewart Oost’s Greek history course stimulated further reading in that area. Richard Storr introduced me to the history of American education. He and geographer Chauncy Harris, then Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, directed my dissertation on geographical experience in nineteenth-century Harvard, portions of which are incorporated into this book. I remain deeply grateful to all my professors, both at Clark and Chicago, for indulging my rather idiosyncratic interests. As Visiting Assistant Professor at Clark in the spring of 1963, I temporarily occupied Semple’s old office. I returned to Clark as a regular faculty member in 1967, to hold the first joint appointment in history and geography in any American doctoral university. I subsequently founded the Clark University Archives and for ten years served part-time as University Archivist. In that capacity I processed a large body of Semple correspondence in the papers of President xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Wallace W. Atwood. In 1977 I assumed responsibility for what became the required first-year graduate colloquium in geography, the ‘Development of Western Geographic Thought’, beginning it with one session on Greek geography. The extra reading I needed to do for that class session began to engage me seriously. In 1989 I began giving papers on, and three years later began publishing my research on, aspects of classical geography in Britain and the United States. I have presented papers in this area at a number of professional venues, including those of the New England/St Lawrence Valley Geographical Society, the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, the Association of American Geographers, the inaugural meeting in Boston in 1991 of the International Society for the Classical Tradition, the International Standing Conference on the History of Education’s 1991 symposium on ‘Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education’ at the University of Zurich, the 1992 Ellen Churchill Semple conference at Vassar College, and the International Geographical Union’s 1995 conference on ‘Nature and Culture in the History of Geography’ at the University of Dublin. I thank all those who have supported and commented on my research during these various occasions. I would further like to acknowledge the aid of librarians, archivists and manuscript curators at Clark University’s Goddard Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Harvard University Archives, the Houghton Special Collections Library of Harvard University, the Massachusetts State Library, the Watkinson Library of Trinity College (CT) and both the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts and the Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr Archives, now housed in the Sheridan Libraries at The Johns Hopkins University. In my retirement years in California, in addition to further use of several of those libraries, I have used materials in San Diego State University’s Love Library, the Copley Library of the University of San Diego, the Geisel Library of the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego Public Library. Outside San Diego, I have used the collections of the Library of Congress, the University of Pennsylvania Archives, the Alderman and the Small Special Collections libraries of the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago’s Regenstein and Crerer libraries, the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, the University of Oregon Library, and both the American Geographical Society’s xiii

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archives in New York and its library collection at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, as well as the Golda Meir Library in which the latter collection is housed. In Britain, I have been given access to archival and manuscript material in the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, various libraries in the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool, St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden, Wales and, thanks to the kind permission of Sir William Gladstone, to the GlynneGladstone papers at St Deiniol’s, accessed at the Clywd County Archives. I should also like to acknowledge my intellectual indebtedness to my friend and former colleague Anne Buttimer, now emerita at the University of Dublin and also a historian of geography who is particularly interested in the relation of geography to the humanities; to my friend and former graduate student, Anne Godlewska, now of Queen’s University, whose book on the history of French geography from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century is a model study of its kind and has indirectly stimulated this book; and to my long-time friends and companions in a half-century task of research and writing on the history of geography: Geoffrey Martin, now emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University, Gary Dunbar, now emeritus at UCLA, and the late Mildred Berman of Salem State College. My former Clark colleague Rhys Townsend, a classical archaeologist, graciously permitted me to audit his excellent course on Aegean art and architecture. My former Clark colleagues in the Department of History, especially my dear friend George Billias, now emeritus, and in the Graduate School of Geography, especially Martyn Bowden, Saul Cohen, Susan Hanson, Douglas Johnson, and Billie Lee Turner II, have been uniformly supportive of my diverse intellectual forays. I also wish to express special thanks to Suzanne (Hamel) Zellers, my first assistant in the Clark University Archives, and Stuart Campbell, my second assistant and successor as University Archivist, for their earlier aid and continuing interest. I am grateful also to the several editors and anonymous readers for the journals that have published segments of this work in different forms, and to those who have patiently listened to preliminary papers (now recycled into new text), for their helpful comments and suggestions. I particularly wish to thank Professor Wolfgang Haase of Boston University, Editor facile xiv

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princeps of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, who accepted and originally published the Gladstone essay included as Chapter 5 of this volume, and the present publisher of that journal, Springer, for permitting me to reprint it in its entirety. Thanks also are also due to Professor James Craine of California State University/ Northridge, editor of the Yearbook of Pacific Coast Geographers, who published my article on Henry Tozer and permitted me to reproduce Tozer’s map of his 1879 travels in Turkey, skillfully modified for greater clarity of Tozer’s route by David Deis, Cartographer in the Department of Geography at Northridge and used in that article. I also thank Mary Lynne Bird, former Executive Director of the American Geographical Society, for inviting me to lecture in the Society’s Program of Educational Travel. I am greatly indebted to Professor Robert Mayhew of the University of Bristol, editor of the Tauris Historical Geography Series, for his kindness in reviewing a copy of the draft manuscript, for his suggestions of additional sources, and for his encouragement to pursue its publication. I must also thank David Stonestreet, Geography Editor at I.B.Tauris, for his unswerving confidence in this book as it took shape, for his generous willingness to accommodate the technical ineptitude of a scholar nearing the end of his eighth decade, and for suggesting the title. Finally, to my life partner, Joseph W. Dennison, I can only say thanks for your patience during the long gestation process that has finally given birth to this book. William A. Koelsch San Diego, California 26 September 2011

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Preface

Why classical geography? Why this book? In her thought-provoking study of French geography in the pre-professional period, Geography Unbound, Anne Godlewska summarizes in a few lines the decline of studies in this early form of historical geography, as follows: Historical geographers today are, for the most part, far more interested in national pasts and indigenous cultures than in the historical geography of antiquity. This is so much the case that to work in the geography of ancient Greece or Rome today would probably be to consign one’s career to oblivion. Indeed, to a damned oblivion: to suggest any intellectual parentage from those civilizations to ours has become, in some circles, symptomatic of a profound racism… [as well as] irrelevancy, out-of-touchness, and lack of political purchase.1

Such strictures do not apply in quite the same way, of course, to professional classicists. There are such comforting indicators as the recent revival of interest in the Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo, or the Greek periegete Pausanias, for example.2 But, with the exception of a few pages on ‘The historical geography of classical civilizations’ in Robin Butlin’s Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time, a few tidbits turned up in connection with Robert Mayhew’s path-breaking work on early modern geography and geographers, and an article or a book chapter here and there, one really needs to search for any substantial references to ‘classical geography’ or ‘ancient geography’ in the recent literature of the history of geography produced by Anglo-American professional geographers. As a field of inquiry, the historical geography of antiquity seems indeed to have

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attained the fate Godlewska predicted for its would-be practitioners: oblivion. Thus Alan Baker’s otherwise astute and comprehensive review of the relations of history and geography, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide, published a decade after Butlin’s book, makes no mention of the genre.3 An interesting example of the consignment of practitioners of classical geography to geographical oblivion occurs in the recent British Academy-sponsored volume, A Century of British Geography. In it, we are told (no less than three times, in different words) ‘no geographer was elected to the Academy’s fellowship until 1967, when Clifford Darby won the recognition that his contributions to historical geography so richly deserved’.4 Indeed Darby, a historical geographer best known for his multi-volume geographical reconstruction of Domesday England (or at least of the Domesday Book), and accepted as an equal by the Academy’s mediaeval historians, richly deserved such recognition. But if we attempt to rescue from geographical oblivion those British contributors to the historical geography of Antiquity whose work was recognized as geography in their own times, even though they did not hold PhDs in geography, a different pattern emerges. Henry Fanshawe Tozer, the author of several volumes on ancient geography and of a well-regarded history of classical geography, editor of a volume of selections from Strabo still praised a century later, was an original Fellow of the British Academy, as was William Ramsay, sometime President of the Geographical Association and author of several books on the geography of ancient Asia Minor, including a volume published by the Royal Geographical Society in 1890. The major works of both have been reprinted in recent years, long after their deaths.5 John Linton Myres, author of many articles on the historical geography of the ancient Mediterranean, a number of which were collected and republished in 1954 as Geographical History in Greek Lands, stalwart champion of geography at Oxford and elsewhere in Britain and also President of the Geographical Association, was elected to the Academy in 1923, remaining a Fellow until his death in 1954. Darby himself had once said of Myres that ‘his interests were so geographical that we almost forgot he was a professor of ancient history’. In an obituary notice in the Geographical Journal, the head of the Oxford xviii

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School of Geography wrote of him: ‘geography has lost a scholar of the first rank’. Yet in both the text and index of the British Academy geography volume, he is confused with his historian and Bodley’s librarian son, John Nowell Linton Myres. Is the problem, then, the oblivion of the early practitioners of classical geography, or the obliviousness of contemporary geographers? To add insult to injury, we are informed that Myres’ portrait, formerly hanging in the School of Geography’s Common Room in tribute to the man who had persisted for more than 40 years to ensure a place for geography as a recognized academic discipline at Oxford, ‘seems now to have disappeared’.6 Probably in part because Anglo-American geographers have done such a good job of erasing the geography of classical antiquity from the history of their own subject, recent historians of the classical tradition in Britain and the United States have done no better in demonstrating awareness of this once significant field of study and teaching. Classical geography receives essentially no attention in two recent major surveys of the classics in nineteenth-century America and Britain: Caroline Winterer’s The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 and Christopher Stray’s Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960. Winterer’s more recent The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900, contains just two mentions of classical geography: a brief reference to Samuel Augustus Mitchell’s text on Ancient Geography, and a reference to classical geography in an 1836 novel by Lydia Maria Child.7 Stephen L. Dyson’s Ancient Marbles to American Shores: Classical Archaeology in the United States, and his more recent In Pursuit of Classical Pasts: A History of Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, make no reference to classical geography, which through much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an important tool of early on-the-ground classical archaeological and architectural research as well as a subject taught in school and university. The latter use is, however, briefly mentioned several times in Chapter 1 of Carl J. Richard’s recently published study, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, as both an admissions requirement and as a subject taught in several colleges, including one specifically for women. All of these books are excellent xix

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in their own terms. My criticism, such as it is, is directed only toward their silences regarding classical geography. To borrow a simile from Mary Renault, the distinguished historical novelist of the classical world, its ‘absence [lies] everywhere, like a fall of snow’.8 As Godlewska rightly contends, to dismiss the field out of hand is profoundly unhistorical. Whatever the prevailing attitude to classics today, there was an aura and passion surrounding its study in the early nineteenth century which gave the study of ancient geography a resonance and importance that would be the envy of modern historical geographers.9

The purpose of this book, then, is to track the arc of this now virtually abandoned field of geographical inquiry in Britain and the United States from its rise in the eighteenth century through its heyday in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth to its decline in the twentieth century. Because the field covered, or uncovered, in this book has been so substantially lost to view in recent years, I have not attempted encyclopaedic treatment. Rather, I have selected some key figures and sites that seem significant enough to be considered under this rubric. The book will, I hope, serve as a kind of invitation to further inquiry that will encourage others to avoid the current ‘profoundly unhistorical’ approach to the history of geography that, too often, results in simply mining the past for anticipations of the author’s preferred present-day practice.10 To employ a cliché that pervaded a generation of recent writing on the history of the academic disciplines, every ‘paradigm shift’ is automatically seen as a gain. This may or may not prove to be true. What is unquestionably true, however, is that every such shift involves a loss, in the form of a forgetting. Nearly two centuries ago, Thomas Arnold, the legendary headmaster of Rugby School, could write of the great contributions made by his fellow Englishmen and of the German scholar, Friedrich Kruse, to ‘the geography of Thucydides’ as advancing the understanding of that standard classical author, and expect any educated person to know what he meant. Today, if one uttered the same phrase, linking ‘geography’ and ‘Thu-

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cydides’, to a gathering of professional geographers, one would be greeted with bewilderment. From the mid-eighteenth century to at least the late nineteenth, the terms ‘ancient geography’ and ‘classical geography’ are often used interchangeably. Some books called ‘ancient geography’ confine themselves to the geographies of ancient Greece and Rome; some called ‘classical geography’ include much of the wider Mediterranean world, including especially the ‘Holy Land’, Palestine, or even farther. The geography of the classical world is indeed ancient, but Greece and Rome are only a segment of the ancient geographies of the Mediterranean and Near East. What was commonly called ‘sacred’ or ‘Biblical’ or ‘Scriptural’ geography is another form of ancient geography, exemplified in the nineteenth century by the work of Edward Robinson in the United States and George Adam Smith in Great Britain. It is also of some current interest to historians of geography.11 One more qualification: this volume somewhat privileges the ancient geography of Greek lands over those of Rome. This partly reflects my own interests and background, my studies at the University of Chicago, and my private reading over many years. For several years at Clark I taught a course in classical geography mainly though not entirely based on Greek primary sources (except Tacitus and Caesar), and a second course about equally divided among secondary reading about both cultures. Ancient Rome was, in any case, the subject of courses in Roman and early Christian history taught by my classics colleague, Paul Burke. So I am simply more familiar with the relevant primary and recent secondary sources on ancient Greece. However, the so-called ‘long nineteenth century’, which this study primarily emphasizes, was largely an age of the privileging of Greece over Rome in a number of areas, including the re-editing of Greek texts and more intensive studies of ancient Greek in schools. Beginning with the expeditions associated with the Society of Dilettanti, accelerated by the Greek War of Independence and the possibilities of increasing exploratory and personal travel to Greek lands, there was indeed a recognizable sea change and a defensible reason for emphasizing it. As Hugh Lloyd-Jones has put it, ‘Till [the latter part of the eighteenth century] Europe had been content to look at Greece through Roman spectacles; now for the first time it made a sustained effort to see the ancient Greeks directly….’12 Lloyd-Jones was speakxxi

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ing primarily of professional scholarship. But to that, the historical geographer may add the various attempts, scientific, personal, and pedagogical, ‘to see the Greek lands and the Greek people, ancient and modern, in a fresh way’. The rise and fall of that new way of studying and learning about Greece is the red thread uniting the diverse chapters of this book. My interest in writing this book is not in reviving the field, but rather, as a kind of literary archaeologist, in examining topics which have been, in recent years, ‘hidden in plain sight’, becoming evident only when you begin to look for them. That, it seems to me, and not methodological argumentation, is the proper function of the historian. The Introduction to historian David Hackett Fischer’s recent biography of Samuel de Champlain makes that point succinctly: ‘This inquiry… begins not with a thesis, or a theory, or an ideology, but with a set of open questions….’ I have long agreed with the secondcentury Greek philosopher and satirist Lucian: a writer of history ought to be ‘an unbiased judge, kindly to everyone up to the point of not allowing one side more than it deserves, a stranger without a state in his writings, independent, serving no king, not taking into account what any man will think, but simply saying what happened’ (or, in an earlier translation, ‘laying out the matter as it is’).13 That is what I have attempted to do in this book.

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Introduction: The Search for a Source

Where to begin? Most biographers begin with their subject’s birth (and some delve into their ancestry). Institutional historians usually start when the institution is founded or begins operations. Historians of events can often anchor their studies within fairly clear time frames. But the historian of intellectual activity that crystallizes into an academic discipline (or doesn’t) has a different and more difficult problem. The history of ideas and practices is a discontinuous stream, whose origins are not always easy to identify. The Italian humanist, Claudio Magris, in his book Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, provides a geographic example of the search for origins that illuminates the more general intellectual problem. Magris spends most of his first chapter attempting to establish the meaning of ‘source’ for the Danube – a problem, he tells us, going back to the Greek geographer-historians Hecataeus and Herodotus. Two towns in Germany’s Black Forest, Donaueschingen and Furtwangen, are the principal modern claimants. In the park of the Princes zu Fürstenberg in Donaueschingen is a plaque reading ‘Hier entspringt die Donau’ – ‘The Danube originates here’. The claim stems from the assertion that two other rivers, the Breg and the Brigach, join there to form the Danube. Furtwangen’s claim, also displayed on a plaque, asserts that the Breg, which begins more distant from the Black Sea, is the real Danube, to which the Brigach is tributary.

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Magris’ friend Amadeo, a sedimentologist, followed the waters of the Breg to a spring, which itself originates in a sodden meadow. The meadow, in turn, is fed by a gutter, carrying water from a lead pipe inside an early eighteenth-century house. Yet since the early nineteenth century an underground current has also carried water from the primary spring into the Brigach. This presents a paradox: the Breg, in this view, becomes a tributary of its own tributary. In addition, at Immendingen, part of the Danube falls into a fissure in the rocks, emerging 40 kilometers downstream as the Aach, which flows into Lake Constance. From there its waters flow into the Rhine; in this respect, the Danube could be called, in part, a tributary of the Rhine. Further complicating the geographical problem, Magris learned that, west of Tuttlingen, the Danube dries up in summer. It flows continuously, then, only from that place, fed by ‘trickles and tributaries from the hills around, which have heard nothing of Donaueschingen or of Furtwangen’. At this point Magris figuratively threw up his hands, concluding that, since the Danube is ‘born in several places of several parts’, its point of origin cannot to be understood in any definitive way.1 Back in 1911, the great Austrian geologist, Eduard Suess, had come to similar conclusions. In his capacity as President of the Academy of Sciences, at a meeting honoring the Academy’s curator, the Archduke Rainer, Suess chose for his address a discussion of the physical and human geography of the Danube. ‘To the question, where does it rise?’ said Suess, ‘the school-books give answer, “at Donau-Eschingen, in the Grand Duchy of Baden”.’ But, Suess cautioned, ‘the case is not so simple’, and proceeds to explain why in terms not substantially different from those of Magris.2

SEARCHING FOR A DISCIPLINARY SOURCE: THE CARTOGRAPHIC TRADITION Determining where one should identify the beginning point of what our forebears called ‘ancient [or “antient”] geography’ or ‘classical geography’ presents a similar problem, one as difficult as establishing 2

INTRODUCTION

the source of the Danube. Historians of cartography might point to the reception of the maps of the classical world published in the late sixteenth century by the great Dutch cartographer, Abraham Ortelius, whose pathbreaking atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, was first published in 1570. Ortelius was interested in the relation of modern to ancient geography, and made reference to ancient locations on his modern maps. In 1578 he published his Synonymia Geographica, a guide to ancient place names, separately. The following year, 1579, he personally drafted three maps of ancient geography, which he added to the Theatrum. These three classical maps eventually became 39, which were published separately as the Parergon, an atlas of classical geography that was probably the Western world’s first historical atlas. It continued to be issued long after the last edition of the Theatrum itself. As one of Ortelius’ commentators has put it, here ‘he did not, as in the Theatrum, work over other people’s maps but himself draughted [sic] maps of many places and regions from the lands of classical civilization to illustrate and clarify their history, a subject very close to his heart’.3 The innovations Ortelius had fostered had a long life. Jeremy Black, in Maps and History, cites a seventeenth-century French atlas, Philippe Briet’s Parallela geographiae, to point out that his ‘comparison of ancient and modern reflected the role of the Classics as a point of reference and source of information. The comparison of ancient and modern was to be an important theme in historical geography until the early twentieth century’. Samuel Patrick, an eighteenth-century classicist, issued a classical atlas titled Geographia Antiqua, whose 1789 edition asserted that it was ‘designed for the Use of Schools, and of Gentlemen who make the Ancient Writers their Delight or Study’.4 Most such atlases seem to have been designed with a pedagogic purpose in mind. (Such atlases will be discussed in Chapter 9.) Similarly, in his survey of three hundred years of historical atlases, historian Walter Goffart points out that Ortelius’ method had led directly to maps of the geography of the classical world being ‘most prized’ in the sixteenth century and ‘given a place of honor until well into the nineteenth century’. Goffart tells us that Ortelius used as the epigraph of his classical map section the words ‘Historia oculus Geographia’ or ‘geography the eye of history’, a motto that persisted into 3

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the early nineteenth century. Goffart also quotes an 1808 report of a committee of the Institut de France, which asserted ‘Ancient geography is not only, as one might imagine, an auxiliary or appendix for history; it is an essential and integral part of geographical science properly speaking’. He also points to the importance that Renaissance humanists and their heirs had placed on the comparison of ancient and modern geography, stimulated by the rediscovery and translations of, and additions to, the Cosmographia of Claudius Ptolemy. ‘Ancient geography lost its preeminence in the nineteenth-century reorganization of geography,’ wrote Goffart, ‘but its atlas – the classical and biblical maps Ortelius had done so much to foster – continues to prosper’, although as a niche market for special clients.5 Generally speaking, these clienteles did not include geographers. With the publication of two massive volumes on cartography in the European Renaissance in the University of Wisconsin’s ongoing history of cartography project, the relation of Renaissance cartography to later developments in classical geography and of the exploratory tradition should become clear even to the non-specialist.6 Recent work in the history of cartography is extremely valuable in tracing the long-term influence of Renaissance maps and atlases among humanists. However, though cartography is important to geographers, it is not, as it had been in the Renaissance, a synonym for geography in the long nineteenth century and later. The earlier meaning is vividly suggested in Vermeer’s famous painting The Geographer, which has a terrestrial globe on the cabinet in the background. But the figure is holding a pair of calipers, suggesting that he was a cartographer, not a geographer in the sense that later generations would mean by the word. (Its pendant, The Astronomer, appears to be studying a celestial globe.)7 By and large, earlier classical atlases were based on ancient texts alone. (Indeed, Ortelius himself, as noted already, had annotated his modern maps with references to classical texts.) A slightly later painting of A Geographer, attributed to a member of the ‘School of Caravaggio,’ is now in the possession of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. It shows the geographer consulting what appears to be an ancient text. Such atlases as the Parergon and its imitators, after the development of exploration and survey methods in the eighteenth century, gradually ceased to be central to the practice 4

INTRODUCTION

of geography and became ‘historical atlases’, of primary interest as supplements to school texts or private reading in classics and ancient history.

1. A Geographer, School of Caravaggio, Italian, seventeenth century

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SEARCHING FOR A DISCIPLINARY SOURCE: THE EXPLORATORY TRADITION Ptolemaic or locational geography in a more general sense continued to exist within the emerging geography discipline, and indeed is most prominent today in the development of Geographic Information Science, or GIS. But two other major traditions also stemmed from the ancient world: the Strabonic, primarily a world cultural geography (centered on the Mediterranean world), and what might be called the Periegetic or ‘scientific traveler’ tradition, most prominently stemming from Pausanias. One might thus look for a source among those ancient Greek writers who traveled to examine landscapes and structures of times before their own: Herodotus, Strabo, Pausanias, even Homer (if Homer existed). These classical authors, and field surveys partly based on them beginning in the eighteenth century, made for a broader definition of ancient geography, and thus became a greater aid to the development of the field as an analytic and educational tool from the late eighteenth century onward.8 Also, one might begin with Renaissance travelers, such as the writings and sketches of the Italian humanist Cyriacus of Ancona, who visited Greece in the fifteenth century. Or one might claim as the source the dual expedition to Greece of the Frenchman Jacob Spon and the Englishman George Wheler, in 1676.9 Several travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who wrote books about their journeys might also be cited, even though many were primarily collectors of inscriptions or ‘marbles’ (statuary). Yet though geography in this period is rooted in travel, again they are not the same thing. So, where do we begin to look for the antecedents of what we now call the modern discipline of geography? ‘Wo entspringt die Donau’? Where is the beginning? Eduard Suess closed his lecture by contending that as the drops which trickle from the margin of one of these Alpine snowfields unite to form rivers which find their way by different routes to the Black or North seas, so it is with the thoughts of men. Obscure as these are in their origin, and diverse in the course they pursue, great achievements result from the converging efforts of a multitude of individuals, differing in nationality but united in one common aim.10 6

INTRODUCTION

This convergence of interest in the topography and monuments of the ancient Mediterranean world, primarily the Greek-speaking world, with current ideals of accurate survey, recording and depicting the results of organized expeditions, took place in the late eighteenth century. Improbably enough, it is at least arguable that the roots of the modern study of classical geography can be found in the work sponsored by a group of aristocrats who had returned from the Grand Tour with a taste for classical architecture, politics, alcohol and pornography. In 1732 a group of these highly placed young men had established a dining club, calling it the Society of Dilettanti. Here, then, is where we shall begin.

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It is as bootless in history as in geography to follow out the route of each tributary to its ultimate source. Conceding that there were earlier cartographers who drew maps of the ancient Mediterranean world, and travelers who visited and then wrote about its culture hearths, at some point we need to emulate the Princes zu Fürstenberg and stake out a marker in a particular place. That place, for our purposes, is where and when travel, primarily undertaken for pleasure, self-education, or commercial reasons, becomes a mode of inquiry we call geography. The roots of the study of what, when applied to the Greco-Roman world, was called ‘ancient geography’ or ‘classical geography’, an early form of what we now call ‘historical geography’, lie in the late eighteenth century. Robin Butlin, in surveying the antecedents of this specialized field, has suggested that the historical geography of classical civilizations came second only to what in its earlier form was called ‘Sacred geography’ or ‘Scriptural historical geography’, the geography of the lands of ancient times disclosed in the Biblical narratives.1 Fortunately, a marker has been laid down for us, not on the ground, as in the zu Fürstenbergs’ princely park, but in a chain of texts. J. Theodore Merz’s History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, although published more than a century ago, is still suggestive here. In his section on ‘Scientific Thought’, under the subheading ‘Historical geography’, Merz argued that the origin of a new discipline rests on a combination of ‘individual ability joined to for-

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tuitous circumstances’. As his example, he pointed to ‘the foundation of a new branch of research on the borderland of natural and political history, the geography of ancient and modern Greece’.2 His authority for that statement was the great German historian of Greece and observer of its topography, Ernst Curtius, who while a student at the University of Berlin had listened carefully to the lectures of the geographer Karl Ritter. In an 1880 essay, Curtius had traced the beginnings of ‘the modern science of archaeology or historical geography’ to England. It began, according to Curtius, with the mid-eighteenth-century Greek expedition of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. Theirs was the third journey of exploration to Greece after those of Cyriacus of Ancona and Jacob Spon, ‘but it was the first in scientific importance’.3

THE RISE OF ARCHAEOGRAPHY There is some disagreement (and should be) about what to call the subject in which the Dilettanti pioneered, the systematic (or ‘scientific’) expeditions to ancient classical sites. In his preface to the most recent book on the eighteenth-century Dilettanti, Jason Kelly cautions us that ‘The Dilettanti and their contemporaries did not perceive the same disciplinary or generic borders as modern scholars’, and that part of their effort was ‘to understand foreign peoples, in both spatial and temporal terms’. In other words, what they were doing went well beyond what, in the nineteenth century and later, became known as ‘archaeology’, and includes much of what in the eighteenth century would have been called ‘ancient [or Antient] and modern’ geography. Yet in his main text Kelly treats the expeditions solely in terms of a presumed ‘eighteenth-century archaeology’, from which modern classical archaeology is directly descended. (Kelly is far from being the only writer to do so, however.) Not only does such a treatment contradict Kelly’s premise, which is an important one, but to substitute a part for the whole, and to use a modern disciplinary category not used by the Dilettanti and indeed which had not yet come into general English usage, is a historical solecism. Jonathan Scott’s description of the Society’s publications as ‘intended as 10

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architectural and topographical studies’, and Bruce Redford’s description of them as ‘proto-archaeological’, are nearer the mark.4 If we turn to the standard work on historical usage in the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, we find no evidence for the use of the term ‘archaeology’ until after the first third of the nineteenth century. But under ‘ancient’, we discover that the first use of ‘ancient geography’ dates from 1740.5 Most of the terms relating to archaeology and archaeologists postdate the early Dilettantisponsored expeditions and those of individual members of the Society, such as William Gell and William Martin Leake. The eighteenthand early nineteenth-century expeditions of the Dilettanti were not primarily characterized by excavation, as became true of nineteenthcentury archaeologists; what little they did appears largely to have been to uncover key members of a structure in order to secure more precise measurements. There is ample evidence from their own words that they were involved in a much broader enterprise than the term ‘archaeology’ connotes. Kelly uncovered a letter from Robert Wood to Joseph Spence, a founder of the Society, in 1749. In it, Wood outlined the purpose of his expedition as ‘to compare the Antient [sic] with the present face of the Country; The Greece of the poets & historians with the Greece we shall see’. In discussing his earlier visit to Troy, Wood writes of having been ‘making out a Plan of Troy & the environs from the Iliad, began to compare it as far, as I had time, with the present aspect of that Country’. Making a plan of a site in its full environmental context, and especially comparing the ancient with the present landscape, is what would in its time have been called ‘ancient and modern’ or ‘comparative’ geography, not archaeology. Furthermore, there is the evidence of the instructions given to the leaders of the Society’s first fully sponsored expedition, to Ionia in 1764. Here they were instructed not only to establish ‘the exact Plans and Measures possible in the Buildings’, but also ‘taking such Views as you shall judge proper’ and ‘remarking every Circumstance which can contribute towards giving the best Idea of the ancient and present State of those Places’. Both of these statements convey a far broader understanding of what the interest of the Dilettanti was than does the simple (and anachronistic) term ‘classical archaeology’.6

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Moreover, modern historians of archaeology put the origins of their field as a separate discipline somewhere in the nineteenth century. Thus Glyn Daniel, in 1968, traced it to a member of the Napoleonic expedition in Egypt, 1789, and specifically to D. V. Denon’s travel book, translated into English in 1802. Men like Denon, as well as the staff of the French Institute in Cairo, Daniel contended, ‘showed that a serious and organized approach to the study of the past through archaeology was beginning, and the antiquaries and dilettanti, the travelers and the tomb robbers, were soon to give way to professional archaeologists’. Here Daniel is using the term ‘dilettanti’ in its later, pejorative sense of a superficial dabbler (not to mention tomb robber), and not in its original sense of one who takes delight in the love of the arts. In any case, as we shall see, the Society of Dilettanti expeditions were both serious and organized. In a later book, Daniel was prepared to concede that the Dilettanti members had ‘opened the eyes of Englishmen to the artistic achievements of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations’. But, for Daniel, classical archaeology was a dead end, and the discipline only becomes legitimated after Lyell, certain Danish antiquarians, and Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) had pointed the way. ‘It was not until 1859’, Daniel avers, ‘that prehistoric archaeology could be said to have come into being’. He finds important forerunners in the early nineteenth century, but does concede that its ‘ultimate foundations … lay with the antiquarians and natural historians of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. This book is not the place to discuss the history either of prehistoric or classical archaeology, but one does need to keep in mind the cautions of recent sociologists of professionalization, who tend to reject ‘an evolutionary model whereby enthusiastic amateurs are supplanted by trained professionals’ in favor of one in which the distinction is understood as a product of a self-legitimizing process stemming from ‘the vocabulary of professionalism itself’.7 The French seventeenth-century traveler to Greece, Jacob Spon, had used the term ‘archaeographia’ for what he thought of as a new discipline, combining the visible remains of antiquity with their geographic settings. The term seems to have been unavailable to the German scholar, F. C-H. Kruse, in 1825, but Kruse combined, in one ‘geographischen und topographischen’ discipline, both precision in 12

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ancient building measurements and precision in their geographic and topographic relations. Curtius, drawing on Kruse in 1880, used the words ‘the modern science of archaeology or historical geography’, which by 1880 had become more specialized disciplines (but see the ‘new archaeology’ in the Epilogue to this volume).8 James M. Osborn, in a fine essay on British neo-Hellenism, has used the term ‘archaeography’ in Spon’s sense, and follows the OED in its defining the term as ‘the systematic description of antiquities’. Osborn preferred the term ‘archaeography’ to ‘archaeology’, a term he suggested carries an ‘implication of excavations, particularly in prehistorical sites’, which is again consistent with OED usage. Osborn applied the term to what he identifies as ‘the first phase of NeoHellenism’, beginning with the travels of Wheler and Spon and dominating the study of ancient Greece ‘well into the second half of the eighteenth century’. Osborn terms this first period ‘the scientific phase’ of Neo-Hellenism, succeeded by a ‘Romantic phase’, though he notes that archaeography as scientific work continued under Sir William Gell and other classical topographers. In Osborn’s view, archaeography ‘became transposed to archaeology as digging became a science’, primarily after the German influx following the selection of Prince Otto of Bavaria as King of the newly independent Greek state in 1832.9 In an important essay on ‘Architecture and Travel in the Age of British Eclecticism’, Edward Kaufman has linked the early Dilettanti expeditions to eighteenth-century travel literature and the ‘Grand Tour’. These, he argues, were explorations of places, topographical rather than historical in their approach. Travel and discovery (whether of the classical or the natural world) were the ruling metaphors of the late eighteenth century. The truth claims of the expeditions rested on having ‘been there’ and on accurately representing the structures and sites, using the conventions of travel and ancient geography. Their leaders wrote sober-sided narratives taken from their systematic journal records, including descriptions of the present-day ‘natives’ and their daily activities and habitats; essentially the human geography of the regions visited. Their ‘architectural’ volumes also follow the conventions of travel books. They begin with a panoramic view, the scene as a traveler would first encounter it. They then might include a site map, followed by other perspective 13

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views of the structure in its topographical setting, and architectural plates in the order a visitor would have encountered the structures. They are, in short, spatial rather than historical presentations; descriptions of the sites as they are seen. The late eighteenth century was a period of geographic exploration and travel. Only with the nineteenth-century privileging of time over space do such fields as the historical geology of Lyell, the natural history of Darwin and archaeology as a discipline, with excavation as a primary tool for reconstructing the history of a particular site, come to the fore.10 Robert Eisner also used the term: in commenting on the lack of interest among Germans in travel to Greece in the eighteenth century, he wrote ‘the archaeographical bug had not yet bitten them’.11 Although I might prefer to use ‘ancient geography’ or ‘comparative geography’, the term ‘archaeography’ (which dates, in the OED, from 1804) seems to fit the situation better than ‘archaeology’. ‘Archaeo’ in the period carried the implication of ‘antiquities’, and ‘graphy’, used as it is in geography, topography, cartography, and graphic representation (in maps and topographical drawings) describes better than ‘archaeology’ what the earliest expeditions were actually doing. I therefore will use ‘archaeography’, then, as a portmanteau term referring to the study of ancient human structures (‘antiquities’) in their natural and cultural settings and the representation of these in maps, plans, topographical paintings and measured drawings. While a case might be made under the rubric of archaeography for some of the other early travelers to Greece and the surrounding regions, their work was individually achieved, not the product of systematic and sustained scientific exploration, much less displaying exact measurement and scientific methods of recording and describing as a primary goal. Both the term and the timing do seem to me, however, to fit the Society of Dilettanti’s early expeditions. Cultural geographer Carl O. Sauer of the University of California, Berkeley (see Chapter 10) appears to have introduced the term ‘archaeogeography’ into geography in the 1930s, but the term did not catch on.12 In this chapter, therefore, I shall use the term ‘archaeography’ as Osborn does: to describe a late eighteenth-century protoscience, the Enlightenment ancestor that laid the foundation of several fields that only later became differentiated: classical geography,

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classical topography, classical art and architecture and classical archaeology. Yet it is broader and more inclusive than any of these. We may perhaps think of the Enlightenment work of discovery as a kind of intellectual ‘Gondwanaland’, initially a single land mass that eventually separated to form the multiple continents we now know. Furthermore, ‘archaeography’ seems to mesh with other aspects of eighteenth-century English taste: the creation of new landscapes for the wealthy and well-connected, featuring not only their neo-classical mansions but the picturesque ‘ruins’, the ‘Greek’ temples, the ‘views’, the prized topographical paintings and the landscape designs of ‘Capability’ Brown, Humphrey Repton and others. Perhaps we should think of a neo-archaeography, the ideal English estate landscape the Dilettanti strove for at home. It is that comprehensiveness of vision, rather than simply the architecture, that the Society’s archaeographers brought back from Greece.13

STARTING THE SOCIETY OF DILETTANTI What was the original impetus for this? According to Curtius, it was ‘a free and purely human attraction…to the classical soil’, combined with private means, which stemmed from ‘the love of collecting and traveling common among the aristocracy’. Like Kaufman, Curtius saw the context as a spatial one: travel. This resulted in what Curtius described as ‘the rediscovery of the countries of ancient history’;14 that is, their historical geography. Eventually, part of this effort emerged as a legitimate, if marginal, field of study and teaching in both schools and universities. By the love of traveling and collecting among the British aristocracy, Curtius was referring to the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, a rite of passage made by the young sons of well-born and wealthy Britons which has itself been the subject of a large number of studies.15 Its stated purpose was pedagogical; indeed, his tutor, who was known as the ‘bearleader’, normally accompanied the young traveler. Its object was to ‘cultivate the taste’ by exposing the young men to the best models of art and of antiquity and, not infrequently, to purchase and bring back to England statuary and books of architectural sketches 15

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illustrating classical models seen in Rome and other parts of Italy. The informal curriculum included generous amounts of alcohol, sex and other social habits vigorously continued following their return to England. Most, however, ended their journeys at Rome (or perhaps Venice, renowned for its easily available sexual pleasures). Some adventurers got as far as Naples, but only the serious later braved the terrors of malaria to visit Paestum (Gr.: Poseidonia) to visit the spectacular Greek temples there. Of course, combining descriptions of architecture and topography is as old as Strabo and Pausanias. But Stuart and Revett’s expedition to Greece, as Richard Stoneman has noted, ‘represented a real step forward’.16 That is, Stuart and Revett embarked on a journey of systematic exploration, not simply of pleasure travel, education or collecting. Talented artists, who had improved their skills during their years in Rome, they were now undertaking a semi-sponsored expedition, the first of its kind. The unlikely source of much of their funding were members of a dining club, the Society of Dilettanti, composed of men of wealth and high social standing who, in their earlier years, had made the Grand Tour. Organized in London in late 1732,17 it was initially a purely social group of young Tory rakehells. The Society’s historian, Lionel Cust, writing toward the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, described the original group as ‘a company of gay and brilliant carousers’, between 20 and 30 years old, whose meetings were marked ‘by a vivacity which would be hardly in tune with the soberer ideas prevailing at the close of the nineteenth century’.18 In the 1780s, Horace Walpole growled that for membership in the Society ‘the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk’. Richard Monckton Milnes, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1857, asserted the group’s early activities ‘would now be considered very licentious merriment and very unscrupulous fun’, expressed ‘with a frankness that would now be deemed not only vulgar but indecorous….’ (This is an interesting comment from one who, about the same time, was beginning to assemble a major collection of smuggled French and Italian erotica, including a complete set of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, supplemented by some of de Sade’s manuscripts.) J. Mordaunt Crook, in an excellent chapter on ‘The Rediscovery of Greece’, has reminded us that among the Society’s members were ‘seven prime ministers and one murderer’.19 16

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Although the initial purpose was sociability and sodality, the Society had also attempted to raise English taste in several ways, but principally through their admiration for, and indeed collection of, ancient art. Its membership eventually included a number who became influential politicians and tastemakers, several leading artists and many of the great classical collectors of the day. After a few years, the officers discovered they had accumulated money enough for some useful purpose. Since several members as individuals had subscribed to or were interested in Stuart and Revett’s project, at the prompting of several other members who were working as diplomats in Italy they decided to use some of it to subsidize some of the expedition’s expenses. In 1751 the two men were elected members, the first non-gentry to join the Society. Sponsorship of expeditions of exploration and survey, and underwriting the costs of publication of the results, were to become important activities of the group for nearly a century thereafter.20 Curtius and other scholars have argued that the Society, and more particularly its decision to support Stuart and Revett’s project, marked a kind of sea change in the study of the ancient, and particularly the Greek, world. Helen Waterhouse, writing in the 1980s, called the Society ‘the first coherent body to sponsor the study of classical antiquities and to finance their publication’. David Constantine, in his definitive study of early travelers to Greece, asserts that ‘despite their name the Dilettanti, once they had adopted Stuart and Revett, were the first professionals’, while Richard Stoneman perceptively pointed out that Stuart and Revett’s pilgrimage to Athens ‘was in the tradition of the explorers as much as the scholars….’21 That said, most writers on the Dilettanti, until recently, have limited themselves to a consideration of the Society’s impact on English taste, particularly in architecture. But Monckton Milnes had pointed out in 1857 that Kruse, Professor of History and Geography at the University of Wittenberg, in his book Hellas (1825), a survey of Greek geography and antiquities, had also dated the modern period of understanding ancient Greece to the formation of the Dilettanti. Every important English traveler of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to publish useful information about the ancient Greek world, Kruse observed, had been a member of the Society. ‘With this association’, wrote Kruse (in 17

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Milnes’ translation), ‘begins a rare period of the Discovery of Greece, in which the greatest geographical [and topographical] accuracy was combined with the most accurate measurements of ancient buildings’. In re-translating Kruse’s statement, Bruce Redford makes the German scholar’s point even more sharply: ‘with [the Society’s] foundation begins a new period in the rediscovery of Greece, in which the greatest precision was applied regarding the determination of geographical and topographical relationships, and in particular regarding the measurements of ancient temples’ [emphasis mine].22 Here was the combination Merz had identified as critical for the beginnings of disciplinary development. First, expeditions were organized for the advancement of knowledge rather than for collecting or other pleasures. Second, the methods included making careful records of data, accurate measurement (including mapping and measured drawings), visual representation and publication of the results. Third, Stuart and Revett and their successors for nearly a century were the individuals of ability. Fourth, the fortuitous circumstance was a society largely made up of upper-class Tories with surplus funds and a taste for classical antiquity. That combination launched the systematic study, not only of Greek classical architecture and art, but also the historical geography of the classical world. The latter, a now forgotten sub-branch of geography, was to rise, flourish and disintegrate over the next two centuries.

THE FIRST DILETTANTI EXPEDITIONS The initial idea for an expedition to Greece came to Stuart and Revett in 1748 while on a trip to Naples with two friends and fellow artists. They had come to the important conclusion, from their wanderings around the ruins of Rome, that they were seeing mostly inferior versions of Greek art and architectural motifs; that is, as Hugh LloydJones would later put it, they were seeing Greece through Roman eyes. Two years later they met Robert Wood, a previous traveler to the Mediterranean, and the wealthy James Dawkins. Wood and Dawkins were about to leave Rome for the Levant to study the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbek. While Wood was still in Rome, however, 18

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discussions with him led Stuart and Revett to refine their first proposal seeking financial support. Both parties discovered that they shared an admiration for the work of the French architect, Antoine Desgodetz (or Desgodets), who in 1682 had published the first accurate measurements of classical Roman buildings. Dawkins and other Dilettanti members in Rome provided Stuart and Revett with some financing, and also with other wealthy English contacts. Delayed in Venice in 1750, Stuart and Revett made a side trip to Pola (now Pula, Croatia) to measure and depict the Roman remains there. More importantly, while in Venice they earned the patronage of Sir James Grey, a member of the Dilettanti, who not only secured their election to the Society, but who had his brother, then its Secretary-Treasurer, print and distribute the 1754 version of their proposal in London. Grey also obtained additional secure funding by getting his fellow members to subscribe to their future publications. So, to be precise, Stuart and Revett’s expedition was subsidized, though not officially sponsored, by the Society. While not exactly a travel grant, it had all the elements of one.23 Stuart and Revett’s prospectus, entitled ‘Proposals for publishing an accurate description of the Antiquities of Athens’, promised diligent and faithful ‘drawings made on the spot’ that would show ‘the beauty and variety of a Country, or the exact Scene of any celebrated Action….’ Furthermore, before providing architectural plans, elevations and depictions of sculpture for any architectural ruin, ‘First a View of it will be given, faithfully exhibiting the present Appearance of that particular building and of the circumjacent Country’ [emphasis mine]. They proposed also to add to the drawings ‘some Maps and Charts, shewing [sic] the general situation and connection of the whole Work’.24 In other words, their strategy of representation recognized the importance of placing the object in its full geographic setting. They were thus to begin with a panoramic view and a map, which Kaufman has reminded us was a common travel trope, and only after that do they depict the individual structures. The pair set out for Athens in January 1751 for their three-year expedition. Revett was responsible for the measured drawings, and Stuart for the topographical views. Arriving in early March 1751, Stuart and Revett spent two-and-a-half years there, at substantial personal risk, though nominally protected by a firman secured by Sir 19

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James Porter, another Dilettanti member, who was then Minister at Constantinople. Subsequently they visited Salonica and some of the Aegean islands before returning to Athens to continue their work. Here, Wood and Dawkins, who were returning from the Near East, met them again. Stuart and Revett returned to London in October 1754. Delays in assembling and publication (partly owing to Stuart’s dilatoriness, but also to editorial disagreements between the two men) resulted in their being ‘scooped’ in 1758 by a Frenchman, Julien-David Le Roy, whose more romantic drawings and descriptions were embodied in a book that was the first published survey of classical Greek architecture. Stuart and Revett’s own first volume of the Antiquities of Athens did not appear until January 1763, its price making it unavailable to most below the Dilettanti’s financial standing. Although idiosyncratic in its assemblage of topics, being mostly drawings of minor Hellenistic and other post-classical remains, Revett’s measured drawings and the engravings of Stuart’s colored gouaches were more accurate than Le Roy’s. In that respect they were more in line with late Enlightenment practices of reportage, which, in principle at least, stressed accuracy over idealized beauty and picturesqueness. The Society subsidized the production of the engravings.

2. Monument of Philopappos, Athens

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Other volumes, also subsidized by the Society, appeared slowly after Stuart’s death, Revett having been bought out to settle the disputes over the first volume. Stuart’s widow (Elizabeth) and William Newton compiled the second volume, which included the more important buildings on the Acropolis, in January 1790. A third volume using Stuart and Revett’s material and edited by Willey Reveley, another architect, appeared in 1794. Reveley had traveled in Greece and Italy to make topographical drawings of ancient monuments. Enough material was still unpublished, including the Pola drawings and the Parthenon sculptures, for a fourth volume to appear in 1816, the year the ‘Elgin marbles’ were purchased for the British Museum. A supplemental volume, which included buildings in other parts of Greece and in Greek Sicily, was issued in 1830, 80 years after Stuart and Revett had first made their measured drawings and sketches of the Roman structures at Pola.25 What has all this to do with geography? Certainly Stuart and Revett were artists, not geographers or explorers. Their primary purpose was to furnish models of taste and to influence English architecture, objectives entirely in harmony with the more serious side of their Dilettanti sponsors. Le Roy complained that they put too much emphasis on mere accuracy, criticizing Revett’s concentration on exact measurements and Stuart’s inclusion of ‘lesser objects’ that blocked the view of the classical ruins. He was missing the point. Although Stuart and Revett did engage in a little excavation, notably around the Tower of the Winds in Athens, they were not archaeologists, certainly not in the mid to late nineteenth-century sense. And by and large they were not collectors either. Rather, they were in part accurately picturing the real spaces of Greece, not imagined or romanticized ones, published in a pioneering series of large-scale volumes that Bruce Redford has called ‘a new genre, the proto-archaeological folio’. They were, in the first instance, depicting the spaces within which ancient remains and modern life coexisted. Stuart’s paintings show the English participants in cocked hats and other accoutrements of normal late eighteenth-century British dress, while being watched by modern Greeks dressed in their own contemporary apparel and doing their ordinary tasks, such as tending sheep. The buildings are shown as they are, as ruins not abstracted from their contemporary geographical settings. Stuart and 21

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Revett, of course, went on to the detailed depiction of parts of structures, but these are set in focus by the panoramas, maps and topographical drawings. Barbara Stafford has put it this way: It was in the pursuit of chorography, or specific topographies… that the artist-travellers set forth to experience the universe up close…. The masculine, trenchant, and plain style flexibly adapted itself to the adamantine qualities of the phenomena portrayed. [They learned] through immersion the mutability of the natural world by capturing in atmospheric sketches the specific transient effects or processes of a given moment.26

As Terence Spencer has remarked, the series of volumes produced under Dilettanti patronage threw ‘into the shade’ all previously published works on Greece, not simply for their drawings and descriptions of ancient sites, but because of their ‘large engravings of the contemporary mode of existence’.27 This moved the reader from simple aesthetics to an awareness of ‘the life of the people who dwelt around and among, and sometimes inside, the architectural glories of antiquity’. What Stuart, Revett and their successors put together, using a deliberate strategy of measurement, map and topographical drawing, is the new field of ‘archaeography’ – not yet architecture, certainly not yet archaeology, not ‘creative’ but ‘topographical’ art. How they saw and performed their tasks was thus not fundamentally different from the scientific geographical work of James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt and even Benjamin Franklin, who mapped the Gulf Stream and advocated studying its temperatures by means of another instrument of exact measurement, the thermometer.28

ROBERT WOOD, THE LEVANT AND THE PROBLEM OF TROY In an essay on Robert Wood’s mid-century travel, the British writer C. A. Hutton described him as ‘a born traveller with a quick eye for the salient features of a landscape’ and as ‘an excellent classical scholar’. His ‘real interest’, however, was, according to Hutton, ‘com-

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paring the statements of ancient geographers and modern travellers with the physical conditions as he found them’ (in other words, what would then have been called ‘comparative geography’). As she tells us in her study of the surviving documents and sketches, ‘fully half their pages’ are occupied with ‘minute geographical details’.29 Wood had spent about a year during 1742–3 in traveling to Constantinople, the Aegean islands, Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. For these reasons the wealthy James Dawkins and his friend John Bouverie, whom Wood had previously known in Rome, invited Wood to join them on another long expedition. Dawkins took responsibility for describing flora and fauna, Bouverie for architecture and Wood initially for topography and inscriptions. All of them kept accurate and detailed daily notebooks. Meeting in Rome in 1749, they prepared for the expedition by further study, and, in May 1750, embarked on a chartered vessel, accompanied by Giovanni Battista Borra, the court architect at the Kingdom of Piedmont, as their topographical artist. ‘Where we thought that the present face of the country was the best comment on an antient [sic] author’, wrote Wood, ‘we made our draftsman take a view, or make a plan of it’. The ship itself, as Terence Spencer has noted, ‘was well-furnished with a library of Greek historians and poets, volumes of antiquities, and the best travel-books’ (to which Eileen Harris adds ‘measuring instruments and tools for digging’), making it the humanistic equivalent of the eighteenth-century ship ‘as a scientific instrument’ in the increasing search for geographical knowledge.30 They sailed to Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey) and went from there to Sardis, Pergamon, Constantinople and the Plain of Troy, where they spent ten days (‘with Homer in our hands’). They produced an assortment of diaries, maps, views, detailed drawings and topographical surveys. Their method had been worked out by Wood while in Rome in 1749: to begin with a panoramic view of the ruins in their current state and environmental context, then to proceed in sequence with a map of the exact locations of the buildings, detailed drawings of specific parts of the buildings, and reconstructions of what they would have looked like in their original form. Stuart and Revett had adopted Wood’s pattern while in Rome. After Bouverie died in Asia Minor in September 1750, Wood assumed his responsibility for making detailed measurements as well as the topography and inscriptions. 23

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Wood’s primary interest was, however, in Homer’s geography, and his interleaved copy of the Iliad, which he carried with him and which survives, contains an astonishing 270 geographical notes.31 After stops along the Turkish coast and nearby islands, including Rhodes, Dawkins and Wood spent a month-and-a-half in Egypt, where, in addition measuring the pyramids and other antiquities, they climbed the Great Pyramid. They then traveled to Palestine before going to Damascus and, in March, visiting Palmyra and Baalbek (ancient Heliopolis), spending five busy days at the former site and eight at the latter, making the usual measurements, drawings, plans, and reconstructions, and recording inscriptions. From there they went to Cyprus, Cos, Delos and mainland Greece, where they briefly assisted Stuart and Revett in their work and then made a tour of ancient Greek sites in Stuart’s company before leaving on 7 June for Italy and England. Dawkins, who had actively supported the publication of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, was himself elected a Dilettante in 1755. From this expedition Wood developed two books that rapidly made him famous. Adhering to scientific exactness was his chief aim. As he said in Ruins of Palmyra (1753), ‘the principal merit of works of this kind is truth’, and his aim was ‘to produce things as they found them’. This was the standard truth-claim of all scientific travelers: ‘I have seen it with my own eyes’, and the chosen methods of describing it are wholly consistent with late Enlightenment ideas of what constituted science. The austere methods employed were not always palatable to artists and others who sought models from Antiquity that could be easily imitated. They found Le Roy’s picturesque views and less-than-accurate measurements sufficient, and indeed often more desirable. But Wood clung to his values in his next book, the Ruins of Balbec (1757). Wood was elected to the Society of Dilettanti in 1763 and rapidly took over the design of their expeditions. In his preface to Ionian Antiquities (1769), another project of the Dilettanti, Wood drew the line between the ‘candour and accuracy’ required of the traveler and the ‘judgment and taste’ required of the geniuses of art.32 Wood’s books on Baalbek and Palmyra, whose publication preceded those of Stuart and Revett and of Le Roy, gave him an international reputation. Eileen Harris called the Palmyra book ‘a triumph 24

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such as few English architectural books had ever before achieved’, and tells us ‘its publication was greeted with widespread acclaim throughout Europe’. Wood and Dawkins became so famous that in 1758 they became the subjects of a painting showing them discovering Palmyra, while improbably dressed in Roman togas. Edward Gibbon, himself a master of classical geography, wrote of them in his magisterial History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘every preceding account is eclipsed by the magnificent description and drawings of MM Dawkins and Wood, who have transported into England the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbec’.33 It is, however, in his study of the Plain of Troy that Wood moved closer than ever to the more modern concerns of ancient geographers and classical scholars. Here, Wood was a pivotal figure, both part of a long tradition and a harbinger of things to come. As the ancient historian, Sir John Linton Myres, reminded us, Wood ‘was by no means the first of those English travellers who did so much to lay the foundations of a classical geography and to widen the basis of classical archaeology beyond the limits of Italian collections’. It was, of course, nothing new for visitors to that part of the world to read Homer, as Wood wrote, ‘in the countries, where Achilles fought, where Ulysses travelled, and where Homer sung’, in the belief that the topography of the site could aid in the understanding of the text. Indeed, Homeric geography had been a subject of debate in Roman times, drawing the attention of the Graeco-Roman geographer, Strabo (who had never visited the Troad), and of Germanicus and others, who had. Alexander Pope, finding no maps with which to illustrate his translation of the Iliad, drew his own, primarily from the text itself. But Pope had never been to the site either. When, in 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montague read Homer and admired his ‘exact geography’ on the Trojan plain, in using Pope’s map as a guide she was almost certainly in the wrong place. Indeed, Robert Eisner has claimed ‘she was twenty miles off target, touring the wrong Troy’.34 Wood, however, had trod the Plain of Troy, and made his own map of the plain and its rivers based on his ten days of topographical survey there (hence much more accurate than Pope’s). That he had failed to find the exact site of King Priam’s city itself was disappointing to the stay-at-homes. But he did explore the streams, springs and various other sites. In so doing, he set in motion a continuous stream 25

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of ‘boots on the ground’ studies of the relation of Trojan topography to the events described in the Iliad. Unfortunately the description in his incomplete work, ‘A Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade’, an attachment to his more famous Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1767; revised edition, 1775), was marred posthumously by an editor’s meddling. Yet as J. M. Cook has pointed out, ‘it was research of this sort that was needed to confront the geographers with geographical fact and expose the futility of the prevalent arm-chair cartography’. Eisner has written, ‘Wood was the first traveler of the eighteenth century with the library, knowledge of Greek, and intellectual acumen to read deeply and profitably in Greek literature amidst the Greek landscape’. ‘It was this direct experience of the Homeric environment that made Robert Wood’s important Essay… quite different from all previous criticism of Homer’, wrote Terence Spencer. ‘It emphatically told the reader that the geographical background of the Iliad was still in existence and demanded the careful study of those who would wish to understand their Homer’. Timothy Webb added that Wood ‘was even in a position to check Homer’s accuracy in nautical affairs from his own experience of local conditions, both of wind and of sea’. M. L. Clarke wrote of him, ‘Wood successfully shows that the scenery of Homer’s mythology is Greek, and is derived from observation.’ J. A. Davison, in what was long a standard reference on the history of the ‘Homeric question’, called Wood’s work ‘the first of many attempts to bring geography and history to bear upon the elucidation of the Homeric problem….’ As Spencer would have it, ‘Paradoxes about Homer’s illiteracy were all very well. But geography was [scientific] fact’.35

RICHARD CHANDLER AND IONIAN ANTIQUITIES With the Chandler expedition to Ionia of 1764–6 we reach a new plateau in the development of archaeography and therefore of classical geography, archaeology and architecture. Chandler’s was the first expedition to be initiated and fully sponsored by the Society of Dilettanti. The Society funded it with an appropriation of two thou26

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sand pounds in April 1764. The appropriation mandated a dual purpose: ‘to collect important Informations [sic] relative to the former state of those countries [emphasis mine], and particularly to provide exact descriptions of the Ruins of such Monuments of Antiquity as are yet to be seen in those parts’. The combination of words used to describe the task, and the lack of a single term covering it, is again significant. Collecting information about places at an earlier time is, however, of the essence of historical geography. In this case, since the former time specified was the context of monuments of classical antiquity, it becomes classical or ancient geography. Also significant is the absence of any mention of excavation as a primary task. Instead, the instructions explicitly refer to measurement and description of those ruins still visible in the landscape. ‘Archaeography’ was, as yet, an undivided science. A Dilettanti committee, chaired by the notorious rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, but including both ‘Athenian’ Stuart and, more importantly, Robert Wood, was given the task of planning such an expedition. Wood defined the team’s instructions, provided them with maps and other information based on his own earlier expeditions, wrote the preface to the first volume of its resulting publications, and furnished other material, including drawings, to the authors. With his election Wood became essentially the Society’s Director of Expeditions, the person who defined the tasks and to whom journals and maps and sketches were to be sent. He asked in return only that the expedition’s leaders supplement his information on the Troad so that he might add it to his still unfinished manuscript, the ‘Comparative View’. Most importantly, Wood located and introduced to the committee an Oxford classics don, Richard Chandler, who had published an inventory of Oxford’s holdings of ancient statuary. Chandler was made head of the expedition, with additional responsibilities for collecting inscriptions and writing the historical sections of the resulting volumes. Assisting him were Revett, the only member of the team who had been to the Aegean, and a promising young 22-year-old artist, William Pars. Revett was once again to be responsible for measured drawings of the ruins, and Pars was assigned the job of ‘taking Views’ as well as sketching the reliefs on the structures. All were enjoined to ‘keep a very minute Journal of every Day’s Occurrences and Obser27

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vations’, to mark distances and directions, and, as mentioned earlier, to note ‘every Circumstance which [would] contribute toward giving the best Idea of the ancient and present State of those Places’ – in other words, to describe their geography, ancient and modern.36 Setting out in June 1764, the Chandler party visited the Troad on their way to their original base of operations, Smyrna, from which they visited the key ancient Greek sites in Aegean Turkey. But an epidemic of plague in August 1765 forced them to shift their base to Athens, where they spent ten months supplementing what Stuart and Revett had done ten years earlier by attempting a comprehensive survey and then, thanks to additional funding from the Society, made a two-month tour of ancient sites in the Peloponnese and in mainland Greece. They reached England again in November 1766, and the next month turned over the remainder of their materials to the Society. The committee continued to supervise the project to its completion. They commissioned engravings, to be made at the Society’s expense from the sketches and drawings the team had made, with Revett supervising the process. They decided what would be included in the first volume, Ionian Antiquities, for which Wood wrote the preface, and they specified that 150 copies be printed for the use of Society members. After this was accomplished, in 1769, they turned the plates over to the three team members for reprinting as many copies as they wished for their own benefit. Sales were slow, however, and Revett, who had bought out the other two, ultimately lost money on the venture. But, as Milnes wrote nearly 90 years later, ‘for accuracy of observation, beauty of typography, and appropriate grace of design, [the volumes were] unsurpassed by any production of later art and more complete mechanism’.37 Chandler was unsuccessful in getting the Society to publish his volume of translated inscriptions, and published them himself through Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1774. His two accounts of the journey, Travels in Asia Minor (1774) and Travels in Greece (1775) were initially published by Oxford University and by subscription, respectively. ‘The geography of Greece is explained’, he wrote in the Asia Minor book, ‘and the narrative illustrated by maps, plans, and charts.’ When it came to such vexing problems as identifying the source of the Meander River, he promised to provide ‘as clear an 28

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account, as I can, of the ancient geography of that region, which has been much perplexed’.38 These two books, based on his on-the-spot expedition journals, were reprinted several times and were probably the most widely read publications stemming from the expedition. Several chapters of the book on Athens were devoted to a kind of ethnographic description of the present-day inhabitants. In the latter volume he also recommends both Strabo and Pausanias to travelers, both to ‘increase their own pleasure, and at the same time greatly advance the general knowledge of antient [sic] geography’. Gibbon praised the ‘very exact and pleasing description of the ruins of Laodicea’ in Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor.39 In part owing to Wood’s death in 1771, as well as Stuart’s demands that he use some of the materials for the second volume of his own Antiquities of Athens, and other reasons too numerous to detail here, the second volume, now called Antiquities of Ionia, was much delayed and was not actually published until 1797. Both volumes contain wonderful plans, maps and views of the sites studied, showing the activities of present-day inhabitants as well as the surrounding topography of the classical remains. As Bruce Redford put it, Pars ‘wishes above all to document the current state of the structure and to position it within a thoroughly legible landscape’. David Constantine called Chandler’s journey through Asia Minor and Greece ‘the classic of the age’. A late product of the expedition was Chandler’s 1802 history of Troy, whose original title was the more accurate, if more cumbersome, ‘Essay on the Troad, or, a Review of the Geography, History, and Antiquities of the Region of Troy’.40 By the time Ionian Antiquities was published, in 1769, all of the elements of a late Enlightenment scientific expedition were in place. A more or less learned society was the sponsor, and the expedition and its parameters were planned in advance by people with competence to do so. The organization employed a team of ‘scientific’ explorers (albeit for humanistic ends) who were working under clear instructions, which included keeping accurate daily records and making compass observations, methods reflecting the values of a scientific rather than an artistic community. They furnished regular reports of their activity during the process of exploratory survey, systematic recording, mapping, topographical drawing, and measure29

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ment. When they returned, they turned over all their materials to the Society as owner, and the Society worked out a plan of publication and funded it. In the words of David Constantine, one of the most astute modern writers on Greek travelers, the Dilettanti were putting the exploration and study of Greece on a new footing; they had resources and definite, expert aims…. With [Chandler] and his associates (Stuart and Revett in particular) we begin to move towards a new kind of authenticity, that of full and exact documentation, exhaustive enquiry, lasting results.41

Such methods and organization might equally mark sponsorship by the Royal Society or, in America, the American Philosophical Society. There is no great difference – difference in degree, perhaps, but not in kind – from Captain James Cook’s expeditions to the South Seas or the Lewis and Clark expedition in the United States. The only significant difference is that the humanists’ plan of operation and its execution were earlier than either. David Stoddart has dated the beginnings of modern geography as an empirical exploratory science from Cook’s initial voyage, in 1768–9. G. R. Crone, another British historian of geography, had earlier claimed that Cook’s voyages ‘bring together, for the first time on a significant scale, explorers and scientists actuated by the ideas of the enlightenment’. Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Instructions to Captain Lewis’ (1803) is the later counterpart of Robert Wood’s instruction to Chandler on the Society’s Ionian expedition. The role of the American Philosophical Society as the repository of the records of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6 and as the organization initially responsible for the publication of the results (and indeed its difficulties and delays in doing so) is comparable to those of the Dilettanti Society’s Ionian Expedition of 1764–6. Indeed, the core of the work is seen as early as the expedition of Stuart and Revett: as Bruce Redford has put it, ‘on-site investigations, accurate measurement, and scrupulous delineation: these form the heart of the undertaking’. As we have seen, Wood, for his own expedition and that guiding Stuart and Revett’s, had worked out the basic pattern of empirical

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exploratory research, which included accurate recording, measurement and mapping. The remaining results of Enlightenment scientific survey research were in place within the Society of Dilettanti by the beginning of 1764. Redford points out that the spare prose style and the requirements of daily notebooks, and other elements such as the use of compasses, were closely related to the recommended practices of the Royal Society for scientific travelers. To be sure, the object of Chandler’s study differed from those of Cook or Jefferson, and the original instructions of the Royal Society were guidance for individual travelers, not sponsored expeditions. Yet all three represent aspects of the scientific methodology of the late Anglo-American ‘Age of Enlightenment’. In the light of the organized Dilettanti expeditions (and indeed those of Cook), we can no longer claim, as Roy Porter has done, that the crossing of the North American continent by Mackenzie (1790–1) and by Lewis and Clark (1804–6) were those that ‘opened a new era of well-equipped scientific exploration’.42

THE CLASSICAL TOPOGRAPHERS: I – SIR WILLIAM GELL Two early nineteenth-century members of the Society of Dilettanti deserve special mention in this context, since they exemplify a slightly different and more clearly geographic approach to the study of ancient sites. Since Ptolemy’s day, writers on geographic method had adapted – from his primarily cartographic approach – a taxonomy according to spatial scale: ‘geographic’ for the world scale, ‘chorographic’ (or ‘chorologic’) for the regional scale, and ‘topographic’ for the local scale. With Sir William Gell, William Martin Leake, and their contemporaries and followers, the term ‘classical topography’ began to be employed to describe research seeking to identify and describe the specific localities where classical sites were situated, though both Gell and Leake regarded their work as part of the larger project of classical geographic research. The research of Leake and others coincided with the early nineteenth-century British resurgence of interest in Pausanias, the 31

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second-century ‘periegete’, or traveler, who had described the topography and monuments of Greece as they had survived in, or had meaning for, his day. Although the time period of their work falls within the periods Osborn later identified as ‘Romantic Hellenism’ and ‘Philhellenism’, Osborn had also pointed out that ‘in all three phases, each of the three elements is found’. The work of Gell, Leake and their fellow travelers neatly illustrates his point. Like Pausanias, the classical topographers were ‘boots on the ground’ men. As Richard Stoneman has put it, beside the world of the painters and poets there arose a new world of foot-weary students of the terrain…. Sextant and rule in hand, they paced out the Greek countryside, ‘settling the geography’ of Attica, identifying the site of Dium or Dodona, arguing and even coming to blows at the site of Troy….43

Stoneman pointed out that, following the appearance of Volume 3 of Antiquities of Athens in 1794, ‘the most striking characteristic’ of the next generation was its interest in the topography of Greece itself. The classical topographers of the early nineteenth century thus had somewhat different objectives from the earlier Dilettanti, whose underlying purpose was, to a substantial degree, to appropriate accurate images of classical ruins to elevate British taste and architecture. While some continued to be motivated by the desire to adapt classical structures to neo-classical taste in Britain, others moved toward ‘a disinterested appreciation of the Greek scene in both its aesthetic and historical aspects’. It was ‘the discovery of the Greek landscape’, Stoneman argued, ‘that changed the understanding of Greek history’. The primary aim of the ‘classical topographers’ was to understand the Greek countryside, to study and even to attempt to describe the sites of Greek history as they were in ancient times. As Martin Fredericksen has written of Gell, ‘he had the eye of the true topographer, for whom men and events became real when placed in their natural or geographical setting’.44 They bridged the gap between the Dilettanti expeditions (in one of which Gell had a leading role) of the second decade of the nineteenth century and the later nineteenthcentury formation of an independent discipline of classical archaeology. But the survey method, including the exact determination of

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location and position, applied to such sites as that of the battle of Marathon or the sacred sites identified by Pausanias, was carried over from the earlier pattern and made the topography itself a key part of the interpretation. Indeed, the topographic study of ancient sites continued well beyond the 1870s and was to experience a renewal of sorts in the ‘new archaeology’, emphasizing extensive geographic field survey, following World War II. (See Epilogue to this volume.) William Gell was a Cambridge graduate and Fellow who had visited the Troad with two friends (all three of them future Dilettanti) and made his first significant topographical studies there in 1801, publishing the results in folio form three years later as The Topography of Troy and its Vicinity (1804). While in Athens, he and his friends had made drawings of the Parthenon and witnessed the removal of the sculptures and other items by Lord Elgin’s men. In 1803 he visited the Ionian islands on a diplomatic mission along with Edward Dodwell, and made a special study and a map of Ithaca, the legendary home of Odysseus, which was published in 1807 as The Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca. This was the first attempt to tie the Homeric text to the topography of that island. These studies made his reputation as a classical topographer, and that same year he was elected both a member of the Society of Dilettanti and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Three years later Gell published a compilation of his Greek travels and studies under the cumbersome, but typically late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century title, The Itinerary of Greece, with a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo, and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity.45 When, in 1811, the Dilettanti planned a second sponsored expedition to Ionia, its last great archaeographic project, Gell was appointed director and, like Chandler, was given instructions and supervision by a Society committee. Taking with him John Peter Gandy and another topographical artist, Gell studied and recorded several sites in Attica and Ionia between 1811 and 1813, doing some excavating as well at Eleusis and Rhamnus. His findings were the basis for the delightfully titled Unedited Antiquities of Attica, published in 1817, which begins with a description of the topography of the Plain of Attica and a map drawn from Gell’s own surveys. Revised and expanded editions of Chandler and Revett’s two volumes of

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Antiquities of Ionia (as the new volumes were both now called), appeared in 1821 and in 1840, the latter four years after Gell’s death. Gell published another itinerary, this one of the Morea (1817), and six years later a memoir of his travels there, as well as a revised edition of The Itinerary of Greece in 1827. He had been knighted in 1814 and made a chamberlain to the Princess of Wales, accompanying her to Italy. From then on he spent more and more time there and, in 1820, became a permanent resident of Naples, together with his wealthy friend, Keppel Craven, youngest son of Baron Craven and stepson of the last Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach and Bayreuth. Ten years later Gell was appointed the Society’s ‘Minister Resident Plenipotentiary’ in Naples. With Craven and Dodwell, Gell began to make studies of the topography of Rome and the Naples area, including what is apparently the first map of the Roman countryside using basic triangulation methods, a task that took him five years to complete. His path was eased in Naples by the special interest of the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1817 and 1818 Gell published the two volumes of his best-known work, Pompeiana; The Topography and Ornaments of Pompeii, the first such undertaking in English, which went into several editions and a French translation. This late work earned him a fulsome dedication in the first edition (1834) of a much more famous book, Edward BulwerLytton’s novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. Gell’s final major publication, assisted by a Society subvention and sponsorship of an English printing of his map, was a Topography of Rome and its Vicinity with Map, which the noted historian of classical geography Edward Herbert Bunbury revised and enlarged for republication in 1846.46 Gell’s work was criticized in its own time for superficiality, dullness and lack of insight. Much of it is indeed ‘pedestrian’, in both usages of the term. Some of his contemporaries wondered, as Stoneman put it, ‘that a man should walk so far to see so little’. His 1823 Morea travel book was written after an unidentified lady had remarked to him, ‘I wish you could give us anything but your dull maps and measures.’ (He couldn’t, as the result showed, but his work was not intended for a popular audience.) The author of his ODNB entry, in noting that Gell’s books were illustrated by his own sketches, summed them up by saying that ‘While these show no great 34

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artistic power, they have been praised for their exactness and minuteness’, which was precisely the point. According to the editor of Gell’s letters, his topographic drawings of monuments and sites, marked by ‘his precision and attention to detail’, are still useful to modern archaeologists. Terence Spencer goes further, arguing that starting in 1801 Gell ‘began a great series of topographical surveys, which, but for the fact that he has been somewhat outshone by Leake, would be regarded as a remarkable contribution to classical studies’. And Andrew Wallace-Hadrill calls him a pioneering ‘topographer who mapped the area around Rome before modern cartography, and who documented antiquities accurately before modern photography’, as well as ‘the founder of the historical topography of the hinterland of Rome’.47 Young George Ticknor, visiting Rome in 1818, dined with Gell and Craven at the Archbishop of Tarentum’s residence. In his journal Ticknor wrote that Gell ‘is a man of learning and taste, but a consummate fop in person and in letters’, and condemned ‘his pretensions and showy books’. And Lord Byron wrote a famous couplet Of Dardan Tours let Dilettanti tell, I leave topography to coxcomb Gell.

In the published version, however, he replaced ‘coxcomb’ with ‘classic’, though on learning that Gell had spent only three days in the Troad, second thoughts prompted the poet to revise it yet again, substituting ‘rapid’ for ‘classic’, a gentle if accurate critique of Gell’s methods. In 1811, Byron wrote a review of Gell’s books on Ithaca and mainland Greece (actually the Argolid), criticizing their maps and the accuracy of Gell’s drawings, as well as the costliness of the Greek itinerary volume, though he did praise ‘the author’s minuteness of research as a topographer’. The former volume Byron found the more readable and, he wrote, Gell, through his interpretation of the Homeric text, had successfully identified present-day Ithaca with the home of Odysseus, though qualifying his assessment by saying ‘if [the identification] be an illusion, it is a very agreeable deception’.48 It was, indeed, both.

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THE CLASSICAL TOPOGRAPHERS: II – COLONEL WILLIAM MARTIN LEAKE William Martin Leake, known as Colonel Leake from his many years of military service, was a more thorough and accurate topographer than Gell, and both his work and his reputation have lasted much longer. Curtius says that his scientific work ‘was a lasting gain for the civilized world, and the travels which he made from 1805 to 1807 mark an epoch in our knowledge of Grecian geography’. More recently, the German classicist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, after only a bare mention of Gell, asserted that Leake ‘laid the foundations of geographical and topographical study of the whole of Greece and important parts of Asia Minor’. He also mentioned Leake’s writings on the topography of Athens and his investigations into the demes. Terence Spencer has called Leake ‘the most accurate and indefatigable of the old topographers of Greece’. Unlike Gell, Leake was also recognized as a geographer, and in 1830 he became a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society.49 Leake’s military career first took him to Aegean lands between January 1800 and September 1802. Officially he was part of a military mission to the Ottoman Empire, but he seems to have had plenty of time to travel well beyond Constantinople. During his first trip he traveled in Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt and Syria, as well as to Athens, central Greece, and the eastern Peloponnese. On his return, most of his journal notes were lost when his ship was wrecked and sank off Kithira. The ship was also carrying some of Lord Elgin’s ‘marbles’, but Leake by quick thinking rounded up a number of divers to rescue them from loss at sea. Leake also made subsequent visits to Greece and Turkey as a military liaison officer to the Ottoman Emperor, in the interest of keeping him pro-British during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as to gain accurate knowledge of Greece itself for the British government. ‘His singular activity as a traveller, great powers of observation, and his vivid realisation of the close connexion between topography and history’, wrote Sandys, ‘ensured his carrying out this instruction with complete success.’50 From 1804 to 1807, and again in 1809–10, Leake was thus able to travel extensively in Greek-settled lands. Leake began with 15 months revisiting central Greece and the Peloponnese (or the 36

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Morea, as it was then called). He then sailed to Mt Athos, and also visited Salonica (where he was briefly placed under house arrest when the Turkish government leaned toward an alliance with France) and northwest Greece. There he spent time with Ali Pasha, the strongest of the provincial governors. In 1807 Leake spent three weeks in Sicily on his way home. The following year he returned to Sicily, and went from there to northwest Greece to try to ensure that Ali Pasha would stay allied with England. In his spare time Leake explored Epirus and expanded his work in central Greece before returning to England in 1810. Upon his return he began to publish his observations, beginning with Researches in Greece in 1814. In that book Leake expressed the objective he held to in all his work: ‘a comparison of the ancient and the modern geography, by confronting the information contained in the ancient authors with the actual state of the country’. Ten years later, in his Tour of Asia Minor, Leake repeated his purpose on the title page: to compare its ancient and modern geographies. Though he was unable to produce the map of Greece he had hoped for at this time, in his subsequent work Leake included a great deal of original surveying and mapping, as well as sketch maps illustrating particular sites. Eisner has pointed out Leake’s ‘declared purpose’ was to check the accuracy of ancient authors, but he includes many observations on ‘the landscape, the manufactures, agriculture, trade, and antiquities’. Leake’s writings, Eisner concluded, ‘provide a reference guide to what may now be irrecoverable, the ancient landscape’.51 In 1814 Leake was elected a member of the Society of Dilettanti, a year following his election to the African Association and a year preceding his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He seems to have enjoyed the Dilettanti as a social and dining club, but also was interested in its serious side. In 1823 he became a member of its publications committee and did some final editorial work on Volume 3 of Antiquities of Ionia. By that time, however, the Society’s publications program was beginning to experience substantial delays and difficulties. Leake is credited with some 33 scholarly articles and nine books, most of them drawn from his Greek experiences. In 1821 he published a Topography of Athens (2nd edition, revised and expanded, 1841). It was a pioneering reconstruction, using Pausanias, other an37

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cient Greek writers, reports of travelers, and his own observations, to create the first substantial survey of that ancient city. Although Stuart and Revett had plotted the sites of many ancient classical buildings, they were primarily concerned with documenting ruins that had survived. Leake’s work differed from theirs in being primarily and more explicitly geographical. As Malcolm Wagstaff has argued, in this book Leake provided ‘a framework…for unraveling the topography of the whole city’. It thus became, Wagstaff claimed, the basis of all subsequent research on the subject.52 His two multi-volume accounts, Travels in the Morea (three volumes, 1830) and Travels in Northern Greece (four volumes, 1835), are grounded in his original journals (not in the order of Pausanias’ travels), but they were also fleshed out with careful and thorough library research in London and with a number of Leake’s own maps. Their purpose is clearly stated: to advance knowledge of ancient history and geography. They also mix visits to ancient sites with accounts of contemporary Greece just prior to its declaration of independence from Turkish rule, an action Leake strongly supported. Indeed, one of his books, published anonymously in 1825, was a Historical Outline of the Greek Revolution, which makes him a ‘philhellene’ as well as an ‘archaeographer’. Since originally the newly independent country consisted largely of the Peloponnese, his work on the Morea found a wide audience among supporters of Greek independence. Leake published On Some Disputed Questions of Ancient Geography, his last work on Greek topography, in 1857, in his eightieth year. His scholarship was widely respected, as evidenced by the outburst of popular and scholarly notice after his death in 1860. In reviewing the events of the year in May, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, Lord de Grey and Ripon, noted his death with several paragraphs of tribute, praising his ‘erudition and critical acumen’ and calling Leake a ‘model geographer’ for the accuracy of his observations and his careful weighing of the evidence in his ‘valuable and standard’ topographical studies of Greece. The German art historian, Adolf Michaelis, in 1906, went so far as to describe him as the ‘founder of the scientific geography of Greece’.53 Leake was a close student of Pausanias, possessing nine different editions of the Descriptio Graecae in his own library. But he was not 38

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an uncritical student of the periegete, and indeed in his Athens book attempted a more comprehensive cultural geography of the city than had Pausanias. Leake’s method included collecting all literary references and comparing them with the actual ground evidence, as well as examining coins, inscriptions and the writings and maps of earlier travelers, to arrive at a coherent argument for the identification of particular locations. To some degree also he made or supervised his own actual surveys, initially shown by two maps in the work on Athens, one a ‘Plan of Athens and its Harbour, with the Surrounding Country’ and the other a ‘Plan of the Antiquities of Athens’. While subsequent research has disproved some of his identifications and locations, many others, on the basis of later excavations, have been found to be quite accurate. Others are regarded as at least plausible.54 Leake’s work has remained a resource for modern scholars. Peter Levi, who made a well-regarded translation of Pausanias and added to it much current information on archaeology and topography, as a young man studying at the British School of Archaeology at Athens had been greatly excited by Leake’s work. Noting that much of the evidence Leake used has disappeared, Levi asserted ‘where it does exist he is still quite often the best guide to it’. Leake’s interpretations, Levi continued, are ‘fundamentally right, and modern archaeology…has confirmed it substantially’. In his translation of Pausanias, Levi frequently footnotes Leake’s work, and in some cases indicates that Leake was the first to identify the site. In his select bibliography Levi goes further, describing Leake as ‘the greatest of all Greek travel writers and topographic scholars’, and his work on Athens, northern Greece and the Morea as ‘required reading for students of Pausanias’. Richard Stoneman, who characterized Leake as ‘surely the most indefatigable of travellers and topographers, Pausanias only excepted’, agreed with Levi that Leake ‘was almost always right’. The geographer Malcolm Wagstaff calls him a ‘serious geographer’ and argues ‘Leake’s views are so well founded that even today they must be taken seriously’.55 As Terence Spencer has written, by the end of the eighteenth century it was still possible for those who concerned themselves with classical geography to present their ideas to the world without having seen the places they were

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writing about…. But on the whole the time had passed when the learned could write about the geography and topography of Greece as if it were a place built to music… and it was now fully appreciated that the country itself must be investigated for the light it might be expected to throw on the history and literature of the ancients.56

That this had become true by the early nineteenth century was a major contribution of the Society of Dilettanti, both through their organized expeditions and through the work of individual scientific travelers associated with it. Leake prefaced his 1835 work on Northern Greece by saying that the ‘chief objects’ of his researches had been ‘ancient history and geography’. Yet Richard Stoneman concluded his chapter on the classical topographers saying, ‘by 1832 there was no cause to puzzle any longer over major questions of ancient Greek topography. The places were known’. The problem now was, it seemed, to investigate those places more thoroughly – meaning by the methods we now associate with modern archaeology.57

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL ARCHAEOGRAPHY About the importance of the rise of the Dilettanti, and particularly their early expeditions, there can be little doubt. Their influence on classical scholarship and on British upper-class taste was recognized at the time and since, by natives and others. Wilamowitz, in 1921, contended that Robert Wood’s discovery of ‘the truthfulness of Homer’s descriptions of nature’ and the founding of the Society of Dilettanti, along with the work of Stuart and Revett, probably had a greater influence on modern classical scholarship than any eighteenth-century textual criticism, including Richard Porson’s. Rudolf Pfeiffer, writing in the 1970s, described Wood’s Homer book as ‘of decisive influence on classical studies’, and praised the Society’s folio volumes beginning in 1762 as ‘of fundamental importance for English classicism’.58

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R. M. Ogilvie, writing on the influence of the exploration of Greece by such people as Leake, points out that for much of the nineteenth century ‘It was not the subterranean discoveries of archaeology but the visible monuments of art and perception of geographical phenomena which added to the range and profundity of classical scholarship’. Yet the nineteenth century saw a decline in the Dilettanti’s programmatic role as a sponsor of comprehensive scientific expeditions. Between 1830 and 1880, according to Cust, the Society and the British Museum under another Dilettante, Charles Newton, were ‘the only two institutions which practically kept the study [of classical antiquities] alive in this country’. Although Cust was lamenting changing taste in the country when he noted ‘the old zeal had to a great extent abated’, his words could apply to the Dilettanti as well. The Society did, however, continue sporadically to publish the elaborate folio volumes containing the results of its earlier expeditions and occasionally to sponsor new ones either to revise or add to its earlier series.59 The ‘archaeo’ part of archaeography mutated by the late nineteenth century, however, into new disciplines, such as art history and classical archaeology, each with its own specialized organizations, culminating in the Society for Hellenic Studies (1879), the establishment of the British Schools at Athens (1883) and Rome (1901), and the gradual establishment of university professorships of classical archaeology and art history. As Ogilvie has written, ‘Towards the end of the [nineteenth] century archaeology began to supplant topography as the chief source of new light on the ancient past.’ Although classical topography continued as a minor specialty, largely of archaeologists and ancient historians, enabling a better understanding of ancient geography was no longer a significant part of the classicists’ program. Nor was it a part of the agenda of the newly emergent professional geography of the same period. Although topography was an important part of Anglo-American geographical study, it was largely confined to the home countries, not the traditional classical lands. As noted earlier, the fourth volume of the Antiquities of Athens series, which included previously unpublished Stuart and Revett material (including their measured drawings of Roman structures in Pola) and a memoir of Stuart, had appeared in 1816. Its editor, Joseph 41

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Woods, had been founding President of the London Architectural Society, but himself had never traveled to either Italy or Greece. William Kinnaird, a minor architect who had traveled in Greece and Italy after the Napoleonic Wars, edited the so-called Supplementary Volume, the fifth one of Antiquities of Athens, published in 1830. C. R. Cockerell was perhaps the most important of the five young architects contributing to this final volume of the ‘Athenian’ series. Cockerell had spent seven years between 1810 and 1817 traveling in classical lands. He had toured Greece, the Hellenistic sites of Asia Minor, Sicily and then Rome and Naples, where Gell introduced him to the excavations at Pompeii. As David Watkin says of him, his watercolors of Corfu and Sparta ‘reveal the impact on him of the Greek landscape as a setting for architecture’ and, like the earlier Dilettanti, he employed the panoramic technique of representation. Cockerell, already at age 22 an ardent Hellenist and described as resembling a young Apollo, on visiting Troy for the first time stripped and ran naked three times around the putative tumulus of Patroclus, as Achilles was reported to have done. But he also made important discoveries at Aegina and Bassae, making topographical drawings and reconstructions of these and also the temples at Agrigento, Sicily. His keen architect’s eye also quickly discerned the entasis in the columns of the Parthenon and elsewhere (noted also by William Wilkins), as well as the Greek use of architectural polychromy.60 Cockerell’s drawings of Bassae and Aegina were not published until 1860, three years before his death, when the Grecian mode in British architecture had long passed its peak. But the 1830 supplemental volume, entitled The Antiquities of Athens, and Other Places in Greece, Sicily, etc., included some of Cockerell’s own Dilettanti-style work, particularly his important reconstruction of the enormous temple of Zeus at Agrigento. Although the volume itself reflects the priorities of the earlier Dilettanti expeditions (and brought him membership in the Society), Cockerell was also representative of the nineteenth-century shift from scholarly reconstitution of ruins in their landscapes to collecting fragments for museums. Among Cockerell’s more celebrated (in the nineteenth century) or deplored (in the twenty-first) achievements were the excavation of the late Archaic pedimental sculptures of the temple at Aegina (subsequently bought for about 40 pounds by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria 42

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for his new Glyptothek at Munich) and the removal of the frieze of the temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae to the British Museum. (Constantine considered such massive removals to be ‘acts of rape or salvage’ whose brutality ‘still makes one wince’.) The architect William Wilkins had traveled through Greece, Asia Minor and Italy between 1801 and 1804, just after graduating from Cambridge. As editor of the Society’s publications from 1814 and its Secretary after 1822, he supervised the production of The Unedited Antiquities of Attica, authorized by the Society’s Ionian Committee in 1814. Since only four of Gell’s sites could be included in the Unedited Antiquities volume, Wilkins recommended and the Society’s Committee on Publications agreed, in 1819, to a plan for revisions of Antiquities of Ionia, and proposed to publish the remaining drawings in two more volumes. Wilkins had nearly completed work on the third volume at the time of his death in 1839; it was published the following year with Leake’s assistance.61 The remaining material was eventually divided between two volumes, primarily edited by Richard Popplewell Pullan (who died in 1888), with volume four being published only in 1881. Volume five was much delayed, appearing only in 1915. Charles Newton, also a Dilettante, was even more of a collector than Cockerell. Newton had held two diplomatic sinecures, primarily in order for him to secure classical antiquities and bring them back to London for the British Museum. After Newton was appointed Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the museum in 1861 (‘a reward, one suspects’, wrote Peter Green, ‘for acquisitions as much as scholarship’), he or his network of surrogates put the collecting aspect to the fore of archaeological expeditions. As Richard Jebb put it in his memorial address, Newton supported all enterprises ‘which could extend the knowledge of antiquity, or which promised to advance an objective always so near to his heart, the addition of new treasures to our great national collection’ [emphasis mine]. And as Jonathan Scott has pointed out in his study of British collectors, this represents a shift from the early Dilettanti priorities of ‘archaeological and topographical studies’ (i.e., archaeography), and the copying rather than the removal of inscriptions, to something closer to the earlier private collectors’ emphasis on accumulating ‘marbles’, or sculpture, for their stately homes. For Newton and his disciples, of course, it was collect43

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ing for the British Museum. When Newton was elected to the faculty of the University of London, it was as Professor of Archaeology, not of art or architecture, and certainly not of classical or ‘ancient’ geography.62 Two later nineteenth-century Dilettanti-sponsored enterprises are also worth noting. Richard Popplewell Pullan was a protégé of Newton, who had himself made excavations in 1856 at the site of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the ‘Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.’ Pullan was first sent out by the Foreign Office to measure the ruins of the Mausoleum; he also made a plan and a conjectural reconstruction of it. Pullan also made a survey of ancient sites on the island of Cos. At Cnidus he discovered an 11-ton statue of a lion atop a tomb, and sent it back to the British Museum.

3. Temple of Athena Polias, Priene

Under the Society’s auspices, in 1862 Pullan excavated the temple of Dionysus at Teos and, in 1866, the temple of Apollo Smintheus in the Troad. In 1869 he excavated the temple of Athena Polias at Priene, which had originally been visited by Chandler and Revett and partially documented in Ionian Antiquities a century earlier. Pullan 44

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cleared the site, was the first classical archaeologist to use a grid system for recording finds, and used photography in place of gouache or watercolor drawings as the basis for engravings, all of which anticipate the techniques of modern archaeology rather than the archaeography of the earlier Dilettanti. As a good Newton acolyte, Pullan also sent back to London a number of architectural and sculptural fragments from Priene, including the block of marble, still to be seen in the British Museum, noting the generous contribution made by Alexander the Great to the costs of the temple of Athena Polias. The three temples were published in the fourth volume of Antiquities of Ionia in 1881.63 The other enterprise worth noting was the Society’s sponsorship of architect Francis C. Penrose, who had an interest in astronomy as well as archaeology and architecture. In 1845 Penrose, a nephew of Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, had visited Athens after reading a pamphlet published a year earlier on the measurement of Greek buildings, and in a letter to the Trustees of the British Museum reported his preliminary findings. The Society of Dilettanti was also interested, and the following year sent Penrose to Athens again, where between October 1846 and May 1847 he made detailed measurements, proving that what appears to be parallel or straight in Greek temple architecture is actually curved or out of parallel, and is therefore an optical illusion. The Society published Penrose’s preliminary findings as Investigations of the Principles of Ancient Architecture: Optical Refinements in the Construction of Ancient Buildings in Athens, in 1851, as well as his more comprehensive Principles of Athenian Architecture, in 1856 (revised edition, 1888). Cockerell had generously given Penrose his Parthenon notes and measurements. Penrose later devised a way to date Greek temples by looking at their orientation and using his astronomical skills to determine the placement of certain stars that heralded the approach of dawn and thus gave the priests time to prepare the first ritual sacrifice of the day.64 Publication of the Antiquities of Ionia series had stretched from 1769 until 1915. The final volume actually contained some of the work of William Gell, and in that sense was a kind of bibliographical fossil from the previous century. But the great spread of publication dates allows us to compare the volumes and to follow both the shifts in emphasis and the growth of a more specialized disciplinary focus. 45

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The topographical drawing, the gouache views and engravings of the structure in its broader geographical landscape, the expeditioners and the activities of the locals that used to be depicted, the ‘mission statement’ that enjoined the participants to note the geographical features or make contributions to ‘antient’ geography, were long gone by 1915. Their absence tells us much concerning the progress of disciplinary specialization and professionalization that was so clearly a development of the later nineteenth century. Professional archaeologists and professional geographers, like the continents once a part of Gondwanaland, had drifted apart, and had both established and policed modern disciplinary boundaries. In 1897 the mountaineer and soon-to-be-President of the Royal Geographical Society, Douglas Freshfield, was elected to Dilettanti membership.65 But, by that time, geographers and classicists were no longer using the term ‘topography’ in quite the same way. The Society’s later volumes continue the measured drawings and the collection of inscriptions and images, but now often added detailed accounts of excavations. ‘Archaeography’ was dead. Modern archaeology had emerged and begun to be institutionalized, both in Britain and America, in specialized societies, schools and professorships. As James Osborne would put it, exploration had become ‘digging’.66 In other words, a geographical process, spatial and topographical exploration, had been replaced by a historical process, the excavation of particular sites to establish their histories. The early Dilettanti themselves have recently become an object of research in their own right by social historians, historians of gender and historians of art, architecture and English taste. The two recent book-length studies of the Society, each excellent in its own way, do not take the history of the Society beyond 1816, though as Kelly has rightly written ‘A history of the nineteenth-century Society of Dilettanti is wanting’, and suggests it may be that ‘the history of Enlightenment dilettantism is simply the pre-history to its full flowering in the Victorian age’.67 There is no recent history of the Society comparable to Cust’s. Much research in recent years has emphasized the more lurid aspects, such as the painting of one of the founders, Sir Francis Dashwood, dressed in a Franciscan monk’s costume and seemingly worshipping the pudendum of a nude Venus, and the like. When Sir William 46

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Hamilton, British Minister to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and a pioneer collector of Greek vases in Italy (and an early student of vulcanism), discovered artifacts of the recently discontinued cult of Priapus that had survived under a different name in the Church of Sts Cosmo and Damien in the remote village of Isernia in the Abruzzi, he bought them and sent them to his fellow Dilettanti in London. These were then published by the Society, together with a long essay on the history of priapic worship by Richard Payne Knight, one of the group’s more notorious members. As late as 1866, in the midst of Queen Victoria’s reign, the Society published a book by Thomas Wright entitled The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages.68 In the midst of more obviously appealing sights for prying historical eyes, however, an important aspect of the Society’s work risks being understudied. That is its role, if not an entirely planned one, in the formation of an early form of historical geography, that of the classical world. There has been some recognition of their role as antecedents of English architecture and of archaeology as disciplines.69 But the ‘third leg’ of their activity, the role of their sponsored and individual expeditions in the development of geography, and in particular their topographical (in map, picture and observation) and cultural-geographical analyses of the Greek world, ancient and modern, have not received the attention given the other two. In part, this is because classical geography began a long decline in the nineteenth century, to become almost solely an academic subject, though largely a subsidiary one, neither fish nor fowl. It is also a topic almost entirely un-referenced in modern surveys of the history of geography.70 Yet, as Merz suggested long ago, there was a moment when the Society of Dilettanti had a role to play in the formation of the discipline of geography. By their organization of scientific expeditions to Greece, Asia Minor and the Levant, by their development of a set of uniform directions for observations, for their emphasis on precise measurement and depiction of the site and situation of ancient ruins, and by their sponsorship of the publication of the expedition’s results (albeit at prohibitive cost, and in later years sporadically), the Dilettanti pioneered, advanced and mirrored a process shared with such scientific explorers as Captain James Cook and Sir Joseph Banks. Even though their volumes had a limited circulation, their efforts indirect47

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ly aided in the introduction of a new subject into the schools of Great Britain and the United States. That one remote source of an academic discipline might be found in the activity of a Tory dining and drinking club, whose early members had been, according to J. M. Crook, ‘mostly hedonists by instinct and scholars, if at all, only by accident’,71 is roughly comparable to Claudio Magris’ friend Amadeo’s discovery of the source of the Danube in the spring providing water to an eighteenth-century German house. No one could argue that this was the only possible source of the Danube, and no one could argue that the Dilettanti were the only possible source of the field we now call ‘historical geography’. But for those who see the world through the lenses of irony and paradox, it is peculiarly satisfying to find at least one point of origin in a society of hard-drinking libertines. Hier entspringt die klassische Geographie? Well, why not?

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2

Classical Geography in the American Colonial and Post-Revolutionary College

John Adams famously loved paradox – one reason his late letters make such lively and interesting reading. He regularly challenges conventional wisdom, worrying away at ideas, sometimes teasing such correspondents as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush with his comments. His last letter to Jefferson shows his mind-set at its most playful: ‘Public affairs go pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be….Our American Chivalry is the worst in the World. It has no Laws, no bounds, no definitions; it seems to be all a Caprice’.1 Adams’ best-known paradox is his oft-quoted statement on the American Revolution: ‘The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The [real] Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people….’ Others appear in his correspondence with Jefferson and Rush on the role of the classics in American life and education. To Rush, Adams makes the paradoxical statement that, contrary to our understanding of revolutions as sweeping away the old and making all things new, the American Revolution instead had ‘turned the thoughts and studies of men of learning to the ancient Greeks, their language, their antiquities, their forms of government’. Rush, however, remained unconvinced, holding that ‘such offal [sic] learning’ as the speaking and writing of the ‘dead languages’ should be banished from the schools.2

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As a consequence of independence, there was a rise in interest in the broadening of the scope of classical studies. This appears to be so for at least three reasons. First, it is clearly related to a search for appropriate classical models of republican government by the ‘Founding Fathers’ themselves. A number of important studies in recent years have attempted to assess the importance of classical reading and study for the Founding Fathers as they attempted to map out the contours of a new national government. Second, given that Americans were looking to the classical past for usable models, the classics become a form of ‘useful knowledge’, which resulted in breaking open the former nearly exclusive focus on the teaching of the classical languages. This opened up a space for classics in translation, for ancient history, and for ancient geography. Third, leaders in politics and educational reform, such as Adams, Jefferson, Rush, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Pierre S. Du Pont de Nemours and others, were thus encouraged to defend the place of the classics in the education of the rising generation of the early republic. It was vital, if republican values were to be maintained, that the young citizens-to-be should absorb that ‘useful knowledge’. Mastery of the Latin and Greek languages would, however, be irrelevant to the majority of future citizens not planning to enter the ‘learned professions’.3 On the smaller canvas of geography, one can see in this shift why there was growing interest in the study and teaching of the geography (and indeed the history) of the ancient world. The relations of ancient history and geography to the study and teaching of the classical disciplines, now redefined as ‘useful knowledge’, became a part of the new republican agenda. In the process, geography as a college subject was enlarged from its earlier role as a branch of ‘mixed mathematics’, closely related to surveying, cartography, astronomy and navigation. In part, at least, it temporarily recaptured its Renaissance role as a study with renewed relevance for history (this largely meant ancient history), for classical literature and for other humanistic disciplines. This chapter examines that process as it plays out under Benjamin Franklin and his successors in Philadelphia, and its effect on the programs of the academic institutions they founded or staffed: the Academy and College of Philadelphia, the new and publicly controlled 50

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University of the State of Pennsylvania, the reconstituted College of Philadelphia now ‘modernized’ as the University of Pennsylvania, and Dickinson College. More briefly, it will look at similar developments at the other colonial college suppressed during the American Revolution, King’s College in New York, and its reincarnation as a new institution, Columbia College, which also incorporated classical geography as part of a republican program. First, however, we need take a brief look at the colonial background. What was the role of geography in the colonial colleges? Where and why was geography taught? What was its content? And what changed (if Adams’ observation is correct) as a result of the American Revolution?

COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES References to geography in the colonial college curriculum are scarce and scattered. Perhaps the earliest survey to include them was Samuel Miller’s Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, published in 1803. The geographer, William Warntz, searched the archives of the nine colonial colleges (and a few later ones) for references to the teaching of geography. Theodore Hornberger’s brief book on science in the American college before 1800 contains some material on geography. Louis M. Snow’s venerable (1907) history of the early American college curriculum reprints a number of early documents listing subjects and years these became required. There are scattered references to geography in studies of the curriculum and in histories of individual colleges.4 From these, we discern that some kind of geography was taught in the colonial college, but instruction was most often linked to instruction in ‘natural philosophy’ rather than history or classics. The context was a division of knowledge called ‘mixed mathematics’, a term that included ‘general geography’ and astronomy, often linked in the colonial college with the practical activity of surveying and mapping. ‘General geography’, a term apparently coined by Bartholomaus Keckermann and made more widely known by Bernhard Varenius in his Geographia Generalis (1650), referred to the whole earth and, large-

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ly, to its physical characteristics (such as size, shape, seasons, distribution of lands and waters, etc.).5 The term ‘special geography’, which referred to the characteristics of the humanized earth, and was thus less capable of scientific generalization (e.g., the distribution of states), was usually included as a kind of appendix of the more scientific parts. When it was taught, then, geography in the colonial college would most likely be taught by the Professor of Mathematics or of Natural Philosophy, or perhaps by tutors. In its earliest incarnation, in the seventeenth century, geography would probably have been virtually synonymous with ‘the use of the globes’, terrestrial and celestial. Except perhaps for scattered references in classical language recitations, or in books of Greek and Roman antiquities, classicists would not have taught the geography of the classical world as a subject separate from the classical texts in which some geographical information was embedded. If we look at the records surviving from the colonial colleges (sometimes a difficult task owing to numerous fires), we find that at Harvard, one of the best-documented institutions, a donation of celestial and terrestrial globes in 1665 apparently spurred the incorporation of a little geography into the program. There were travel accounts, standard cosmographies such as that of Peter Heylyn, and atlases in the college library. More importantly, the collection included editions of Varenius’ Geographia Generalis by Isaac Newton and others. A description of New England to 1689 indicates that geography was regularly offered at Harvard at that time. The earliest surviving official account of the Harvard curriculum, in 1723, indicates that Harvard students recited ‘a system of Geography’ in the third year. Instruction in geography, along with the use of the globes and ‘the Division of the World into its various Kingdoms’, as well as map use, was assigned to the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy when that chair was established in 1727. By 1743 Patrick Gordon’s Geographical Grammar, a British geographical compilation, was being prescribed for geography instruction. William Guthrie’s New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar superseded it in 1774, when it was also noted that geography was a part of the instruction of the freshman class.6

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Similar developments occurred at the other colonial colleges. By the second half of the eighteenth century, most colleges appear to have offered ‘a little geography and elementary mathematics for the sophomores’, as Theodore Hornberger has written. At Yale, geography probably started with the ‘use of the globes’, and by 1745, under President Thomas Clap, geography was being ‘recited’ by sophomores. Under the next president, Ezra Stiles, in the late 1770s the sophomores studied Guthrie’s book, until Jedidiah Morse’s New American Geography replaced it in 1787. Stiles, as a minister, had taught young men in his congregation ‘Scripture geography’, and there is some indication he may have seen a place for geography among the humanities. Edmund Morgan, in his excellent biography of Stiles, quotes him in a letter to a Yale tutor in 1775 as ‘indifferent’ to poetry, drama and novels, but favorable to what Stiles called ‘the higher and more valuable Branches of the belles-lettres, such as geography, history, speaking, and accurate composition in the English language’. This is an interesting grouping of studies, and foreshadows later developments.7 Stiles’ grouping geography with the humanities is rare in colonial higher education, however. Other colleges followed the Harvard and earlier Yale pattern: globes to Gordon to Guthrie to (after the Revolution) Morse. At the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) a student letter written in 1750 indicates some use of Isaac Watts’ First Principles of Geography and Astronomy Explained, along with Gordon’s Geographical Grammar. In the following year the Philadelphia cartographer, Lewis Evans, gave 12 lectures on problems of natural philosophy, including general geography. College of New Jersey students also used Benjamin Martin’s 1747 natural philosophy text, Philosophia Britannica, described as ‘a New and Comprehensive System of the Newtonian Philosophy, Astronomy, and Geography’. Under President John Witherspoon, a recruiting pamphlet of 1772 notes geography as a sophomore subject, offering ‘a compleat [sic] system of Geography, with the use of the globes’. Gordon’s text continued to be used in Princeton until after the Revolution, perhaps as late as 1794. In 1803, however, geography became associated with languages and Roman antiquities under the Professor of Languages and tutors. Between 1829 almost to the appointment of the Swiss geographer, Arnold Guyot, in 1854, geography was not offered in the 53

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college program, though along with English grammar and arithmetic ‘Geography, ancient and modern’ was an admissions requirement. The exception, beginning in 1853, was a course in Biblical history and geography, required of first-year students.8 Geography was offered at King’s College (now Columbia University) from its beginnings in 1754 until its closure during the Revolution. The first curriculum, appearing in the New York Gazette in 1754, listed geography and history among those studies ‘useful for the Comfort, Convenience, and Elegance of life’. Geography (and Chronology) continued to be offered at King’s during the first year throughout the college’s brief life. In addition, classicist Leonard Cutting lectured on Dionysius Periegetes’ Description of the World. Mathematician, Daniel Treadwell, taught geography in the upper grades and set his students a problem in how to construct maps. Scattered evidence in the other colonial colleges suggests similar developments.9 This quick review of the existing general literature suggests no special attention to the geographies of the classical world in the colonial college, except possibly for place names embodied in classical texts. Colonial geography, by and large, did not lay a foundation for later developments. Rather, post-revolutionary developments in higher education, insofar as they affected geography (and indeed history) during the period immediately following independence from Britain, saw a modest, short-lived development in the discipline in America, a Renaissance-like relation with history and classics. Rather than, as with the Dilettanti, a primarily exploratory emphasis, in the new American republic, historical geography was a more explicitly academic enterprise. ‘Classical geography’ was developed as an educational subject, a part of the new emphasis on ‘educating Republicans’. Adams’ paradox therefore appears to be a robust one, at least so far as it concerns the history of geography.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND GEOGRAPHY Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had more in common than their political activity as ‘Founding Fathers’. Among other distinctions, both are included as geographical authors in Ben Smith and 54

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James Vining’s bibliographical guide to early American writers on geography, American Geographers, 1784–1812.10 What grounds are there for thinking of Franklin as a contributor to American geography? Franklin himself, according to a conversation recorded by Benjamin Rush, was self-taught in geography. It is certain that, in 1789, Franklin ‘highly approved of learning Geography in early life’, recalling that he had taught it to himself by examining the four large wall maps in the parlor of his home ‘while his father was at prayers’. For Franklin, then, geography was initially about maps and mapping. For the 2 July 1722 issue of his brother’s newspaper, the New-England Courant, Franklin compiled and published a list of books in the newspaper’s library. The list included several geography-related books, including Pliny’s Natural History, Hermann Moll’s Geography, Peter Heylyn’s Cosmography, George Sandys’ Travels and Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth. In the first issue of Franklin’s own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin opined that a newspaper publisher should be ‘well acquainted with geography’. In his first plans for what became the American Philosophical Society, in 1743, Franklin specified that one of the resident members should always be a geographer, by which he apparently meant map-maker, since the first geographer, William Parsons, was Surveyor-General of Pennsylvania. The following year Franklin published a list of nearly 600 diverse volumes for sale at the Philadelphia post office ‘for ready money only’. The list contains a volume containing ‘67 curious maps of ancient Geography, both sacred and profane’. It also includes Edward Wells’ ‘Maps for the Greek and Latin Classicks’, a revised edition (with new maps) of Gordon’s Geography, several books of classical antiquities, Charles Rollin’s four-volume treatise on teaching the belleslettres, and a pair of 16-inch globes by Senex, which Franklin described as ‘the best Globes extant’.11 Smith and Vining name nine of Franklin’s extensive publications as ‘clearly geographic in nature’, including his short pieces on the formation and shape of the Earth, meteorology, magnetism and population as related to commerce. Only two (one listed and one not) will be treated here. One was his theory of northeastern storms. Franklin had been recording data about thunderstorms since 1734, and was extremely disappointed that an eclipse of the moon occur55

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ring in October 1743 was obscured in Philadelphia by a hurricane. In reading newspaper accounts from other cities, however, he noticed that, despite the fact that the hurricane winds in Philadelphia were blowing from the northeast, several sites northeast of Philadelphia, including Boston, had seen the eclipse clearly. For Franklin, this paradox pointed to a more general scientific problem, and he began collecting data on the movement of hurricanes from newspapers and from correspondents in various other colonies. He found that Atlantic hurricanes originated in the southwest. As he expressed it in a letter to Jared Eliot in 1747, ‘though the course of the wind is from northeast to southwest, yet the course of the storm is from southwest to northeast’. His employee, the cartographer-geographer Lewis Evans, was working on a map of the middle colonies, and it was on that famous map, issued in 1749, that Franklin’s theory of the movement of storms was first published, anonymously. Not content with simply describing the movement, Franklin also proposed an explanation: that the warmer air in the south, rising, pulled in strong cooler winds further north, and that the existence of the lengthy Blue Ridge forced the warmer air masses further toward the seacoast. Here he incorporated the climate, the ocean, the mountains and the sea coast into one explanation of colonial weather patterns. Much later, this project was the basis for geographer William Morris Davis’ characterization of Franklin as the first American meteorologist and the father of weather prediction in America.12 Franklin’s second major contribution to geography was his research on the Gulf Stream, first published in chart form around 1770. This was calculated, in typical Franklin fashion, by his first noting an extraordinary phenomenon, then using folk sources, such as the reports of Nantucket whalers, as clues to the nature of the stream. Franklin was Deputy Postmaster General for the colonies from 1753 to 1774. His research, then, had stemmed from a practical problem, the delay of ships carrying mail across the Atlantic on their westerly voyages, and was to that extent a utilitarian project. But Franklin went about it in a scientific way, forming a hypothesis and then verifying it, using voyage records and thermometric observations to help him arrive at his conclusions. Among other things, he had compared the temperatures of the Gulf Stream with that of adjacent At56

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lantic waters. Then, of course, he mapped it, in 1768, 1782 and 1786. He then published the results in both text and map, after having tested his hypothesis instrumentally in the natural world. Franklin communicated his results in a published letter, again characteristic of the science of his time. His letter of August 1785 to Alphonsus le Roy, a member of several French scientific organizations, assured that it would be read in Europe. Its publication in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society the following year (along with his third chart) ensured that it would be widely read by Americans interested in science. His chart of the Gulf stream was separately published in Paris in 1790, and at the same time Franklin had printed in Boston a set of guides to navigators from Newfoundland to Cape Henry.13

FRANKLIN AS COMMUNITY EDUCATOR Franklin placed a great deal of emphasis on self-education, on mutual education, and on a broader definition of what constituted education for the contemporary urban man. The steps that led to the founding of what has become the University of Pennsylvania were gradual, but looking back we can see that they formed a logical sequence. His own reading, which was substantial, included such esteemed writers on education as John Locke and Charles Rollin, from whom he borrowed selectively to form his argument. Franklin realized the practical problems of fostering educational development as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia, a city that, unlike his native Boston, had no good booksellers, and where most books had to be imported from England. In 1727 he founded a society for the discussion of moral, political and scientific questions called the Junto, in which participants had to read and to write essays. This led, in 1731, to the founding of the first subscription library in the American colonies, a venture that became the Library Company of Philadelphia. Its collection, initially formed from the books owned by its members, was designed for the education of ‘mechanics’, the artisan class to which Franklin himself belonged. Its first book order included five volumes of Greek and Latin authors, a five-volume atlas, and 57

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Gordon’s Geographical Grammar. Non-subscribers were added to the list of those eligible to borrow books, and in this way it became a true public library for the city.14 Franklin was one of the original subscribers to Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, and is listed as having purchased it for the ‘Library at Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, Esq.,’ which is to say, for the Library Company. While in London as agent for several colonies, Franklin, as former Deputy Postmaster General, had become friendly with the notorious libertine and co-founder of the Society of Dilettanti, Sir Francis Dashwood, who in 1776 became the British PostmasterGeneral. Dashwood, characterized by a Franklin biographer as a ‘seasoned old sinner’, had helped to get Stuart and Revett’s work subsidized and published and had taken a leading role in other early Dilettanti expeditions, as we have seen. Franklin made three lengthy visits to Dashwood’s estate, West Wycombe Park, for which Nicholas Revett had designed the West Portico and other buildings. Franklin also accompanied Dashwood to Oxford for the installation of Lord North as Chancellor of the university in 1773, as well as to the dedication of a Unitarian chapel in London the following year. Dashwood asked Franklin to assist on Dashwood’s improbable project to revise and abridge the Book of Common Prayer. Although Franklin’s abridgements of the Psalms and the Catechism were extensive, Dashwood ultimately made little use of them. After Dashwood had published his revised Book of Common Prayer privately in 1773, Franklin, a Deist, sent a copy to his daughter, Sarah Bache, who gave it to her pastor, the Reverend William White, Rector of Christ Church, Philadelphia, and eventually the first Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. In this way, it became one of the sources consulted in the preparation of the American Book of Common Prayer, first published in Philadelphia in 1789. Thus not only did Franklin become a conduit for colonial knowledge of the Society of Dilettanti and its expeditions, but also of Dashwood’s and other contemporary revisions of Anglican liturgies.15 Franklin was not himself learned in the classical languages, and he was a critic of excessive emphasis on their teaching except for those preparing for one of the ‘learned professions’. He had spent less than one year in Boston’s Public Latin School before his father pulled him out and sent him to a private instructor in writing and arithmetic. Franklin had learned some Latin 58

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on his own, after teaching himself French, Italian and Spanish. His own experience suggested, he argued, that teaching Latin first as undergirding the modern Romance languages was the wrong method. Students should learn modern languages first and then, if they had need of it, the classical ones. In his youth in Boston he had satirized the classical curriculum of Harvard College in No. 4 of his famous ‘Silence Dogood’ letters, and in 1789 he told Rush that Latin and Greek were ‘the quackery of literature’.16 Franklin did not oppose the teaching of classical texts in translation, however. In his Autobiography, he acknowledges his lifelong debt to Xenophon’s writings on Socrates. In common with several other Founding Fathers (including, to a degree, Rush), he thought that instruction in the classics, in ancient history and presumably in ancient geography as well, was essential for all citizens of the new republic. But these works would be taught in English, so that a greater proportion of the rising generation, the children of farmers, mechanics and tradesmen (like Franklin himself), not just the learned professionals, would be grounded in a knowledge of classical cultures and, it was to be hoped, of virtue and republican government.17 This, of course, brings us to the program Franklin envisioned for the Academy of Philadelphia and, eventually, the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1740s Franklin had begun to think of a permanent organization that would extend the reach of public education. Moved by the preaching of George Whitefield, Franklin and others had organized a fund to build a hall for non-denominational services. In it, in 1740, the trustees opened a charitable school for the children of the poor. Three years later Franklin sketched out a plan for an English academy, but set aside the draft for six years. After consulting with other members of the Junto, he issued it as ‘Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania’, looking toward an academy that would contain ‘Maps of all Countries’ and globes among its holdings. In this document, Franklin quotes Locke on the necessity of early exposure to geography, chronology and history. Franklin would have students carefully read translations of Greek and Roman historians as well as modern histories of ancient Greece and Rome. In his proposals for geography, Franklin stressed map reading and the requirement to point out on a map the great historic sites and ‘to give their old and new Names’. That is, the students 59

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should learn both ancient and modern geography, after the method of Ortelius’ maps. When the academy opened, provision had been made for maps, and the first order for the new library included the writings of Latin and Greek authors and also maps, one of which was a map of the world.18 In order to garner more widespread support, Franklin’s final proposal embraced an academy of two equal parts, an English School and a Latin School. Under its constitution, each was required to teach history, geography and chronology. In 1750 he drafted a proposal for the English School that included history and geography at the fourth level. At the sixth or final level he would again have studies in history and geography, as well as the use of the globes (taught by the mathematics master) and translations of Greek and Latin classics. But in Franklin’s mind all this was initially in aid of a practical education, in English, with heavy emphasis on science and career preparation.19 His hiring of William Smith to head the Academy would, however, eventually lead to strong differences of opinion between the two men. Against Franklin’s wishes, Smith increased the emphasis on the Latin School and stacked the Board with conservative men of wealth who had more traditional ideas about the purpose of an academy. That is, it should primarily prepare students for college, and therefore place its principal curricular emphasis on the Latin and Greek languages. The library gradually reflected this approach by increasing purchases of classical literature in the original languages and of maps of classical antiquity. In 1756 Franklin was removed as President of the Board of Trustees in favor of a conservative clergyman, Richard Peters, a ‘learned professional’. It was not until 1789, when the original college charter was restored as the foundation of the present University of Pennsylvania, that the aged Franklin, then President [i.e., governor] of Pennsylvania, once again became President of the Board of Trustees.20

EARLY GEOGRAPHY IN THE COLLEGE OF PHILADELPHIA Franklin is properly credited with the origins of the University of Pennsylvania through his founding of the Junto and subsequently of 60

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the Academy of Philadelphia. But the elevation to college level of part of what was an ill-knit collection of largely separate schools is largely the work of two other founders. Both William Smith and Francis Alison were leading scholars, educators and clergymen. All three men advocated geography in the curriculum of the academy and subsequent college. But it was Smith and Alison who, in 1755, secured a college charter, and with it the authority to grant degrees.21 Smith, a Scotsman from Aberdeen and, after 1753, an Anglican priest, had emigrated to New York in 1751 and, two years later, published a widely read utopian pamphlet, A General View of the College of Mirania. This publication had caught Franklin’s attention and had led him to invite Smith to be Provost of the new Academy. The idealism of Mirania, which among other things advocated learning surveying and mapping in connection with mathematics, and the use of the globes as a part of astronomy, was to be somewhat tempered by events. The Latin School became Smith’s leading concern. Smith’s curriculum included geography, however, both in the third year of the Latin School and the first year of a division called the Philosophy School (the unit that became the College in 1755). In the latter, the geography text was Varenius’. In 1779, the charter of the College of Philadelphia was revoked and a new institution, the University of the State of Pennsylvania (of which more later) was established as a wholly state-owned institution. Ten years later, the University of Pennsylvania saw its charter and property restored, though until 1791 both weak institutions existed uneasily side-byside.22 From the standpoint of the history of academic geography in America, Alison is the more notable figure. The geographical literature attributes to Johann Daniel Gros of Columbia, his successor John Kemp, who had Gros’ geographical professorship added to his own in 1795, and Robert Davidson, at Dickinson College from 1785, the honor of being the first American professors to have the word ‘Geography’ in their titles.23 Yet Alison was Professor of Classics, Logic, Metaphysics, Geography and Moral Philosophy for the entire existence of the College of Philadelphia, from its charter in 1755 to 1779.24 The Ulster-born Alison had studied at the University of Glasgow and, after graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 1732, emi61

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grated to America in 1735 and became a Presbyterian minister. Initially a private tutor in Maryland, he removed to New Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1743 and opened a grammar school there, probably the first in the middle colonies and a forerunner of the present University of Delaware. President Stiles of Yale regarded Alison as the finest classical scholar in the American colonies. In 1752 Alison was asked to head the Latin School of the Academy of Philadelphia. When the College was chartered in 1755, he became Smith’s ViceProvost, as well as serving as assistant minister of the ‘Old Light’ [conservative] First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.25

4. Francis Alison

Although ‘classical geography’ was not yet identified as a separate area of study, either at Philadelphia or elsewhere (a development that seems rarely to occur in America until the early nineteenth century), 62

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in the understanding of educators on both sides of the Atlantic the historical geography of the ancient world was still regarded as within the province of the geographer. In his atlases, Ortelius had used the motto ‘Historiae oculus Geographia’. Richard Hakluyt, the first Reader in Geography at the University of Oxford, in his lectures in 1587 also referred to geography as the ‘oculus’, or eye, of history, which in the Latin grammar schools meant ancient history. (In Hakluyt’s betterknown formulation, geography was considered the right eye of history, and chronology the left.) Joseph Priestley, in his lectures on history, regarded it similarly, as did many other writers on the teaching of history.26 According to a letter of Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Temple Franklin, who entered the College of Philadelphia in the autumn of 1775 (though did not remain long), geography was taught three times a week to first-year students. Given Alison’s standing in the classics and his other duties in the humanities, his geography and history teaching in the new college was largely about the ancient world. Of the required textbooks for the first year, four were either history or geography: Livy, Thucydides, Dionysius Periegetes’ Geography, and Varenius. Alison is thus the forerunner of a disciplinary development that largely took place after his death on 28 November 1779, just one day after the suppression of the College of Philadelphia by the Pennsylvania legislature.27

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE NEW UNIVERSIT(IES) OF PENNSYLVANIA After the charter of the College of Philadelphia was suspended in 1779, the publicly controlled University of the State of Pennsylvania replaced the institution Franklin had called into being. As its name implies, the new institution was to be wholly under the control of the Republican state legislature, who appointed new and presumably politically safer Trustees. The authorities also replaced Smith, the Anglican priest suspected of Tory leanings (or at least as being too neutral for the times), with a new Provost, John Ewing, a former student of Alison. Benjamin Rittenhouse, the distinguished physical 63

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scientist and astronomer who had constructed the famous ‘Rittenhouse orrery’, was made Vice-Provost and Professor of Astronomy. Among his other duties, Rittenhouse was charged with giving instruction in geography and ‘practical astronomy’, as well as sharing instruction in physical science and mathematics with Provost Ewing. Given this mandate and person, geography must have been understood in the new University of the State of Pennsylvania as related to astronomy, and thus close to Varenius’ concept of ‘general geography’. However, Rittenhouse resigned in April 1782 to become a Trustee, and there is no evidence that he ever gave any lectures, in geography or any other subject. Indeed, his nephew, Benjamin Smith Barton, himself later a professor at the university, denied that his uncle had ever lectured on any of the proposed subjects. Neither the Trustees’ minutes nor contemporary newspapers mention any Rittenhouse lectures.28 During their first year the new Trustees appointed a faculty committee to develop a plan of faculty and instruction. Although the committee’s report seems to have envisioned separate professorships in history, chronology and geography, the plan as adopted by the Trustees in July 1782 created only seven professorships, including one in Latin and Greek and one in history, apparently the first such professorship in any American college. James Davidson was assigned the classics chair, and his brother Robert, who had taught at the older institution since 1773, became the Professor of History. Although not named as such in the chair, the fields of chronology and geography were also assigned to Robert Davidson. So, until his resignation in 1784, geography at the University of the State of Pennsylvania was taught under the aegis of history, not mathematics or astronomy.29 The original college charter was restored in 1789, and the resulting University of Pennsylvania became re-privatized. In 1790 it was noted that geography, chronology and history were not being taught, and probably had not been taught since Davidson’s departure. The post1789 Trustees, unlike their predecessors, did not set up a faculty committee to plan the new program, but reduced the professorships to six. History was no longer a separate professorship, but its teaching was assigned to the Professor of Moral Philosophy. The Professor of Natural Philosophy, among his other duties, was to teach ‘so much of astronomy as applies to navigation and geography’. The Professor of 64

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Mathematics would teach history and geography (along with arithmetic, bookkeeping and ‘practical mathematics’) to the boys in the lower forms of the English school. The Professor of Belles-Lettres was to teach history and geography, among other subjects, to the upperlevel boys. The Professor of Classics was given charge of the Latin School, and it is possible that some classical geography and ancient history were taught in conjunction with classical languages, as they had been under Alison.30 The reorganization seems in some ways a harking back to the earlier College of Philadelphia. Scattered information suggests that geography continued to be fragmented among the various departments of learning. Warntz found that in 1795 ‘geography and other branches of mathematical learning’ were taught under the rubric of the mathematical program, but all BA students in the ‘Philosophical School’ (or College) were required to master the ‘elements of geography’ as well as advanced mathematics. New rules in 1811 specified that the Professor of Languages give instruction in ‘ancient and modern geography’, along with Latin, Greek and history. Third-year or senior students underwent a review course in geography ‘with the use of the globes and the construction of maps’, taught by the Professor of Natural Science and Mathematics. Six years later, it appears that firstyear students took geography and history with the Professor of Moral Philosophy. In 1820 ‘elements of geography’ appears as a requirement for admission, though first-year students got a review course in geography and second year students sat under the Professor of Mathematics for instruction in ‘maps and dialling’.31 In 1830–1 a course of lectures on ‘ancient and modern geography’ was given in the sophomore year but was soon dropped. In the 1840s, ancient geography and modern geography became joined on the entrance exam. Samuel Butler’s Atlas of Ancient Geography was then prescribed for freshmen, replaced in 1849 by Arnold and Putz’s text in ancient history and geography, only to be dropped in 1853. In 1875, entering students were told that they would be examined on ‘such portions of Ancient Geography as are necessary to the intelligent study of Ancient History: particularly, the chief states, cities, rivers, mountain-chains, and adjacent waters and islands, of Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy’. Three years later, the faculty suggested that entering students use Philadelphia publisher S. Augustus Mitchell’s Ancient 65

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Atlas to prepare for that portion of the examination. Although seniors heard a series of lectures on physical geography until 1876, ‘Ancient and Modern Geography’ continued solely as an admissions requirement until the geography admissions examination itself was eliminated in 1887.32

PENNSYLVANIA AND COLUMBIA: TWO REVOLUTIONARY COLLEGES The experience of the University of Pennsylvania was somewhat replicated elsewhere from the 1780s onward. Like the College of Philadelphia, King’s College in New York, founded in 1754, was seen as too Anglican (and too Loyalist), and was closed down during the American Revolution. These two were the only ones of the nine colonial colleges, then, to have been closed down and established as new institutions after the war. In 1784 the former King’s College was reconstituted and reopened as the new (and safely republican) Columbia College. Among other signs of its modernity, the Trustees created a Professorship of Geography and one of German, both held by a European-trained German Reformed minister, Johann (or John) Daniel Gros (or Gross). Gros’ compensation came from his geography chair; the German chair was designated an ‘extra professorship’, carrying no salary and supported solely by fees from students who elected such training. In 1787, Gros was also made Professor of Moral Philosophy in order to teach the standard senior moral philosophy course, since the new President of Columbia, who would ordinarily teach such a course, was not an ordained clergyman. In his geography persona, Gros was to lecture three times a week to the sophomore class on the following: a Description of the Globe in respect of all general matters. Rise, extent and fall of ancient empires; chronology as low as the fall of the Roman Empire; present state of the world; origin of the present States and Kingdoms – their extent, power, commerce, religion, and customs; modern chronology.33

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It is clear that Gros’ comprehensive mandate included Varenius’ ‘general geography’, but was concentrated to a larger degree on ‘special geography’, with the convention of geography and chronology as the two ‘eyes’ of history very much to the fore. Given that geography was to be made relevant to both ancient and modern history, classical geography had to be a part of his task. As Herbert Baxter Adams later described the course, ‘This was history with an ancient and geographical basis’. When Gros retired in 1795, his Professorship of Geography fell to young John Kemp, already Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Under those circumstances, it is likely that Kemp placed greater emphasis was on the first part of Gros’ charge, the ‘description of the globe in respect of all general matters’, with perhaps some expansion into the ‘use of the Globes’ and cartography.34 From 1801 Columbia required second-year students to study modern geography and third-year students ancient geography, taught by the Professor of Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chronology, and Geography (Kemp), according to Samuel Miller’s account in 1803. By 1810, however, Columbia evidently contemplated relieving Kemp in these last fields by appointing a Professor of Geography and History, whose duties were to teach geography to the first-year class and ‘Geography, History, and Chronology’ to the next two. In the following year, however, this professorship (perhaps never filled) was dropped and the teaching of geography continued to be assigned to the Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Kemp, however, died prematurely in 1812. In 1821 ‘ancient and modern’ geography was offered for the first two years, but seems to have disappeared temporarily by 1825. However, the visiting Swedish educator, P. J. Siljestrom, reported that the first-year program in 1849 included ‘Roman and Greek antiquities, ancient history and geography’, with the last two being repeated in the Sophomore year. Until at least 1862 one professor ‘taught German, ancient history, Greek and Roman antiquities, and ancient geography’. Historical geography (type unspecified) was still required of Columbia undergraduates through ‘daily drill upon text-books and hand-books of history’ during the early 1880s.35 To sum up, as the experience of Pennsylvania and Columbia suggests, geography as a discipline in the post-Revolutionary period was 67

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offered under several guises, often fragmented and incoherent as to its content and placement. At certain times and places it incorporated elements of the early Enlightenment, such as the use of the globes, as well as the tie with ‘practical mathematics’ or with astronomy. At times it reflected post-Revolutionary and early nineteenth-century emphases on geography as one of the ‘eyes’ or ‘handmaidens’ of history, including explicit and often short-lived instruction in ancient history and geography, increasingly taught as freestanding courses. Then, as in other universities, all but a few elements of geography were downgraded by the 1830s to the status of an admissions requirement. When geography was revived at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s, however, it would be under the aegis of the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, linked neither with history, classics, mathematics, natural history, or astronomy, but with economics. In 1919, an alumnus of and professor at the Wharton School, J. Russell Smith, migrated to Columbia to establish a department of geography within the School of Business there. In all but a few cases, the humanistic link with classics and history that some Founding Fathers had stressed had long since faded from view.

BENJAMIN RUSH, ROBERT DAVIDSON AND DICKINSON COLLEGE Benjamin Rush, physician, medical school professor and, as a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, a ‘Founding Father’, was also a college founder as well as a tireless advocate of the teaching of geography. Rush was the major force in establishing the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania as the leading such school in the new United States. Like Franklin, he was also one of the most prominent post-Revolutionary critics of the teaching of classical languages. Rush shared with other Founders the notion that American students ‘should apply themselves to ancient and modern history so they might discover the ways by which the science of government might be perfected’. But Rush, a conservative Presbyterian, also had religious and moral objections to the teaching of classical languages. He was against, he wrote, exposing students to ‘the histories of the incests 68

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and rapes and worship of heathen gods, with which the Greek and Roman classics abound, and which, to the disgrace of reason and religion, form a part of the education of boys in Christian countries’.36 Rush had studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in the 1760s and there had come in contact with prominent Scottish realists. Unlike both Franklin and Jefferson, Rush was a critic of Deism and of contemporary moral philosophy courses, advocating in their stead a course on the Christian religion as the foundation of true Republicanism. He advocated the use of the Bible as a school book in the early grades, and even went so far as to be ‘skeptical to all history except to that which is contained in the Bible’. Such an idiosyncratic combination of ideas was to affect the role he played as an educational reformer and as the principal founder of Dickinson College in the 1780s.37 Rush held that geography should be universally taught at early stages. Like Jefferson, he hoped for a free primary school in each township supported by taxation, and at times advocated an academy in each county, to be partially funded by land grants. His philosophical reliance on sense-experience and the importance of training the ‘faculty’ of memory in the early stages of life led him to propose a primary curriculum of geography along with natural and civil history. These would orient the student early in life ‘into the knowledge of the globe on which he exists’. Geography should be taught with extensive visual aids – cards, globes and maps – and along with reading and discussion these would help ‘fix [geography] upon his memory’ at an early age. ‘Geography is a simple science’, he argued, ‘and accommodated to the capacity of a boy under 12 years of age’. Rush was greatly annoyed, however, when one of his sons, studying Ovid, asked his father a basic geographical question: whether the Nile River and Egypt really existed. Rush wrote heatedly to his friend Adams that the question had summed up all that was wrong with the teaching of classics in the United States.38 Although the essay in which the quoted phrases occur uses the term ‘boy’, Rush had previously argued that girls, too, should study geography and chronology, to ‘enable a young lady to read history, biography and travels, with advantage’. These studies would then qualify her both for living in the world and also ‘to be an agreeable 69

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companion for a sensible man’. Geography up to that time had been a subject largely read by boys, so Rush’s proposals represented an unusual advance in the education of young women.39 Even for those undertaking the study of classical languages in preparation for the learned professions, Rush argued, learning to read the classics made it ‘absolutely necessary that a boy should first be instructed in history and geography. Let him read an account of the rise, progress and fall of the Greek and Roman nations, and examine upon maps the countries they inhabited and conquered, and their languages will soon become interesting to him’. In other words, to Rush, classical geography and ancient history are fundamental to the student’s engagement with classical languages and literatures.40 Rush’s plan for higher education in Pennsylvania, published in 1786, envisioned a system of four colleges based on the Scottish higher education system and distributed around the state, plus one university in the capital city (then still Philadelphia). The four colleges were to be located in Philadelphia, Carlisle, Manheim and, eventually, Pittsburgh. In Rush’s view, these should be denominational institutions, to avoid confusing the students with religious ideas and practices different from those in which they had been brought up. This meant locating the institutions with reference to the leading ethnic and religious groups within the state. The public University of the State of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, was nonsectarian. Dickinson College was initially Presbyterian, and located at Carlisle, in the midst of the Scotch-Irish population. The German college was to be located within the predominantly German-settled area, at Manheim. With Rush’s help, it emerged eventually in Lancaster as the Lutheran and Reformed-run Franklin College (today’s Franklin and Marshall). Rush also advocated unsuccessfully for the establishment of a national university.41 Rush was largely responsible for the original Dickinson College curricular plan. But the college had a rocky beginning, for a variety of reasons. These included disputes between Rush and the institution’s head, the Scottish-born Charles Nisbet (who had come to Pennsylvania at Rush’s urging), and the Trustees’ succumbing to student pressure to confer degrees after one year’s study. (After 1802, it became a two-year program, and was later extended to three years.) From the standpoint of geography, Rush’s most important contri70

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bution was to include the subject in the college’s initial academic program and to persuade Robert Davidson to leave the University of Pennsylvania in 1784, to become both minister of the Presbyterian Church in Carlisle and, in 1785, Vice-Principal of the new college.42 As we have seen, Davidson, who had been assistant minister of Philadelphia’s conservative First Presbyterian Church as well as Professor of History in the University, also had responsibility for teaching geography and chronology. At Dickinson, he was given a professorship of ‘History, Geography, Chronology, Rhetoric, and Belles-Lettres’, a comprehensive but at the time not unusual spread of fields. As the old joke has it, many a professor in the old-time college occupied ‘not a chair but a settee’. But having the word ‘geography’ in the title of his professorship puts him in the small group of late eighteenth-century academics that included Francis Alison of the College of Philadelphia, Johann Daniel Gros and John Kemp of Columbia College, and few if any others. Davidson’s claim to recognition as geographer rests on his sixtypage pamphlet issued anonymously (‘By an American’) with the cumbersome title Geography Epitomized; Or, a Tour round the World; Being a short but comprehensive Description of the Terraqueous Globe attempted in Verse for the Sake of the Memory; And principally designed for the Use of Schools. This compendium was first published in Philadelphia in 1784 and reprinted there at least three times. It was republished in London in 1786, in Burlington, VT in 1791, in Leominster, MA around 1800, in Morristown, NJ in 1803, and in Stamford, CT in 1805.43 Rhyming geographies were quite common at the time, as aids to memorization at a time when geography was seen as a vital element in the development of the faculty of memory. Although Davidson’s son, in a memoir of his father, described the work as ‘highly esteemed in its day’, it seems not to have been so esteemed by Dickinson College students, who were required to purchase it and memorize its 1433 lines. We have testimony to that effect by an early Dickinson student, later Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney, who records in his memoirs that Davidson was ‘disliked by the students generally’. The geography class, according to Taney, was largely devoted to recitations from memory of Davidson’s poem, which by Davidson’s own admission had been designed as a school, not a college, text. Taney and others were especially incensed by the 14-line 71

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introduction, which was an acrostic using Davidson’s own name, and which also had to be memorized as part of the geography requirement. Future President, James Buchanan, also ran foul of Davidson, apparently both by refusing to purchase his book and for nonacademic reasons as well. Davidson, then Acting Principal of the College [in effect its second President], demanded that Buchanan not return to Dickinson for his second year. Buchanan was able to get that decision reversed, however, through a friend of his father’s on the Board of Trustees.44 Davidson’s booklet is doggerel verse, as Rush’s biographer Harry G. Good called it long ago. Good was also correct in characterizing the rhyming geography genre as ‘once so popular, but which a deserved neglect has long since overtaken’. Taney’s complaint is still valid: ‘It filled our minds with names of places and general descriptions, without giving us any definite idea of their position on the globe, or their relation to one another’. Besides, ‘some of the lines and rhymes were harsh and uncouth enough to be the subject of ridicule’.45 Putting geographical qualities into verse form has a long history: both Homer, in the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ and elsewhere, and Alexander Pope in his English translations of Homer, used such rhyme. But the search for words that rhyme often trumps their geographical significance, to say nothing of their descriptive accuracy. Robert Wood, in his book on Homer, criticized Pope’s distortion of Homer’s geography by adding to it superfluous epithets to make his couplets rhyme. Wood did not, however, discuss Homer’s own distortions through the use of formulaic phrases (like the familiar ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ or ‘wine-dark sea’) to match the metre of his poems. In any case, Davidson was no Homer, nor even a Pope. One of his Dickinson colleagues, however, is said to have suggested that some of Pope’s lines would fit Davidson’s work quite well: Here embryo thoughts in wild disorder lye; Here newborn nonsense first is taught to cry.46

One who has read through the entire original can only agree. Some excerpts, as quoted by other historians of geography, illustrate the point:

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On the far-flowing Danube Vienna we see, And Berlin appears on the banks of the Spree. On the Elbe we may Dresden, in Saxony, find, And Mannheim’s the seat of [the] Prince Palatine.

And, toward the end, this nationalistic jingle: Having cross’d the Pacific, we’ll now take our stand, On this happy, prolific, and wide-spreading land, Where nature was wrought with a far nobler hand. No more let the Old World be proud of her mountains, Her rivers, her mines, her lakes, and her fountains – Tho’ great in themselves – they no longer appear To be great – when compar’d to the great that are here.47

There is no significant attempt to tie geography and history to each other in this strange and self-referential work. Surprisingly, even the section on Greece is quite unhistorical, except by indirect reference: East of Italy, lies a large country far-famed. Queen of Arts and of Arms, Ancient Greece it was named. Her brave hardy sons their own Scepter long swayed; But now they are slaves, and the Turk is obeyed.48

In other words, the emphasis is on modern rather than ancient geography (if geography it may be called). And whatever one may think of the later careers of Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice or James Buchanan as President, as Dickinson undergraduates they were clearly on the side of the angels. To sum up, early geography in Franklin’s Academy, the College of Philadelphia, the University of the State of Pennsylvania, Dickinson College, and the post-1789 University of Pennsylvania were a part of the conflict between the practical, universally accessible, and contemporary ideas of several Founders, and traditionalist support for the more restricted curriculum deemed necessary for the learned, classically trained elite. At its best, it was an integral part of the movement to bring the ancient world home to a greater number of citizens of the new republic. That wave, at different times in various American colleges, more or less broke on the beach as a result of the assignment 73

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of ancient and modern geography courses to faculty whose interests and expertise lay primarily in other areas. (In this regard, postRevolutionary America is in strong contrast to post-Revolutionary France, where the linkage of geography and history lasted until the turmoil of the 1960s.) The shallow geography that resulted, deemed worth while primarily as a device for training the ‘faculty’ of memory, was transferred, along with arithmetic, to the pre-college level by the mid-nineteenth century. Ancient and modern geography remained largely an admissions requirement in American colleges until the late nineteenth century. In very different form, geography began to return to the college curriculum around 1870. But before that development occurred, there was another, and much more successful, attempt to combine geography and the classics (and, less so, geography with modern history), in Thomas Jefferson’s great educational experiment just 250 miles south of Philadelphia, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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American geographers have claimed Thomas Jefferson as one of their own since 1893 when, at a Charlottesville, Virginia, gathering of the National Geographic Society, the Arctic explorer General Adolphus Greely proclaimed him ‘one of the greatest of American geographers’. Greely’s papers on the subject were followed by Yale geographer George T. Surface’s ‘Thomas Jefferson: A Pioneer Student of American Geography’ in 1909 and Gary Dunbar’s ‘Thomas Jefferson, Geographer’, given at another Charlottesville meeting in 1960. Ben Smith and James Vining count him as a geographer in their American Geographers, 1784–1812. The historical geographer, Ralph Brown, writing on Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, indicated in 1943 that he planned a comprehensive study of Jefferson’s contributions to geography, but Brown’s untimely death five years later prevented this project from being realized. Other geographers have studied special aspects of Jefferson’s geographical ideas, such as the intellectual background of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jefferson’s work in climatology and cartography, and Alexander von Humboldt’s visit with him in 1804.1 Until 2008, however, nothing in the geographical literature had discussed Jefferson’s views on the place of geography in education. Yet in 1779, as Governor of Virginia, Jefferson advocated free coeducational district elementary schools, whose curriculum would be reading (principally history), writing and arithmetic. Above them would be grammar schools or academies, in which selected boys

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would study classical languages, geography and ‘higher forms’ of arithmetic. From there some boys would go on to a reformed College of William and Mary, which Jefferson wished to transform into a university-level institution. Jefferson’s 1779 plan contains his first mention of geography as a school subject. In 1814 Jefferson restated and elaborated his earlier scheme for a graded system of institutions. Here he moved geography and parts of the ‘higher arithmetic’ down into the elementary schools, which meant that girls as well as boys would study geography as a foundation subject. At the secondary level, in the academies or ‘colleges’, geography would be taught under what he called ‘Physico-Mathematics’ – essentially applied mathematics – which was part of a group that included the related subjects of navigation and astronomy. Jefferson embodied similar provisions in a draft ‘Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education’ early in 1817. This proposed Bill makes two mentions of ‘ancient and modern’ geography. Each was to be taught both in the ‘colleges’ and in the proposed university. A Federalist member of the House of Delegates, Charles Mercer, had introduced a competing Bill that differed from Jefferson’s in enough important respects – principally centralized control and funding issues – that it was unacceptable to Jefferson and his Republican legislative allies, who killed the Mercer Bill without passing their own. A separate Bill, authorizing only the state university, was passed early in 1819. From this time until his death in 1826 Jefferson focused primarily on establishing the new University of Virginia.2

JEFFERSON’S LIBRARIES: CLASSICS AND GEOGRAPHY Jefferson was a life-long bibliophile, and famously told John Adams in 1815 ‘I cannot live without books.’ He not only collected books but he developed his own classification system and his own arrangement of his books on the shelves he had built into his beloved Monticello. Although, surprisingly enough, the first literary biography of Jefferson was not published until 2008, we know a great deal about his purchases and his reading from other sources, including catalogues. We know that from an early age he had practiced and 76

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recommended to others reading the classics in their original languages. We also know that, beginning with some of the materials he had inherited from his father, Peter Jefferson, his libraries included many books on geography and travel. One of his collections is believed to have been the largest private library of its time on the American West and its borderlands and on New Spain. Scholars of the classical tradition have written extensively on Jefferson’s classical reading, and scholars of the Lewis and Clark expedition on his New World collection.3 What is the connection, however, between Jefferson’s classical and geographical interests? Jefferson did not study problems of ancient geography through personal expeditions to classical sites. The one partial exception was his 1787 visit to the south of France, where he studied the Roman antiquities in Nimes and Arles, and then proceeded to northern Italy, where (as he wrote George Wythe), ‘I scarcely got into classical ground.’ The one approach he made to a traditional problem in classical geography was in taking with him materials in which others had attempted to establish Hannibal’s route through the Alps, but Jefferson concluded from his personal observations of the Alpine landscape that those attempts were useless. Presumably he was also interested in his secretary, William Short’s, letter describing the classical antiquities and Roman sites Short had observed while on an official mission to Italy the following year. By and large, however, Jefferson’s interest in ancient landscapes appears to have been primarily in their architectural survivals, especially the Maison Carée, the Roman temple in Nimes that had famously stimulated his design for the new Virginia Capitol. His letter of 20 March 1787, written on site to his friend, the Comtesse de Tessé begins: ‘Here I am, Madam, gazing at the Maison quarée [sic] like a lover at his mistress.’ Instead, we must look to his libraries for knowledge of what he knew or might have known about the geography of the ancient world, and to his educational plans for how such knowledge might be incorporated into the minds of leaders of the new republic, in Washington and Charlottesville.4 Jefferson is associated with four library collections. The nucleus of the first was his cartographer father’s library of 42 volumes, including history, literature, religion and law, as well as maps, which he inherit77

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ed in 1757. Peter Jefferson’s library and Tom Jefferson’s association with his revered classics teacher, Reverend James Maury, who possessed a library of 2 or 300 volumes, appear to have stimulated an early interest in the West, in addition to Maury’s teaching of classical languages. To these must be added Jefferson’s own purchases while a William and Mary student and later. These are known to have included John Potter’s Antiquities of Greece and Basil Kennett’s Antiquities of Rome, among the three to four hundred volumes Douglas Wilson has estimated as the size of this library. Almost all of these were lost in a fire at Shadwell, the family estate, in 1770. While in Williamsburg, Jefferson also had access to the strongly classical libraries of his legal mentor, George Wythe, and of Governor Francis Fauquier.5 Second, and largest, was the library he assembled after 1770, through London or Philadelphia booksellers and his purchases from Parisian booksellers while Minister to France. He also ordered from booksellers in other European countries. Jefferson also bought whole collections from the estates of fellow Virginians and, while President of the United States, received a bequest of books from his old law teacher George Wythe’s library. This second library was divided between Monticello and his summer retreat at Poplar Forest. It numbered nearly 6,500 volumes (3,200 titles) when he sold the Monticello collection to the Library of Congress in 1815, after the British had burned the much smaller congressional collection the year before. This collection was notable for its large number of works dealing with the American West and New Spain. The ‘Geography’ section of Millicent Sowerby’s catalogue for the library sold to the nation in 1815 runs to more than 170 pages and lists editions of the ancient Greek geographers Dionysius Periegetes, Pomponius Mela and Strabo, as well as both a Latin and an English version of Pausanias’ Description of Greece. Aids to the study of classical geography include Lawrence Echard’s Classical Geographical Dictionary and Edward Wells’ Maps of Antient and Present Geography, as well as geography texts such as Herman Moll’s Compleat Geographer and John Pinkerton’s Modern Geography. Among the travels to classical lands are Bernard Randolph’s Present State of the Morea, George Sandys’ Travels and a 1679 edition of the expedition of Spon and Wheler. 78

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Yet other books germane to ancient and modern geography appear in other sections of Jefferson’s classification. Under ‘America’, in addition to Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography and American Gazetteer, we find Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in its 1595 edition, which included the celebrated cartographer’s classical maps and 11 maps relating to America. The category ‘Fine Arts’ includes Robert Wood’s Ruins of Balbec (1757), Julien-David Le Roy’s Ruins of Athens (1759) and the first volume of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens. Jefferson apparently had only the first volume in his second library, but later ordered all four volumes then published for the University of Virginia.6 From this library he retained a few books, chiefly classical and mathematical, which were the nucleus of his third library. He made use of friends traveling or living abroad, such as George Ticknor, as well as American suppliers such as Matthew Carey of Philadelphia. By the time of his death this ‘retirement’ library ranged between 900 and 1,000 volumes. These included the ancient geographies of Strabo, Pausanias, Ptolemy and Dionysius Periegetes, as well as some of Von Humboldt’s writings, Sidney Edwards Morse’s and other geography texts, the German geographer Christoph Daniel Ebeling on Virginia, and several aids to the study of ancient and modern geography. Of those he retained from his earlier library, Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy was a ‘longtime favorite’, but he also later acquired James Sloan’s more recent volume on the same subject, as well as several works on American exploration, including Zebulon Pike’s. He purchased his last book less than a month before he died in 1826. Jefferson had intended this library to go to the University of Virginia on his death, but because his estate was so encumbered by debt, 931 items of this collection (166 of them either modern or ancient history) were publicly sold at auction in 1829.7 Jefferson’s fourth collection is the one he assembled for the early library of the University of Virginia, consisting of more than 8,000 titles, mostly Jefferson’s selections. First, it must be stipulated that Jefferson’s collection of geography and travel books was largely in aid of his major interests – architecture, the Americas and classical literature. As in the America of his time, geography was a subsidiary interest. Yet the subject’s traditional function as the ‘oculus’ or ‘eye’ of history had made books on geography and travel valuable to Jeffer79

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son and, as he presumably believed, to students at the University of Virginia. It is clear that Jefferson’s choices were carefully made and suited to the perceived needs of a serious undergraduate body as well as of faculty members. Some of these as well as others had been bought abroad by Francis Walker Gilmer, who for classical books had the advice of British classicist Samuel Parr, and by George Ticknor, whom Jefferson urged to get the latest or best editions of classical titles while Ticknor was traveling in Europe. In 1825, the London bookseller Bohn and the Boston firm of Cummings, Hilliard and Co. were given contracts to supply books to the new university. Each of these has been the subject of bibliographical commentary. Many of the books from this fourth library were lost in a fire in the Rotunda (then the University’s library building), in 1895. The 1828 printed catalogue of the library’s holdings includes Cluverius’ Geography, Strabo, Dionysius Periegetes, Potter’s Antiquities of Greece, Addison’s Roman Antiquities, Ortelius, Wells’ Ancient and Modern Maps, a number of modern geographies, and Richard Hakluyt’s collection of English voyages. The university library also had a complete set of Charles Rollin’s works, in French. Of books based on British expeditions by Dilettanti or their contemporaries, for his new university’s library Jefferson ordered Wood’s volumes on Balbec and Palmyra, William Gell’s work on Pompeii, Robert Adam’s book on Diocletian’s palace at Split, Thomas Major’s The Ruins of Paestum, and all four of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens volumes published between 1762 and 1816. From all of these, University of Virginia students could have picked up some notion of the geographic settings of the structures of classical antiquity. That Jefferson was already familiar with the books produced by the eighteenth-century ‘archaeographers’ at least as early as 1785 is shown in a letter to James Madison on 20 September of that year. In it, he praised the Maison Carée at Nimes for ‘yeilding [sic] to no one of the beautiful monuments of Greece, Rome, Palmyra and Balbec which late travelers have communicated to us’. Palmyra and Balbec, of course, were the subjects of Robert Wood’s important volumes. At the time, Jefferson had seen the Maison Carée only in drawings, and he never saw any of the others in situ.8 What are some of the other geography books in which Jefferson was interested? There is no complete list, but some idea can be gained 80

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from the catalogues and from his correspondence with booksellers, and with friends whom he commissioned to purchase on his behalf. Thus in 1789, while Jefferson was still in Paris, his friend Lucy Ludwell Paradise attended the London auction of the collection of the Venetian collector Maffeo Pinelli in order to purchase books for Jefferson’s library. Though neither Jefferson’s request list nor his marked copy of the auction catalogue survives, we know that Mrs Paradise did not purchase John Hudson’s Geographiae Veteris Scriptores Graeci Minores, which included both Greek and Arabic geographers, because Jefferson believed it to be too expensive. Nevertheless, his letter shows that he wanted to have this particular collection in his library, that he was still proficient enough in Latin to read and understand a scientific collection, and also that he may have been interested in Arabic geographers as well as those of Greece and Rome.9 From time to time Jefferson would advise students and others what to read, often as an auxiliary to private study with George Wythe or some other mentor. In the lists he made for such users, Jefferson frequently suggested books on geography, as well as in ancient history or among classical authors. In 1788, writing to two young Americans traveling in Europe, Jefferson recommended buying maps and town plans before their visits and, for Italy, Joseph Addison’s travel book for its references to classical sites, for ‘it gives infinite pleasure to apply one’s classical reading on the spot’. Ten years later he recommended Guthrie’s and Morse’s geographies to William Munford, a William and Mary student. On Munford’s list, however, geography is grouped with mathematics, natural philosophy and natural history. In September 1800 Jefferson developed a reading list for Joseph Cabell, the young man who was later to become his chief legislative ally in the fight for a University of Virginia. In addition to various classical authors and a four-volume ancient history, Jefferson recommended Potter’s Antiquities of Greece and several geographies. In addition to Guthrie and Morse, he recommended Anton Busching’s six-volume world geography of 1762, a portable atlas, and ‘travels ad libitum’. But these work, too, are classed with natural science, coming directly after astronomy.10 In the spring of 1809, responding to a request from the Westward Mill Library Society, Jefferson recommended that it include ‘a few wellchosen books’ that would give readers ‘a general view of other history, 81

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and a particular view of their own country, a tolerable knowledge of Geography, the elements of Natural Philosophy, of Agriculture and Mechanics’, and offered to recommend the best books on those subjects. Later that same year he furnished a library representative with a list that included Pinkerton’s geography in his natural philosophy list. Pinkerton’s evidently satisfied his minimum ‘tolerable knowledge’ test, since he recommended it to others for a general knowledge of modern geography. Jefferson also encouraged his children and grandchildren to master geography. During his trip to the south of France in 1787, Jefferson wrote his daughter ‘Patsy’, instructing her to take out her map and trace out his route ‘in order to exercise your geography’. Four years later he asked his younger daughter Mary, or ‘Polly’, to do the same for his famous trip to Lake George with James Madison. In 1803 young Thomas Jefferson Randolph asked his grandfather, then President of the United States, to bring him ‘a book of geography’, but in the absence of one in Washington, the President promised him one of his own from Monticello. ‘Jeff’ later studied mathematics at Louis Girardin’s academy in Richmond. Five years later Jefferson’s granddaughters, Anne and Ellen Wayles Randolph, wrote their grandfather to tell him ‘I have begun to study Geography and I am very much pleased with it’ (Ellen) and that ‘Ellen and myself are learning geography with which I am very much pleased indeed’ (Anne).11

JEFFERSON AND GEOGRAPHY AS A UNIVERSITY STUDY During the colonial period, like most other colleges, William and Mary had required study of the ‘use of the globes’ under the rubric of mathematics. Between 1731 and 1737 Jonathan Fry, who subsequently produced a remarkable map of Virginia in collaboration with Peter Jefferson, would have taught this form of geography. During Thomas Jefferson’s time as a student, he would have had such instruction from his beloved teacher of mathematics and science, William Small, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen who was then Professor of Natural Philosophy. When Jefferson became governor of Virginia in 1779, as we have seen he would have required academies (for boys) 82

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that would offer geography as part of an applied science, ‘PhysicoMathematics’. At the same time he offered a second Bill that would have reformed and modernized the curriculum of William and Mary. Neither Bill passed, but, as an ex-officio member of the Board of Visitors, Jefferson persuaded his colleagues to suppress certain professorships he deemed obsolete and replace them with professorships of law and modern languages, as well as adding other contemporary sciences to the academic program.12 During the course of the debates over reforming William and Mary during the 1770s other voices also emerged, usually in the Richmond newspapers. One of them, the unidentified ‘Academicus’, writing in 1774, argued for strengthening the classics and adding history, geography and chronology, in a curricular plan quite similar to, and probably drawing upon, that of the College of New Jersey. Two years later, another anonymous writer, ‘A.M.’, in addition to advocating professional programs and new chairs in the natural sciences, also argued for history and chronology. By comparison, then, Jefferson’s reforms look quite conservative. In the event, William and Mary redefined its program in 1779 around a series of voluntary lectures and required final examinations. The 1792 college laws stated explicitly that graduates ‘must also have a competent knowledge of Geography’. Between 1803 and 1807 lectures in this field were among the responsibilities of a French exile, Louis H. Girardin, who bore the title of Professor of Modern Languages, History and Geography, though he also lectured on natural history and pursued studies in botany. In an 1807 reorganization of the college, however, Girardin’s chair was dropped and he resigned. Instruction in history, and presumably geography as well, was resumed only in 1822, when a new professor of classics was appointed and also taught (presumably ancient) history.13 We will return later to Girardin in relation to Jefferson’s ideas on the placement of geography at the University of Virginia. Among the Frenchmen who had come to the United States during the American Revolution was Alexandre-Marie, Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who was briefly a captain in the Continental Army serving in Virginia. In the 1780s Quesnay raised 6,000 francs for a proposed academy at Richmond, with hoped-for branches in other cities. This would be an advanced teaching and research institution, 83

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patterned somewhat after the French Academy. He received financial support from a hundred or so Virginians, as well as from Americans elsewhere, and in 1786 erected a building in Richmond to house the institution. After returning to France during Jefferson’s time as Minister to that country, Quesnay enlisted Jefferson’s cautious support. The approaching French Revolution, however, put paid to that project. Among the 16 ‘schools’ Quesnay had proposed was a School of Geography. Given French educational theory at the time, we may assume that classical geography would have been a part of the instruction in that School.14 Jefferson turned his attention to higher education again in 1794, when he attempted to aid an unsuccessful effort by Francois d’Ivernois, a Swiss exile Jefferson had known in Paris, to bring to the United States the entire faculty of the Geneva Academy, closed down during the French Revolution, as the nucleus of a new research and teaching institution. In this case Jefferson was enthusiastic, first attempting to gain support for it to locate in Virginia. The legislature turned it down, however, on the grounds that only three members of the Academy were fully fluent in English and young Virginians were not prepared to hear lectures in a foreign language. Jefferson then tried to interest President Washington in the idea of using the Genevans as faculty for the proposed national university, which Jefferson hoped to locate not in the Federal capital (then in Philadelphia, but shortly to be on the Potomac river), but somewhere in rural Virginia. The President threw cold water on the idea, partly for practical and partly for political reasons. Since Washington conceived of the national university as a school of politics and public administration, beyond the language barrier was the issue of whether a politically conservative faculty at odds with Geneva democrats would be appropriate trainers of leaders of the new American republic. Nevertheless, the failed effort is relevant here, since d’Ivernois’ plan for the institution would have had a professor of geography and history, placed in a proposed ‘Collège de Belles Lettres’, thus grouping him with professors of Greek and Latin, of French, and of English languages and literatures. Also, in a proposed ‘École Générale’, a preparatory school, one of the assistant masters would teach history and geography.15

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In 1800 Jefferson began to consult on university education with other reformers, such as Joseph Priestley and Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours. By this time Jefferson had become disillusioned with the prospects for William and Mary, gloomily describing it in a letter to Priestley as ‘just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it’. Jefferson had identified a list of advanced subjects that to him seemed ‘useful & practicable for us’, including both geography and history. But he was uncertain how these subjects might best be grouped, and what might be included under a single professor or within a single department. According to Roy Hunnewell, Jefferson ‘seems to have made considerable use of Priestley’s Lectures on History and General Policy’ which, in addition to repeating the hoary claim for geography as one of the ‘two eyes of history’, defended the independence of geography as a discipline, and called it ‘absolutely necessary to the knowledge of’ history. Surprisingly, for lectures originally given in the late 1780s, Priestley anticipates the much later argument of George Perkins Marsh, contending that ‘the hands of men have made many alterations in the face of the earth’, such as draining the marshes, clearing the woodlands and building canals.16 In April 1800 Jefferson requested that Du Pont, whom he had known in France, suggest a plan for American education, though he probably did not expect the 159-page document Du Pont had completed by mid-June and sent him in August (subsequently published in 1812). In it, Du Pont proposed a national university, which, somewhat to Jefferson’s displeasure, would be located in the Federal capital. Both Du Pont and Priestley placed geography at the university level with what we would now call the social sciences. In Du Pont’s proposed ‘colleges’, geography would be linked to ‘Natural and national law, political economy, and history’, as one of nine ‘classes or courses’. For Priestley, ‘Geography, civil history, Law, and general policy’ would be taught in the university by the same professor.17 In his bill of 1817 Jefferson had placed university-level ‘history and geography, ancient and modern’, in a proposed program in civil government, including politics and ethics, much as Priestley had recommended in 1800. But other correspondents had seen geography in terms traditional in American colleges, as a science closely related to 85

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astronomy, and therefore a ‘physico-mathematical’ science. John Adams, while protesting that grouping subjects into professorships was ‘far beyond my forces’, had suggested putting astronomy and geography together under one of his five proposed professors. In his report of the commissioners to establish a site for the new university, the so-called Rockfish Gap report of August 1818, Jefferson’s curriculum proposal situated geography under a professor of physicomathematics, as he had done earlier for the academies. This placement reflected the customary understanding of ‘general geography’ as developed by Bernhard Varenius and other writers on the subject.18 The primary purpose of the gathering at Rockfish Gap was to choose a site for the proposed new University of Virginia. Three towns were in competition: Charlottesville, Lexington and Staunton. Jefferson had arrived, however, with what Philip Bruce later called an ‘innocent-looking blunderbus[s]’, a map he had prepared showing the distribution of Virginia’s white population. (At the time, Virginia included what is now West Virginia.) With it, Jefferson was able to demonstrate, at least to his own satisfaction and, as it proved, the majority of the commissioners, that his personal choice, Charlottesville, was more centrally located, and presumably more accessible to the sons of the white population, than its competing locations. The map itself does not survive and we know of it only through the written descriptions of those present. So we cannot know whether the map was accurate or mere cartographic skullduggery (as Jefferson’s enemies claimed). But it does show that a tool of geography Jefferson had practiced for years, map-making, was present even at the creation of the University of Virginia.19 As noted earlier, Jefferson’s draft bill of 1817 would have required ‘ancient and modern geography’ in both the secondary schools and the proposed university. At a meeting at James Madison’s home, Montpelier, in July 1817, the Board of Visitors, the Trustees of what was then called ‘Central College’, including Jefferson, had voted to ask Dr Samuel Knox, a Republican Presbyterian clergyman and educator, to take ‘the professorship of languages, belles-lettres, rhetoric, history and geography’. Knox had written an award-winning treatise in an American Philosophical Society contest for proposals toward a national system of education. In it, he had recommended Greek and Latin and ancient and modern geography, as well as works on Greek 86

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and Roman antiquities. Three months after the vote to elect Knox, however, acting on an erroneous belief that Knox had retired, the Board of Visitors rescinded the offer. But they simultaneously assigned one of the pavilions on the proposed campus to a ‘professor of languages, belles-lettres, rhetoric, oratory, history and geography’.20 Given these actions in 1817, one wonders whether Jefferson’s placement of geography at Rockfish Gap as a physico-mathematical science the following year may have been simply a political gesture to ensure there would be no distracting opposition from educational traditionalists that might derail his main objective – to locate the new university at Charlottesville. Eighteenth-century French philosophes had strongly advocated introducing geography and history together, as a way to reform universities and schools by breaching the narrowness of the traditional classical curriculum. Combined professorships of history and geography had been established in France as part of the post-Revolutionary changes in the academic program. The Sorbonne’s two professorships of history and geography were reorganized into three professorships, one each in ancient and in modern history, and the third in geography, in 1812. French writers on education, and the reformers (such as Du Pont) Jefferson had met while in Paris, had shown him a rationale for such a combination. Charles Rollin, Professor of Ancient History at the Sorbonne, had written a multi-volume Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles-Lettres (1726–8), which was (along with his extensive works on ancient history) widely influential on both sides of the Atlantic. In it, Rollin had termed geography ‘absolutely necessary for youth’ in his discussion of ‘profane history’, and also suggested methods ‘to make this study [geography] less dry and disagreeable’. In a separate essay on geography, Rollin had stressed the importance of maps, ‘for this [geography] is an ocular science’. It is, of course, significant that he should have discussed the teaching of geography as a subject to be included under ‘Belles-Lettres’. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, in an important essay written for Diderot’s Encyclopedie, had strongly recommended history and its two ‘offshoots and supports’, chronology and geography, the first locating men in time, and the second their distribution across the globe.21 French exiles in America also spread the idea of the importance of geography and history in some combined or at least simultaneously 87

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taught form.22 Thus Amable-Louis-Rose de Lafitte du Corteil, who taught French, geography and history at a boy’s school in Bordentown, NJ, prescribed mathematics, geography and history as a must for adolescents. Louis Girardin, who had been employed in Louis XVI’s library and was a broadly learned man, after resigning his post at Jefferson’s alma mater had opened a school in Richmond to which Jefferson had sent his namesake grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Between 1813 and 1815 Girardin ran a school in Albemarle County, near the Jefferson property at Shadwell. While working on the final volume of a history of Virginia begun by John Daly Burke, Girardin was given full access to Jefferson’s papers and borrowing privileges from Jefferson’s library. Jefferson read the manuscript and gave Girardin advice and information to be included, and Girardin dedicated the book to him. Although there may be no formal record of it, it is reasonable to assume that, based on Girardin’s experience and their mutual interests in education, over these two years of intimate association there must have been some discussion of school and university curricular practice in France, and indeed of disciplinary allocation at William and Mary during Girardin’s time there.23 Furthermore, in a critique of the Rockfish Gap report in the prestigious North American Review, Edward Everett, Professor of Greek at Harvard and the Review’s editor, had gently criticized the placement of geography under the proposed Professor of Physico-Mathematics. Everett, though still a young man, had been elected to a new chair of Greek at Harvard in 1815 and then sent to Gottingen, then the leading German university for classical studies, where he had earned the doctorate in philology in 1817. Remaining in Europe, he had visited Jefferson’s friend, Alexander von Humboldt, in Paris, and later reviewed Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of his travels in Latin America in the Review. Everett had even trod the soil of Greece, the first American classicist to do so. Everett thus had a special interest in geography, particularly for the understanding of ancient Greece. He was to persuade Israel Thorndike to purchase the extensive geographical library of the German geographer, C. D. Ebeling, for the Harvard library, and had just persuaded his wealthy friend, Theodore Lyman, to purchase a huge Panorama of Athens by the British artists Robert Barker and Robert Burford for Harvard. Everett gave a series of public lectures on antiquities and an88

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cient art, in an unsuccessful effort to raise funds for a special building for it, but it was displayed elsewhere and remained at Harvard until it was destroyed by fire in 1845.24 Given Everett’s standing and his interests, despite his youth, Jefferson was bound to take Everett’s views seriously. While tying geography to the physico-mathematical sciences was not ‘philosophically wrong’, Everett argued, it was unwise ‘to separate geography from history, which gives it so much of its interest’. Everett then strongly urged the Board of Visitors to rethink the place of geography within the grouping of subjects. Moreover, geography had been linked with history after 1814 at West Point, founded during Jefferson’s presidency, and in which he took a continuing interest. At West Point, the chaplain held the professorship of ‘Geography, History and Ethics’.25 The Rockfish Gap report had envisioned ten professors, though since the available finances would support only eight, some reshuffling of faculty responsibilities had become necessary prior to the university’s opening. The question of placement was not finally resolved until April 1824. At that meeting, the Board of Visitors approved (perhaps ‘rubber-stamped’ is the more meaningful description) Jefferson’s new table of organization, which provided for eight departments, called ‘Schools’ (a term Jefferson borrowed from French practice), each initially under a single professor. The Board of Visitors’ minutes for that meeting read In the school of ancient languages shall be taught the higher grade of the Latin and Greek languages, the Hebrew, rhetoric, belleslettres, ancient history and ancient geography. In the school of modern languages shall be taught French, Spanish, Italian, German, and the English language in its Anglo-Saxon form; also modern history and modern geography.26

Jefferson’s final choice of the topics to be included in the two language schools, then, undoubtedly reflects the French practice of associating history and geography with belles-lettres, his friend Girardin’s example of combining language, history and geography at William and Mary, and the early post-Revolutionary practice of a number of American colleges (including Pennsylvania, Columbia and Dickin-

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son) of broadening the curriculum by adding ancient history and geography, Everett’s critique of the Rockfish Gap report, and possibly Jefferson’s interest in and advocacy of studying the Anglo-Saxon language in relation to its history and its geography. (When the university opened in 1825, Jefferson, then past 80, took a tutorial in Anglo-Saxon with George Blaettermann, Professor of Modern Languages.) It is clear, however, that, given the actions of the Central College Board of Visitors as far back as 1817, linking geography and history with language and literature had been an option in Jefferson’s mind well before the question of placement was finally resolved. Whatever the ultimate source, through their official action in 1824 Jefferson as Rector and his Board of Visitors firmly placed geography at Virginia at the heart of the humanities.

VIRGINIA’S FOUNDING FACULTY AND HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHY While Jefferson and his colleagues were working out the academic plan and also engaged in finding the funding to support Jefferson’s classical vision of a stunning campus design, the Board of Visitors employed a young Virginia lawyer, Francis Walker Gilmer, to search Britain for the best possible candidates from these and other professorships.27 The appointment in modern languages and literatures, with associated work in modern history and geography, went to George Blaettermann, a German who had lived in London for several years and had expressed his interest in Jefferson’s plans as early as 1819. George Ticknor, who had earlier turned down Jefferson’s offer of a Virginia position in Belles-Lettres, had recommended Blaettermann for that position, mainly on hearsay, though they had also become acquainted in London.28 The chair in ancient languages and literatures, ancient history and ancient geography (as well as, initially, rhetoric and belles-lettres), was given to George Long, then a 24-yearold Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and already a promising classical scholar. In his letter to Long, outlining the requirements of the job, Gilmer wrote, ‘You should explain the history and geography

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of the famous ancient nations as illustrative of their literature, etc.’, a mandate Long was to embrace vigorously.29 Blaettermann also appears initially to have taken seriously his responsibility to go beyond the teaching of languages per se. Given the large number of languages he was expected to teach, however (French, German, Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon, with optional instruction in Danish, Swedish, Dutch and Portuguese), and probably because teaching language was his personal preference, his initial commitment seems not to have persisted. In 1830 he was rebuked by the Board of Visitors for neglecting to teach the literature, and for failing to lecture on modern history and geography. The Board then ordered him to resume those lectures. Blaettermann proved to be unpopular with most students, however, and even with his colleagues. His enrollments dropped, part of his language instruction was turned over to someone else and, in 1838, students petitioned the Board of Visitors to have him removed. He was finally dismissed two years later, after whipping his English-born wife in public – for the second time. The succeeding professors of modern languages, the Hungarian polyglot Charles Kraitser (who himself was dismissed after his wife publicly whipped him) and Maximilian Rudolph Schere de Vere, continued to teach modern history and geography until about 1860, shortly after the establishment of a School of History and Literature under George Frederick Holmes, who among other resources recommended George Long’s atlas of ancient geography to his students.30 Long, despite being the youngest member of the faculty, was nonetheless what Richard Beale Davis called the young university’s ‘most distinguished professor’. He was enthusiastic from the beginning about Jefferson’s notion of teaching ancient history and geography together with classical languages and literatures, though he soon gave over his added responsibilities in rhetoric and belles-lettres to his colleague, George Tucker, the Bermuda-born Professor of Moral Philosophy. Long’s School of Ancient Languages, which had sixtyfour students as of September 1825, rocketed to 107 the following year, the largest enrollment of any School in the new university. Closest in age to the students, Long seems to have been quite approachable. One of the earliest students, Burnett Stark, later described

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him as ‘a very popular, enthusiastic and efficient teacher’, who also set a high standard in his classes. Long’s Virginia lectures on classical geography survive in two forms: his handwritten copies of 1826 and a published version based on lectures given in the fall of 1827 and the spring of 1828. The latter group was published in Charlottesville in 1829, after Long had returned to England. At the beginning of the series of 1826, Long told his hearers that Ancient geography is too much neglected; ancient history without some knowledge of it can never be well remembered or understood…. But if we will read and understand, if we do not wish to remain ignorant of the allusions, and if we wish to derive from them all the advantages that we ought, the geography of the antient [sic] world must not be entirely neglected.

He went on to recommend Samuel Butler’s text on ancient and modern geography (see Chapter 9) and Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s maps.31 There is a liveliness, an enthusiasm, in Long’s ancient geography lectures, particularly those on ancient Greece, that must have engaged students. Several of Edgar Allan Poe’s biographers have commented on this, and link Long’s teaching to Poe’s later ‘penchant for geography’, as shown in his later stories, particularly ‘Narrative of A. Gordon Pym’ and ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman’. One of them summed it up as follows: ‘Long seems to have taught Latin and Greek with an understanding of history and geography that made them more alive than was usual in those days.’ The 1826 term had begun on 3 February, but Poe did not matriculate until ten days later. Since Long’s encomium on classical geography was part of his first lecture, Poe may not have heard it. But since the only Schools in which he enrolled were Long’s and Blaettermann’s, Poe was taking all the geography (and history) offered at Virginia in its earliest days.32 Poe was a serious and largely self-motivated student and a wide reader. He is known to have charged out several volumes of Charles Rollin’s histories of the ancient world, for example. Since the Library’s set was in the original French, it also gave Poe practice for Blaettermann’s modern language school, although Long may have

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initially suggested it, Poe also evidently read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of his explorations in Latin America. Poe did well academically in both language Schools, being recognized for his excellence in both French and Latin in December 1826 by an examining committee that included former Presidents James Madison (who had succeeded Jefferson as Rector) and James Monroe. Although there is no direct evidence for it, Poe had probably encountered Jefferson himself a number of times, either on campus or at Monticello, since Jefferson regularly invited university students in small groups to join him for Sunday dinner. Poe was one of the few who made it through a heavy storm in time to observe Jefferson’s interment in the family plot at Monticello on 6 July 1826. Poe was later to criticize Jefferson’s rationalism, but praised his breadth of mind and his grasp of science, as shown in Jefferson’s direction of the Lewis and Clark expedition.33 Jefferson’s rationalism had perhaps made him too confident that the behaviors characteristic of the rowdier sons of Virginia planters away from home for the first time could be altered by environment and contact with a well-selected faculty living in the midst of them. Jefferson’s campus design was the famous ‘academical village’. This featured classically inspired ‘pavilions’: two-story structures that were both faculty residences and their classrooms, as well as being models of environmental design intended to uplift students’ tastes. Jefferson described it (somewhat boastfully) to his son-in-law, John Eppes, as ‘a beautiful Academical village, of the finest models of building and of classical architecture, in the U.S.’ The subtle influences of the neoclassical environment and close proximity to scholars of the first rank would, Jefferson hoped, result in the kind of serious student he had been at William and Mary. Unfortunately for his theory, not all students, or even a majority, were young Tom Jeffersons. As Jeffrey Meyers has succinctly put it, with perhaps pardonable exaggeration, the early University of Virginia, besides being the most expensive, was at once ‘the most idealistic and most dissolute college in America’.34 The pavilions were connected and backed by rows of individual (and relatively unsupervised) student rooms, each with separate entrances. The open and unmonitored architecture of the student quarters was made to order for hosting ‘women of the town’ and for 93

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drinking parties. A series of disturbances directed at the ‘European’ professors (including a bottle of urine thrown past the elegant neoPalladian Ionic columns of Pavilion V and through George Long’s front window) resulted in the resignations of both Long and Thomas Hewitt Key, the Cambridge-educated Professor of Mathematics, bringing matters to a head. Students initially refused to name the culprits, but a hearing before the Board of Visitors, which in addition to Jefferson as Rector, included former Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, intimidated students into confessing. Several were disciplined and four, in all, including Wilson Cary, a nephew of Jefferson’s son-in-law (and a great-great nephew of Jefferson himself), were sent down. The Rector was so overcome by this dramatic refutation of his theories that he was unable to speak more than a few words to the assembled students. Fortunately, Jefferson did not live long enough to see the first murder of an American university professor, gunned down by a University of Virginia student in 1840.35

5. Pavilion V, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Academical Village’, University of Virginia

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TRANSATLANTIC EFFECTS: LONG, KEY, AND CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN BRITAIN As a consequence of the 1825 disorder, the Board of Visitors instituted a stricter code of conduct but declined to accept Long’s and Key’s resignations. Both left Virginia, however, before their five-year initial contracts were up and they became members of the founding faculty of the new University of London (now University College, London). The University of London was the brainchild of Henry Brougham, an educational and political radical greatly interested in making education and scholarship available to the middle and working classes. He had early embraced the idea of establishing Mechanic’s Institutes in London and other British cities. In 1825 he had established a system of distributing lectures written by academic or other specialists to be read at these institutes. Late in the year that the University of Virginia opened, Brougham and a number of wealthy Dissenters, along with assorted Catholics, Jews, freethinkers and utilitarians, many of them with Scottish roots, founded the University of London. This institution, like the Scottish universities from which much of its inspiration came, was nonresidential, non-tutorial, and placed heavy emphasis on science. It was also free of religious requirements, such as subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles and compulsory chapel, and even of religious instruction, which brought it the title of ‘the Godless institution in Gower Street’. The original institution opened in 1828 with two faculties, largely of a reformist bent, one of Arts and Law, embracing a wide range of subjects, and the other of Medicine. It soon drew the sons of middle-class business and tradesmen from London and surrounding areas, who would not have been able to attend Oxford or Cambridge for religious or financial reasons, or who lacked the traditional classical grammar school background necessary to pass the Oxbridge entrance examinations. This first University of London operated without a royal charter, and therefore lacked the right to grant degrees. But in 1836 its name was changed to University College and, with King’s College (an Anglican institution founded to counteract the University’s alleged ‘Godlessness’), became one of the two founding colleges of a new University of London, which functioned as the examining and degree-granting body for both.36 95

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The founders of the University of London had great respect for the Rockfish Gap report and what Jefferson had done in Charlottesville in creating an institution that had departed from the traditional model of higher education. Like Virginia, London allowed options for students in choice of program, omitted religious subjects and sectarian affiliation, and placed emphasis on the sciences and other ‘modern’ studies. It is not surprising, then, that Brougham would attempt to poach Virginia’s English-born faculty. Key, who had married an English wife shortly before leaving for Charlottesville, pled the ill effects of Virginia’s climate on his health and had been released from his five-year contract, returning to England in 1827. He was therefore free to accept appointment as Professor of Latin in the new institution when it opened the following year. Brougham then pressured Madison, who had succeeded Jefferson as Rector, to release Long from his contract as well. Long had married a Virginia woman and professed to love both Charlottesville and the University. Nevertheless, the new London institution’s reformist bent seems to have been an attraction for him. Jefferson had praised Long to Joseph Cabell in December 1824 as ‘a most amiable man, of fine understanding, well qualified for his department, and acquiring esteem as fast as he becomes known’. Madison seems also to have had a high opinion of Long. In a letter to Lafayette, Madison described Key’s loss as ‘unfortunate’ and called him ‘a valuable acquisition’, but described Long in more fulsome terms, as one ‘whose distinguished competency we can scarcely hope to replace’.37 Madison and the Board of Visitors ultimately yielded to the combined pleadings of Long and Brougham and released Long in 1828 to take charge of instruction in Greek at the newer university. At the time of his departure Long’s book on Greek and Roman geography was almost finished, but he left the task of completing the section on the geography of Rome to his British colleague, Robley Dunglison, Professor of Anatomy. Part 1 of the book provides a general description of ancient Asia and Africa, Part 2 deals with Greece and Persia, and Part 3 describes Roman Italy. The last section, plus a chapter on Etruria, is largely Dunglison’s work, and in it Dunglison apologizes for not including the Roman colonies. Long’s portion is clear and inviting, and often includes ancient authorities. He frequently poses alternative explanations and refers to competing hypotheses, as well 96

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as giving recommendations to other texts and maps of the ancient world. It is easy to see why his geography lectures were of such interest to students. Dunglison’s portion is, in contrast, a straightforward compendium of facts, and makes for rather dull reading.38 Long’s Virginia experience had given him a perspective on the importance of classical geography, and indeed of geography in general, to classical scholarship and teaching. In his inaugural lecture at London as ‘Professor of the Greek Language, Literature, and Antiquities’, Long pledged to teach the geography of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia in connection with Xenophon’s Anabasis, and to explain ‘the extent of geographical knowledge before and during the age of Herodotus’, as well as ‘the means by which the science was improved among the Greeks’. His first English publication after taking up his new appointment was a ‘summary’ of Herodotus, written as the introduction to a new edition of that author. One of his students in the university’s first year was 16-year-old Robert Browning, who dropped out after a year, but who evidently got from Long a method of reading Aeschylus and some introduction to the cultural and historical context of Greek literature. Long remained in the Greek chair for only three years, however, resigning (with others) over an internal faculty dispute.39 One of Brougham’s ideas resulted in the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or SDUK, formed in 1826, whose purpose was to prepare and distribute printed material that working men could afford. The Society also sponsored the Penny Magazine and the 29volume Penny Cyclopaedia, both published by Charles Knight and issued in affordable segments. The latter occupied Long both as editor and contributor from 1833 to 1846. The Society also published a new almanac and a number of treatises in its ‘Library of Useful Knowledge’ series. After criticism of the difficult content of some of its books, the Society produced a series of more popular versions, the ‘Library of Entertaining Knowledge’. The Society also started a Quarterly Journal of Education, the first such periodical in Britain, which Long was to edit throughout its five-year life span, and to which he contributed an important essay, ‘On the Study of Geography’, and probably several of the other articles and reviews on geography as well. An expensive attempt at a biographical dictionary, however, forced the Society to suspend its operations in 1846. 97

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Long edited a geography of the Americas (1841) for the Society, for which his former Virginia colleague George Tucker wrote the sections on the United States. Long also co-authored a work on the geography of England and Wales, and produced a widely used Classical Atlas (1854) based on the maps of a well-known British geographic educator, William Hughes. He prepared the maps of Egypt and Syria for the Society’s map series, and probably wrote the article on geography for the Penny Cyclopaedia. Long also wrote several articles on classical geography for William Smith’s classical dictionaries (see Chapter 9).40 As a result of these efforts, building upon his Virginia experience, Long became recognized as a leading English authority on ancient geography. Long’s Virginia colleague in mathematics, Thomas Key, had temporarily taken over Long’s responsibilities in the summer of 1825 so that Long could return to Cambridge to qualify for the MA, a condition of retaining his fellowship and stipend at Trinity College. At London, in 1833, Key also became co-headmaster (in 1842 sole headmaster) of the University College School, and taught Latin and geography there. In an obituary, Long wrote of Key that ‘he was very fond of geography and taught it well in the School of University College’. (Browning, who took Latin with Key, was less enthusiastic. One of his most frequently anthologized poems, ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’, appears to be modeled on Key, Professor of Comparative Grammar after 1842, and coiner of the term ‘enclitic’, which Browning uses in the poem.) Key also contributed maps of both ancient France (‘Gallia’) and of the French provinces before 1789 to the SDUK map series. After Key’s departure from Virginia, his colleague and Professor of Natural Philosophy, Charles Bonnycastle, was transferred to the professorship of mathematics and, among other things, taught his students the projection and construction of maps. In all, then, six of Jefferson’s eight original faculty appointees (Long, Blaettermann, Dunglison, Tucker, Key, and Bonnycastle) either taught or wrote on some aspect of geography at some point in their professional lives.41 Jefferson, one thinks, would have been pleased. Long was a founding member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, and served for 19 years either on its Council or as an officer. He was Vice-President between 1839 and 1841, and one of its first two Honorary Secretaries between 1846 and 1848. To be sure, it was a low 98

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period in the Society’s history; its historian, H. R. Mill, described the presidency of W. J. Hamilton in the 1840s as ‘perhaps the darkest time in the history of the R.G.S.’ But it was also a time when many members were classicists or others interested in the advancement of classical geography (whose presence Mill, a self-described ‘practical geographer’, later deprecated). Hamilton had combed Turkey looking for Greek inscriptions, the Society’s Journal reported on the topography of Troy in 1842, and the geologist Roderick Murchison was interested in establishing the sites of ancient gold mines, to take but three examples. Long himself contributed two papers to the Society’s journal, one on the site of Susa in 1833 and another that was an extensive commentary on a contribution from A. H. Layard in 1842.42 Long returned to University College as Professor of Latin in 1842, succeeding Key, resigned again in 1846, and lectured on jurisprudence in the Middle Temple. He became recognized as the leading English authority on Roman law. From 1849 to 1871 Long was classics master at a new progressive school, Brighton College. Of his postVirginia scholarship other than geography, his best-known work was a translation of Marcus Aurelius, which was the standard one well into the later twentieth century. Matthew Arnold praised it in an essay, and compared Long to his revered father, Thomas Arnold, in his ability to make a classic text live for students in the present. Robert E. Lee, then President of Washington College, praised Long’s ‘excellent translation’, asking Key to present his regards and grateful thanks to Long for the gift of it. Long seems to have been respected by his students, both at London and Brighton, though he seems to have become more distant and indeed more acerbic as he aged. One of them commented later on his ‘caustic irony, accurate and almost ostentatious dry learning, and profoundly stoical temperament’, as well as his practice of ‘exposing pretentious conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience’ among his students. Yet the ‘Old Boys’ of Brighton College, where he was evidently revered, placed a memorial to him in the College chapel after his death, presumably as a gesture of appreciation.43

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LATER CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY AT VIRGINIA The Board of Visitors invited Long to furnish names of a possible successor. They seem to have been taken aback when he told them they had no need to search abroad, since his own student, Gessner Harrison, was fully qualified to teach the range of studies Long had laid out. Long had been 24 when he was hired directly out of Cambridge University. Harrison was barely 21, and had just graduated as one of the first three students to concentrate in Greek at Virginia. Of the other two, Henry Tutwiler became the first Professor of Ancient Languages at the University of Alabama and later master of a private academy, and Robert M. T. Hunter also gained distinction in later life. This, however, was not in classics but in politics, as Speaker of the US House of Representatives and Senator from Virginia, and in the Confederate government both as Secretary of State and as a Senator.44 The Board of Visitors compromised by appointing Harrison for one year only on a trial basis, pending a possible second search in England, but gave him a regular appointment in 1829. Harrison continued Long’s stress on the relevance of, and indeed ‘necessity for a thorough knowledge of’ ancient history and geography for the study of classical language and literature. According to his colleague, George Tucker, Harrison regularly included questions on classical geography in his examinations and delivered two lectures a week on geography and history. He recommended to his students the use of Butler’s, D’Anville’s, or the Eton Atlas, as well as the maps issued by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and used the Society’s texts for Greek and Roman history. (See Chapter 9.) In 1834–5 Harrison published his own brief text (essentially a pamphlet based on his lectures), The Geography of Ancient Italy and Southern Greece. Although he put a great deal of work into it, the two sections (originally issued separately) were condensed to the point of being what one of his former assistants, John Broaddus, called ‘a mere syllabus’ and ‘hard work to pull (students) through it’. It is rather duller than Long’s, suggesting that, for Harrison, ancient geography was more of an assignment for students to memorize rather than an opportunity to enliven and enrich his teaching of classics. Indeed, though he continued to stress the relevance of 100

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geography for history, in his later years Harrison ‘spent less time in teaching Ancient geography’. But prior to his retirement in 1859 Harrison had trained most of the southern classics students who went on to teach in colleges and academies in the region. Even though the author ‘lays no claim to originality’ and had printed his notes specifically for the use of his own classes, there is ample testimony that Harrison’s emphasis on geography was widely adopted in the South. One of Harrison’s former students, Gordon McCabe, who founded an academy after returning from the Civil War, reported that his students in the upper forms were required at the beginning of each year to produce maps of Greece and Italy of ‘a high standard of accurate and elegant execution’.45 By 1856 Harrison, who had also served for several years as Chairman of the Faculty (in effect, President), and in 1839 had been horsewhipped by two students he had suspended or expelled, was overwhelmed with work and suffering from fatigue. Enrollments in the School of Ancient Languages had increased from 33 in 1843 to 259 by 1856. At his request, in May 1856 the Board of Visitors divided the chair, with Harrison taking the Latin half and Basil Gildersleeve appointed to the chair of Greek (and during the Civil War period, of both Greek and Latin). After Harrison retired in 1859 to start a new academy, classical geography temporarily disappeared from the School of Ancient Languages. Gildersleeve had studied in Germany, immersed himself in classical philology, had an arrogant attitude toward his colleagues, was contemptuous of the ‘English’ pronunciation Long and Harrison had used, and seems to have been completely uninterested in the history and geography of the ancient Mediterranean. During Gildersleeve’s reign at Virginia, ancient geography and ancient history were dropped from the requirements of the ancient languages curricula. In 1858 the Board of Visitors also noted ‘Modern History and Modern Geography are not required to be taught in the School [of Modern Languages]’. Gildersleeve’s narrow attitude, carried over from his German training in philology, is perhaps best summed up in an 1878 address on ‘Classics and College’, given two years after he became Professor of Greek in the new Johns Hopkins University: ‘A point of literary history cleared up by a study of the sources, a text closely studied, an inscription well commented, is 101

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worth much more for pupils than any number of brilliant lectures on language, literature, the discoveries at Mycenae and Olympia, or the latest finds in Attica and Boeotia’.46 His enormous influence on the education of professional classicists along these lines was to multiply Browning’s grammarians, ‘dead from the waist down’, and was to have a negative effect on the place of the classical humanities in America until the 1950s. It was the reverse of Jefferson’s comprehensive vision of the role the classics might play in American higher education. Gildersleeve’s successor in the Greek chair at Virginia, Thomas Prince, resumed lecturing on ‘the geography and political history of Greece’ in the Junior or first year for some years before departing for Columbia University in 1882. In 1835 William Barton Rogers (later the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy, with additional responsibilities in the geological sciences after 1839. Rogers included physical geography and meteorology/ climatology in his Natural Philosophy courses. In 1856 the Board of Visitors discussed the creation of a new professorship ‘embracing Physical Geography, Geology, Mineralogy’ and applied science, and in 1859 voted to create a School of Physical Geography and Agricultural Science, which would have included in its remit ‘Physical Geography, Meteorology and Climatology’ in relation to agriculture and rural economy. They then elected Matthew Fontaine to be Maury Professor of Physical Geography and Scientific Agriculture, but Maury refused, and nothing further came of it. Yet the trend reflects the mid- to late nineteenth-century shift from geography as a humane study toward geography as a natural science. Physical geography in its turn disappeared from the college program, no longer taught in the School of Natural History and Geology. By the early twentieth century it appears only in the Summer School program, presumably for teachers at the secondary school level, in accordance with the recommendations of the ‘Committee of Ten’. It had also become an optional examination for admission to the University. Occasional courses in commercial or economic geography were taught around the same time as part of the economics program in the School of Economics and Political Science. But not until 1946 was an independent School of Geography established at Virginia, in conjunction with the new Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Af102

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fairs, only to be [sub]merged in 1970 into a department of environmental science.47

JEFFERSON’S ACHIEVEMENT Of course, the root of all this goes back to Thomas Jefferson and his championship of geography as a useful and mind-expanding discipline. The significant points concerning Jefferson’s interest in the teaching of geography are these. First, Jefferson clearly believed that some form of geography should be taught at every level of the curriculum, from the elementary stages of instruction through university. Second, after mulling over the problem of placement for several years, Jefferson ultimately decided to assign geography at the university level to the cultural-humanistic disciplines, closely allied with history, literature and language. Third, in making ancient geography a formal part of the Virginia curriculum as an explicit responsibility of the School of Ancient Languages, Jefferson elevated the academic status of classical geography to a visibility and significance it had never previously enjoyed in America. Finally, Jefferson’s emphasis on the salience of geography for the classical humanities was transmitted through Long and Harrison (and their students) to students in academies and colleges throughout the American South. Through Long’s subsequent work in England, Jefferson’s placement had also encouraged the study and teaching of classical geography in Britain during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We cannot know precisely why Jefferson ultimately chose to structure his University of Virginia curriculum in the way that he did. Perhaps one can best see it as a product of multiple causes: his earlier embrace of geography in Notes on the State of Virginia and the Lewis and Clark expedition, the strong hold that France and French ideas on education had on him, his own broad reading in classics, even originality created out of financial necessity. We may not be able to pin down the causes precisely, but we can see the result. Charles W. Kent, in 1905, praised Jefferson’s Virginia academic program for giving modern languages equal status with ancient, a real innovation at the time. Kent went on to make an extremely significant point: 103

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In the study of these languages he desired not only the mastery of the language and some introduction to its literature, but also a helpful knowledge of the history and geography of those countries where the language was used, thus anticipating the attention now [1905] demanded for the culture-history of a nation. This was his chief addition to the study of ancient languages, for here, too, he insisted upon the teaching of history and geography parallel with the study of the language itself.48

Jefferson believed that a mastery of the classics (preferably into the original languages) was a prerequisite of the advance both of science and of humane learning, as well as politics and citizenship. His profound love of the classics, of history and of languages is well known, and his reading in them only increased during his retirement years. Of the ‘Founding Fathers’ who were also college founders, only Jefferson succeeded in creating an explicit curricular rationale for geography as a humane study. He took what had been, at best, an incidental part of ‘classical antiquities’, and elevated it to the status of a university subject. The broader case Jefferson made, that geography is fundamental to a liberal education and should be taught in tandem with the language, history and literature of specific regions of the world to which it was germane, and which Charles Kent had praised at the beginning of the twentieth century, seems equally worthy of re-examination at the beginning of the twenty-first.

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James Rennell and Henry Fanshawe Tozer: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Professionalization

The lives of Major James Rennell (1742–1830) and the Reverend Henry Fanshawe Tozer (1829–1916) together span the period from the geographies of the Enlightenment, whose relation to classical geography we have already traced in part, to the institutionalization of geography as an independent discipline both in Great Britain and the United States. Except for the curious coincidences of their birthplaces (both born in Devon) and their ages (both lived to see their 87th birthdays), their life courses were quite different. Both men were committed to understanding and explicating the worlds of the ancient Greeks and their geographical writings. Both were also practitioners of what was then called ‘comparative geography’, and engaged in the use of modern methods to illuminate the sites of ancient events. Yet each also reflected the geographical perspectives and methods of his time. Rennell was proficient in the cartographic and accurate measurement techniques of the British Enlightenment. Tozer’s methodology, heavily influenced by the aesthetic side of Von Humboldt and by John Ruskin, stressed accurate verbal imagery, along with field sketches of the forms of the landscape. An examination of the work of the two classical geographers as what Ralph Waldo Emerson or Thomas Carlyle would have called ‘representative men’, then, allows us to bridge the distance from the

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age of the Dilettanti and Thomas Jefferson to the period just prior to the rise of the professional geographer, a phenomenon that in its turn was to discard and then to forget the era of classical geography, which since the Renaissance had been an essential form of inquiry and representation within geography. As members of an aspiring and newly institutionalized academic discipline, the professional geographers of the late nineteenth century organized disciplinary programs that would take geography in very different directions.

JAMES RENNELL: PRACTICAL AND CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHER As Charles Withers has written, James Rennell appears in several ‘guises’. But his humanism and his militarism, his ancient geography books and his practical surveying and mapping, cannot be legitimately separated from one another, for ‘geography in the Enlightenment was what Rennell did’. And as Robert Mayhew pointed out earlier, Rennell unites in his own person both the humanistic textual tradition of geography and contemporary scientific method in such fields as oceanography, topography and cartography. ‘Rennell was one of the few geographers’, Mayhew tells us, ‘to participate fully in both modes of scholarship.’1 Rennell came to be a significant figure in Enlightenment geography by a very different route from most geographical writers of his time.2 Born into a small-holding Devonshire family, he was less than five years of age when his father was killed in battle in 1747, leaving an impoverished widow and two children. His mother’s second marriage did not improve matters financially, and young James had to be taken in by the vicar of the local parish. At age 13 he launched a naval career by becoming the personal servant to the captain of a British naval frigate. In his three-year apprenticeship, during one of which he was lent out to the British East India Company, young Rennell became an accomplished marine surveyor. He made several surveys of harbors and other maritime sites, some of which were engraved and published. In 1763, following the conclusion of the Seven Years War, he took a post on the East India Company’s sea service, and the following year, at just over 19 years of age, he was made the 106

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East India Company’s surveyor of Bengal. His Indian survey work was to occupy him for the next 13 years.3 In many ways recent scholarly writing on Rennell is more refreshing and more analytic than such earlier essays as Brigadier G. F. Heaney’s 1968 ‘Rennell and the surveyors of India’, or even J. N. L. Baker’s ‘Major James Rennell, 1742–1830, and his place in the history of geography’ (mostly concerned with his influence), much less Clements Markham’s 1895 hero-worshipping biography. The older work betrays a top-down approach that obscures the contributions of others, notably Indian surveyors, a point made by one of the commentators on Heaney’s paper for the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) but not picked up subsequently by historians of cartography. Yet to the extent that recent studies rely on currently faddish generic categories (perhaps reflecting the ‘colonial guilt’ complex of many contemporary British geographers), the analysis obscures Rennell’s actual work.4 What did Rennell actually do in his more purely cartographical work, the primary task of his 13 years in India? The most important aspect, as Matthew Edney points out, is his collection of geographical data, some from his own duties as Surveyor-General of Bengal, and others collected by the British military, and their compilation into general maps of the Indian subcontinent. This not only enabled him to surpass such earlier maps as those of Jean-Baptiste d’Anville, but it provided an influential holistic image of India, or ‘Hindoostan’, as he called it on his maps, for the use of British and European publics. Edney argues: ‘the geographical unity of India is, in short, a creation of the British mapping of their empire’. Having made the first regional survey of Bengal, which included distances, directions and the astronomical location of latitudes of important reference points, after his return to London Rennell was able to put these materials into a Bengal Atlas, first published in 1780. Turning also to the materials collected in London’s India House, Rennell then began a long process of compilation that resulted in a series of maps of Hindoostan, the first in 1782, and an accompanying memoir, published in its first incarnation the following year. Additional maps and scientific memoirs followed these works. Rennell’s Bengal survey brought him membership in the Royal Society and the friendship of Sir Joseph Banks, the scientific entrepreneur who had sailed with James Cook in 1769. 107

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His map and monograph on Hindoostan earned Rennell the Society’s prestigious Copley Medal.5 For our purposes, two things stand out. First is that in his map of Hindoostan, Rennell used the provincial subdivisions established by the Mogul emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century. Here Rennell relied on a historical document, a recently translated Islamic geography compiled in 1598. On his map, he had the names of the Mogul provinces set in regular type, but the names of the current provinces in a cursive script. He also used color to distinguish between the historical and modern divisions. Rennell incorporated into his map other ancient sources, including those concerning Alexander the Great’s expedition to India.6 As we have seen, an important technique of ‘comparative geography’ ever since the Ortelius atlas was to indicate and distinguish both ancient and modern places on the same map. Michael Bravo, in his analysis of the paradigm of precision beginning in the later eighteenth century, makes a most significant point regarding Rennell’s historical work. As we have seen in Chapter 1, from the mid-eighteenth century onward, the narrative accounts of the traveler were expected to incorporate the newer techniques of simplicity and precision. Thus, Bravo argues, the ‘triumvirate of surveyor, naturalist and [topographical] artist (and its variations) laid the ground for future models of scientific travel and expeditions. Techniques of measuring, drawing and describing contributed to a common vocabulary of precision.…’ Bravo then goes on to link this idea with D’Anville and other students of ancient geography, as well as those contemporary expeditions with which Banks, among others, was closely associated. ‘Rennell’s project’, Bravo writes, was ‘situated among the moderns and the ancients’, noting that in the late eighteenth century the term ‘precision’ was equally applied to activities seemingly as disparate as surveying and philology. In 1791 Rennell published an essay ‘On the Rate of Travelling, as Performed by Camels; and its Application, as a Scale, to the Purposes of Geography’. In it, he attempted to use the historical sources on the pacing of camels as an instrument of cartographical precision across areas where carrying a large number of surveying and astronomical instruments would be impracticable. That study alone illustrates Bravo’s point admirably. Much earlier, Samuel Miller, surveying develop108

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ments in geography (than which ‘few sciences are more interesting’) in the eighteenth century, had given Rennell’s memoirs and maps of both India and Africa high praise.7

RENNELL AS A CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHER At the conclusion of Bravo’s essay, he points out that ‘the most elegant and informed description of the course of the Gulf Stream was to be found in Rennell’s comparative study of the ancient geography of Herodotus, corrected and judged against his own, that of the moderns, as revealed through a minute analysis of Navy logs’. Again, that conclusion draws us to Rennell’s later work and to what, in his time, was called ‘comparative geography’. Although an American historian might have given greater credit to Benjamin Franklin for producing a prior map of the Gulf Stream, based on a phenomenon Yankee seamen understood but Royal Mail packet captains did not, Bravo’s comments may serve as a transition toward a fuller discussion of Rennell’s work on the geography of the ancient world.8 In a balanced essay entitled ‘On the cusp of modern geography: fieldwork and textuality in the career of James Rennell’, Robert Mayhew has found in Rennell’s work the combination of seeming opposites identified in his subtitle. Taking up the challenge posed by recent emphases on imperialism as an organizing concept in British histories of geography, Mayhew concedes that it is easy to see Rennell through a late nineteenth-century imperialist lens. ‘Rennell seems to verify the contention that the “new” [or modern] geography’, he writes, ‘was solely a product of and for the grandiose imperial ambitions of the nineteenth century.’9 In assessing Rennell’s ‘modernism’, Mayhew points out that Rennell’s work departs from the conventional geographies of his time and place in several significant ways. One was that he moved to incorporate some field work into his geography books. This both improved the accuracy of his maps and, in contrast to the hack writers who wrote most eighteenth-century geography texts, shifted them to a regional focus, centered on India, the Near East, and Africa. Second, within his publications, Rennell opted for systematic inquiry into a 109

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limited range of topics within a specified region, rather than listing every characteristic the author thought worth recording, such as the boundaries of episcopal dioceses. Third, and perhaps most importantly, his work reflects, and perhaps initiates, a partial turn away from geography as a propaedeutic subject only, subservient to history and classics, to envisioning, Mayhew argues, ‘an independent role for geography’, grounded in Rennell’s self-concept as ‘part of a community of enquiry composed of past and present geographers’.10 This is an extraordinarily fertile insight. Mayhew also argues, however, that Rennell was firmly attached to the early modern textual tradition in important ways. Indeed, his work on the classical world does not differ appreciably from the ideals of eighteenth-century French geographers, such as D’Anville and other French practitioners of the ‘rational geography’ associated with the Académie des Inscriptions and adapted by Rennell’s friend and contemporary Edward Gibbon in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Rennell’s late publications on classical geography are significantly within the traditional understanding of geography as the ‘eye’ of history, important for the light it can cast on problems of ancient history, including identifying the sites of ancient places. Rennell could read no Greek, and had to rely on English and French translations. Where he departed from the textual tradition, dependent as it was on etymology and philology, was in drawing on the latest research in oceanography (to which he himself had contributed), geomorphology, meteorology and other sciences, as well as contemporary concepts of military strategy, to attempt to settle disputed points of ancient geography. But he shared with his late eighteenth-century contemporaries the humanist, textual, educational and value-laden characteristics of the classics. He also shared their skepticism of ‘imperial overreach’, while simultaneously supporting colonial expansion. All of these characteristics keep him from being an early exemplar of either late nineteenth-century imperialism or of late nineteenth-century science. He remains a man of the Enlightenment.11 Mayhew’s all-too-brief examination of Rennell’s place in geography has moved us into new territory. Let us now turn to Rennell’s work in classical geography to see if this conception of Rennell can 110

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aid us as we consider it. His work in this area includes four books (two of them in two volumes apiece), several major articles, and essays included in the books of other authors. The earliest and bestknown of these is his 776-page work on Herodotus. Its full title, The Geographical System of Herodotus examined and explained by a comparison with those of other Ancient Authors and with Modern Geography, published in 1800 and again, after some revision, in 1830, summarizes his approach. Although Miller, in 1803, could refer only to Rennell’s Herodotus volume, he commended the works of D’Anville, Gosselin (another Frenchman) and Rennell as doing ‘honour to their authors, and to the age’. And Miller calls the work of such ‘modern’ geographical writers on ancient geography as ‘highly interesting and valuable, and deserve to be regarded among the signal improvements of the eighteenth century’. Rennell’s other books on the subject include the 156 page Observations on the Topography of the Plain of Troy and on the Principal Objects within and around it, described, or alluded to in the Iliad, published in 1814; Illustrations (Chiefly Geographical) of the History of the Expedition of Cyrus from Sardis to Babylonia, and of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks, from there to Trebisonde [sic] and Lydia, published two years later; and the posthumously published Treatise on the Comparative Geography of Western Asia, in two volumes, with an atlas. These last volumes, edited by his daughter, contain the essays for the major project, unfortunately left uncompleted, of Rennell’s later years.12 Five articles are also important in Rennell’s classical oeuvre. They were ‘The Voyage and Place of the Shipwreck of St. Paul’; ‘Concerning the Identity of the Archaeological remains of Jerash, whether they were those of Gerasa or of Pella’; and ‘Concerning the Place Where Julius Caesar Landed in Britain’. These, presented as papers in 1824 and 1826, were published in 1828 in the Society of Antiquaries’ journal Archaeologia. Other essays include the previously mentioned ‘On the Rate of Travelling, as Performed by Camels’, published in 1791 in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and an essay ‘On the Topography of Ancient Babylon’, published posthumously in 1839 in Claudius Rich’s Narrative of a Journey to the Site of Babylon.13 Rennell’s prolix preface to the Herodotus volume (reprinted in the second edition) identified his larger project, defined as ‘correcting the geography, ancient and modern, throughout that part of Asia situ111

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ated between India and Europe….’ He characterized his ‘bulky volume’ (whose bulk he attributes to having underestimated the amount of available material) as ‘a part only of a larger work’, preparing the ground for the remainder of his more comprehensive ancient geography. In particular, Rennell wished to use geography to correct deficient parts of the military history of ancient times. Conceding that the ideal author would be a professional scholar learned in both Greek and geography, as a practical matter, since the death of D’Anville, no such person had yet attempted such work. Admitting he was ‘ignorant of the Greek language’, Rennell was forced to rely on a translation of Herodotus later scholars have condemned. He thought of his work as an interim scheme, however, until bettered by a scholar proficient in both disciplines. Rennell thus adopted the modest stance of the author of Second Maccabees, who closed his own book by saying, ‘If it is found well written and aptly composed, that is what I myself hoped for; if cheap and mediocre, I could only do my best.’14 Rennell describes his book as a ‘system’, which essentially means that he extracted the geographical sections of Herodotus, compared these, and subjected them to the scrutiny of later scholars and his own experience as a geographical scientist. This approach necessarily pushed him toward a number of systematic topics in addition to his chapters on Herodotus’ regional treatment. His lengthy subtitle, while not a complete table of contents, shows his approach: ‘Dissertations on the itinerary stade of the Greeks, the expedition of Darius Hystaspes to Scythia, the position and remains of ancient Babylon, the alluvions [sic] of the Nile, and canals of Suez; the oasis and temple of Jupiter Ammon, the ancient circumnavigation of Africa, and other subjects of history and geography’, a comprehensive agenda indeed.15 Rennell’s historical geography, then, is primarily a work of textual comparison and compilation, showing his own fieldwork only to a limited degree. Among the earlier writers whose work he consulted for his text and maps, D’Anville has pride of place. ‘As far as he was in any degree master of the actual geography’, Rennell wrote, D’Anville’s systematic work in this field was ‘incomparable in its kind’, and his maps of antiquity a first resource, not only for Rennell himself but for anyone wishing to go beyond Rennell’s own maps in 112

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the Herodotus volumes. Many of Rennell’s maps were fully within the early modern practice of comparative geography, having both modern and ancient place-names, the latter indicated by an underlying dash.16

6. Major James Rennell, frontispiece to his Geographical System of Herodotus

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In addition to the headings already mentioned, Rennell devotes a chapter to a generally sympathetic critique of Herodotus himself, accepting that he was writing as a historian and not setting out to write a geography text. Even so, Rennell believed, the geographical sections (which some modern scholars have termed ‘digressions’, rather than seeing them as integral to Herodotus’ method), could be researched and improved using the methods of Enlightenment geographers, without detriment to Herodotus himself. To take a typical essay, on the explorations of Hanno the Carthaginian, Rennell could critique the work of D’Anville and other writers on the subject while at the same time giving them credit for what they had accomplished in their own times.17 The work is marked both by generosity of spirit and a becoming modesty. Rennell tells us quite clearly what he is qualified to do, and what he is not able to do. In his conclusion he acknowledges the necessary ‘dryness of geographical detail’. To keep the attention of his general audience, however, he added some more ‘agreeable’ subjects from history, ‘which it is the proper office of geography to explain’. And he quotes Polybius on geography to the effect that, although earlier writers had made errors in their geography, ‘their labours deserve on the whole rather praise than censure’. Earlier errors must always be corrected gently, according to Polybius, since had those earlier writers lived into current times they would have changed their claims in accordance with contemporary knowledge. Rennell then expressed a hope that he would live long enough to do that for his Herodotus book, and though he did not see its publication, his revised version was published in 1830, the year of his death. Mayhew’s point is well taken: the whole sets a tone, not of scholarly conflict or braggadocio, but of continuing civilized conversation among Rennell, Herodotus, Enlightenment scholarship and the classically educated public. In that alone, Rennell’s achievement is a remarkable one.18 Rennell’s later works, while largely complete in themselves, are also parts of the incomplete larger project, the classical geography of western Asia. Rennell’s book on the topography of the Trojan plain belongs to a genre that had piqued the interest of a large number of travelers since the sixteenth century. Rennell’s location in London gave him access to a large number of travel books and other material. It also had brought him in contact with such persons as Banks and 114

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particularly with Gell, whose Topography of the Plain of Troy (which Rennell praises, as he also does Richard Chandler’s history of Troy) had been published ten years earlier. Even though the book utilized the ancient form of a comparison of the ancient with the modern, Rennell never visited the site itself. Two years after his Troy book was published, a travel account by Philip Hunt proved Rennell’s river Simois, which he had derived entirely from published sources, was a fiction. Rennell’s book has not held up well and seems to be no longer referenced. The topic has not died, however, with new ‘facts on the ground’ being exposed by the Troia archaeological project and treated in such recent English-language books as J. V. Luce’s Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes.19 Rennell’s 1816 study of Xenophon’s account in the Anabasis, which had been drafted in 1794–5 and revised in 1812, again stands in a chain of scientific studies that had begun authoritatively, Rennell believed, with B. G. Niebuhr’s travel account in the late eighteenth century. More generally, Rennell was following the tradition of verifying the text by setting the ancient accounts against modern appraisals of the features of the landscape, and thus attempting to validate the events described. In this case, of course, it involves the vexing problem of establishing the actual route of the retreat of the Ten Thousand from Mesopotamia across Asia Minor to Trebizond on the Black Sea with some degree of precision. Rennell’s major contribution in this work was to produce a more accurate map grid than that of D’Anville, whose latitudes were incorrect. The few travel sources available at the time also gave him an opportunity to correct some errors, though within a short time the publication of James Kinneir’s travel journal showed some of Rennell’s suggestions to be implausible. As Tim Rood has recently written, ‘Rennell’s work marks the end of an era in the investigation of Xenophon’s route’, one that was limited in his time by the paucity of information on the region. Rood calls attention, however, to the appendix of Rennell’s book, which suggested valuable hints to travelers on ‘The Best Method of Improving the Geography of the Anabasis’. In it, Rennell urges those traveling in the region, for whatever purpose, to be more active in data collection, a task that a number of Victorian travelers, including Tozer, would assiduously undertake. The precise route of the retreat 115

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of the Ten Thousand remains a vexatious problem in the twenty-first century, however, and not only for reasons of regional unrest and armed conflict. Robin Waterfield has put it bluntly: ‘Trying to trace Xenophon’s route in detail will drive you crazy.’20 The title of Rennell’s final major work, the posthumously published Treatise on the Comparative Geography of Western Asia, promises more than the volumes themselves deliver. The primary emphasis is on the maps in the accompanying atlas. The text, brought together from his notes by his daughter Jane, Lady Rodd, is principally a series of commentaries on the sources and methods of the maps. Rennell’s notes drew on his earlier work with itinerary measurements and travel routes, including the camels he had written about many years before. As Clements Markham points out, this is Rennell in the workshop, outlining his critical method and the reasons for placing as he did the data displayed on the maps.21 For that reason, it may still be useful as a study in Enlightenment methods of compilation. Nonetheless, Rennell’s work remained a source for later nineteenth-century geographers, even though in some respects superseded. Both Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter refer to his work. Even though Rennell’s volumes on Herodotus were quickly replaced as a first reference by B. G. Niebuhr’s Dissertation on the Geography of Herodotus, translated into English in 1830, by W. P. Grant’s Geography of Herodotus (1841) and eventually by the four chapters on Herodotus in Edward Bunbury’s massive History of Ancient Geography (1879), later writers continued to refer to him with respect. Bunbury called Rennell’s Herodotus study ‘still of the greatest value, notwithstanding the imperfect character of the materials at his command’, and cites him frequently, while disagreeing with some of his identifications. Although Rennell can no longer be called, as Markham did, the ‘Father of British Geography’, it is still true to say, as J. N. L. Baker did almost 50 years ago, that he deserves ‘a place higher in the history of British geography than hitherto recognized’.22 After all, following his death, his contemporaries honored Rennell with burial, tablet, and bust in Westminster Abbey. Of how many geographers can that be said?

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HENRY FANSHAWE TOZER: ‘BOOTS ON THE GROUND’ GEOGRAPHER

Who was Tozer, and why should we remember him? Henry Fanshawe Tozer was born in Plymouth on 18 May 1829, less than a year before Rennell’s death. As Rennell’s work can be taken as a ‘representative man’ of late Enlightenment classical geography, so Tozer is representative of what we might call ‘Romantic’ or, better, mid-Victorian classical geography, the geographic work of the generation just preceding the rise of professional geography as we know it. Born the son of a naval captain and amateur botanist who taught his son to observe the landscape, the father shared his botanical knowledge by taking his son on expeditions into rural areas of Cornwall and Devon. During this time young Henry became proficient in sketching, a talent he was later to put to good use in collaboration on landscape imagery with his friend Edward Lear. Young Tozer attended Winchester, where he was appointed a prefect, and matriculated in 1847 at University College, Oxford, where he remained for two years. Here he encountered Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, then Tutor at the university. Stanley was an important member of the group of liberal Anglican scholars associated with Oxford who, beginning with Thomas Arnold, shared an interest in the relations of history and geography (see Chapter 6). Stanley encouraged such an interest in his pupil, along with nurturing his interest in exploratory travel.23 Tozer, however, is primarily associated with Exeter College, to which he transferred as a Devon Scholar in 1849. He took his degree in the School of Literae Humaniores the following year, and was promptly elected a Fellow of Exeter despite having earned only second-class honours. Five years later, he was made Librarian and Tutor. Of his 13 years as librarian, one memorialist in a position to know claimed that Tozer’s work made Exeter’s collections in geography and modern history ‘the most complete of their kind in Oxford’. Given the scope of geography at that time, his efforts must also have laid a foundation of bibliographical resources for the ‘line of anthropologists’ and ‘nursery of anthropologists’ that Exeter subsequently and famously nurtured.24

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7. Henry Fanshawe Tozer

Exeter had some distinguished forebears in geography, especially Nathaniel Carpenter, elected Fellow in 1607 who, wrote J. N. L. Baker, ‘there found himself in the company of several geographical scholars’.25 During Tozer’s time as a Fellow, Exeter was home to a

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number of distinguished scholars, and in particular of Fellows who, like Tozer, had interests in geography and, often, in the relations of geography and history. George Butler, who lectured on geography at Oxford in 1853, was a Fellow of Exeter. Henry Pelham, a principal in the founding of the Oxford School of Geography in 1899, was elected a Fellow of Exeter in 1869 and became the Camden Professor of Ancient History in 1889. (His lecturer in Greek history, G. Beardoe Grundy, became the Oxford School’s first lecturer in ancient geography, after holding a Royal Geographical Society traveling fellowship.) William Ramsay, later knighted as the distinguished historical geographer of Asia Minor, was elected Fellow of Exeter in 1882, though shortly departed for the University of Aberdeen.26 In other words, Tozer, as an Exeter Fellow, was associated with or acquainted with a number of scholars who were not exclusively self-identified as geographers, but who nevertheless worked, both prior to and after 1887, to sift geographical perspectives into the rather rigid Oxford curriculum and were sometimes involved in the greater struggle to institutionalize the discipline permanently.

TOZER AS TEACHER OF GEOGRAPHY As Tutor for 38 years, Tozer’s work was marked by high standards, though he was never one of Oxford’s great vivid lecturers. His personal kindness to students was noteworthy, and he regularly turned back the income from his Fellowship to be used for undergraduate scholarships. After his marriage to Augusta Satow in 1868, he offered what one of his colleagues called ‘genial hospitality’ to both friends and pupils. Forced to resign as Fellow (though not as Tutor) on his marriage, he was reinstated under the new statutes in 1882; he resigned both positions in 1893 and was made Honorary Fellow.27 Tozer’s primary responsibility as Tutor was to prepare Exeter pupils for the Schools, and therefore most of his instruction was in direct preparation for their examinations. He probably exercised his widest influence through his lectures on comparative philology, designed to prepare students for their first examinations in the School of Literae Humaniores, the so-called Moderations, or ‘Mods’. 119

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Here his teaching seems to have been rather pedestrian, and it is probable that his real influence on students lay outside the classroom. Lewis Farnell, who succeeded Tozer as Senior Tutor and later became Rector of Exeter, disliked Tozer’s ‘dull and uninspiring’ teaching in his ‘Mods’ preparation. Although Farnell thought Tozer’s scholarship ‘respectable’ and ‘accurate’, he also found it ‘arid’ and ‘without imagination’. Yet Farnell also called Tozer a ‘good man’ who had been generous and kind to him as an undergraduate, and was grateful for his hospitality. Though Farnell deplored Tozer’s lack of interest in classical art and architecture, he conceded that Tozer’s travels in wild and dangerous areas (where he and his entourage once frightened the local peasants, who had taken him for a well-armed bandit chief) had made him an authority on the historical geography of the ancient world. Farnell especially praised Tozer’s Aegean islands book, his history of ancient geography and his edition of George Finlay’s history of Greece as ‘notable contributions to the scholarly output for which our college has been distinguished….’28 R. R. Marett, also a Fellow of Exeter, criticized Tozer for concentrating on ‘the sheer geography’ and not on the archaeology of Greece (therefore, as being a geographer rather than an archaeologist). But Tozer ‘urged’ him to travel to Greece, and Marett appreciated the coaching Tozer had given him for his first journey. Ultimately, Marett conceded that Tozer was on the right track: ‘I had to find myself in Arcadia and its tangle of hills and valleys before I realized how completely the history of the entire country was determined by its shape’. After Tozer’s death James Bryce praised his singular kindness and helpfulness to others, and the Rector of Exeter, William W. Jackson, recalled his financial generosity to undergraduates, of which Farnell, among others, had been a beneficiary.29 Tozer also contributed to one of the great, through relatively unfamiliar, reform movements of the 1870s that was one of the turning points in Oxford’s gradual transformation from an Anglican institution, grounded in the classics, to a modern university with a greatly broadened range of subjects taught by scholarly specialists. These were the intercollegiate lectures fostered by a group of tutors, of which Tozer was one (though not a leading) participant. He was asked to lecture on the geography of Greece, which he did in a series of ten lectures in Michaelmas Term (Fall 1872). They were published 120

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the following year as Lectures on the geography of Greece and republished in 1882. Appropriately enough, the published version was dedicated to his friend and former tutor Stanley, by now Dean of Westminster, ‘who has done more than any living man to promote the intelligent study of historical geography’.30 In his preface, Tozer situates himself squarely in the midst of the conservative Oxford academic reforms of the 1870s. The ten lectures were given, he says, as ‘one of a number of courses voluntarily undertaken by members of the University on subjects indirectly connected with the usual studies’.31 In other words, they were enrichment courses, designed to nudge Oxford’s traditional academic program in new directions without fundamentally changing its base. Tozer dismissed any need to replicate the detailed essays on Greek topography already available in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1857). Rather he lays out four objectives. The first is ‘to enable students to form a more real conception of the country from the impressions of one who at various times has travelled over most of it’. Here he is responding to the concern expressed by Ruskin, in his lectures on art, that classical scholars, preoccupied with philology, know only the names of places, but write ‘never one line of conception of them in their minds’ sight’. In the first instance, then, Tozer attempted through pictorial imagery, derived from his own visual experience, to provide the student ‘with material, by means of which he may to some extent represent to himself the country generally and its particular features’.32 Secondly, Tozer wanted to survey the main influences of soil, climate, vegetation and other physical constraints influencing Greek history and literature, accepting current conceptions of environmental relations. Third, he wished ‘to sketch the connection of the geography and the history, starting from the geographical point of view’ [italics mine]. A good map and a guiding hand, he believed, may be of help to ‘any intelligent student of history’ in making these connections. Finally, Tozer wished to draw attention to two geographically related topics he believed to have received less attention than they deserve: the relations of geography and mythology, and the etymology of Greek place-names.33 In addition to the writings of ancient Greeks themselves, principally Strabo and Pausanias, Tozer drew on Smith’s Dictionary, on the 121

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new Biblical and Classical Atlas edited by Smith and George Grove, and on various German scholars, most notably Ernst Curtius’ Peloponnesos, which Tozer described as ‘distinguished as well by its breadth of view on geographical questions as by its great learning and accuracy of topographical description’. He also cautioned the reader that, necessarily, treatment of this range of subjects is superficial and asked for tolerance for mistakes of detail.34 Despite these caveats, the book holds up remarkably well after more than a century. As the reviewer for the Saturday Review put it, ‘Mr. Tozer has got hold of a good subject, and he treats it thoroughly well.’ The lecture format, which the book retains, gives the content a simple, straightforward appeal. By and large, Tozer is successful in avoiding such minute descriptions as ‘would severely try your patience’. He proposes, he tells us, ‘to describe the physical features of the country, and the works of man upon it, as they appeared to the Greeks themselves, as they influenced their history, and…as they affected the national character and mind’. This is no narrow subject, but Tozer held that the connections geography brought to both the natural and the human sciences enabled the student to bring together in one comprehensive view those features that account for what he calls ‘the pre-eminent greatness of ancient Greece’.35 In this, of course, he reflects both his times and his situation in Victorian Oxford, where the classical humanities, particularly ancient Greek studies, held pride of place. Tozer began the series with a general locational lecture, along with a critical discussion of the principal authorities on the geography of Greece. Of the classical authors, Tozer stressed the second-century traveler, Pausanias, the accuracy of whose place identifications was beginning to be confirmed by contemporary archaeological investigations, and Strabo, whose writing on Greece he finds erroneous. Tozer accepts certain of Strabo’s general observations, however, such as the notion that the defining element of Greek geography is not the land but the sea. Among the moderns, Tozer praises William Martin Leake, described as ‘one who made an epoch in the study of Greek geography’, and a number of German scholarly writings: besides Ernst Curtius’ Peloponnesos and other works, he cites Niebuhr’s lectures in ethnography and geography and Bursian’s Geographie von Griechenland. He 122

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also draws on his own travels in Greece: for example, ‘I have never experienced such heat in any country as in the plains of Boeotia in the month of July.’ And his descriptions of scenery known to him, such as that of the Vale of Tempe or of Mt Athos, are admirable.36 Lectures 2–4 trace the main physical features of the country. But the core of his ten lectures were numbers 5 through 8. Lecture 5 is a general description of the Greek landscape and its effects on Greek culture, but with cautionary words about exaggerated notions of environmental determinism of the type held by H. C. Buckle. Tozer added an unusual argument for the study of ancient Greek geography: that it forces the student to address ‘the whole people, dispersed over the face of the country’,37 rather than simply the urban population and large-state concentration characteristic of the study of Greek history and literature. There follow are three regional lectures, on northern, central, and Peloponnesian Greece, enriched by the personal observations of the lecturer and other scientific travelers. The lectures conclude with one each on the relations of geography to Greek mythology and on the origins of Greek place-names. It is clear from both references and text that Tozer was near the end of the pictorial representation of landscape form derived from Alexander von Humboldt and Thomas Arnold, transmitted and reinforced in Britain by the work of A. P. Stanley and by John Ruskin. To take one example of his pictorial writing, describing the approach to Sparta from the north, Tozer writes ‘when at last [the traveler] suddenly comes in sight of that place and its environs from the heights which overhang its eastern side, descending from the flanks of Mt Parnon, the name of the country, its epithets, and its history, become at once intelligible to him’.38 Tozer then develops this description in the form of a verbal panorama of the countryside as seen from the mountain-top. As previously mentioned, the lectures on Greek geography were published the following year and again in 1882, but Tozer seems not to have given them again. About half way between the two published editions, a Wadham graduate, Algernon M. M. Stedman, published a book entitled Oxford: Its Social and Intellectual Life for the use of intending Oxford students. In it, Stedman gives us a snapshot of what was expected at that time for literae humaniores students as they prepared for examinations. All candidates, he wrote, were expected ‘to 123

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show such a knowledge of classical Geography and Antiquities, and of the general history of Greece and Rome, as shall be necessary for the profitable student or the authors of periods which they offer’. How, or to what degree, they were to master those subjects is seldom spelled out. For the study of Thucydides, an indisputably central author in the literae humaniores program, the author recommends a recent edition for its accuracy, but, given that its handling of history and geography was slight, recommends consulting Thomas Arnold’s edition (see Chapter 6) for such notes. Since the author had absorbed the mid-century dictum that ‘History cannot be understood without a fair knowledge of Geography’, and since the examinations usually included questions testing that knowledge, a good atlas was requisite, as was careful study of ‘plans of battles or besieged places’. The best atlas, according to Stedman, was William Smith’s (see Chapter 9), but it was too expensive for most. In its place, Jacob Spruner’s Atlas Antiquus was the best choice both for value and price, but Kiepert’s atlas rated only an appraisal of ‘good, but too small’. Stedman also makes recommendations of atlases for the School of Modern (i.e., post-Roman) History. But Tozer’s Greek geography lectures are not mentioned, nor are Strabo, Ptolemy, or Pausanias on the University’s list of ancient authors.39 The initial publication of his Lectures on the Geography of Greece brought Tozer’s work to the attention of the historian J. R. Green, himself interested in the relations of geography and history, who was Macmillan and Company’s editor for a series of ‘Primers’ – short books on science, history and literature designed for popular sale. The resulting 127-page book, Classical Geography (1876), after an introductory general chapter, offered a series of regional chapters on the parts of the world useful for the student of ancient history and literature, including Biblical literature. D. Appleton and Co. republished it in the United States the following year, and it appears to have been widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. At the new Johns Hopkins University, for example, J. Franklin Jameson used it in the required undergraduate course on the relations of history and geography, and it was republished in America several times, as late as 1899. It was also published in an Italian translation.40 Tozer made a second and equally fruitless attempt to sift some classical geography into the ossified Oxford curriculum in the 1880s 124

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and early 1890s, by preparing a set of annotated extracts from the Graeco-Roman geographer Strabo, published as Selections from Strabo: With an Introduction on Strabo’s Life and Works. This was a more subtle attempt to add ‘the Geographer’ to the standard list of authors read and tested in the examination schools. To try to get the authorities to accept whole books of Strabo would have been a fruitless task, and Tozer undoubtedly knew it. In the preface to his published set of selections, Tozer, while claiming that no other ancient author produced so much about the ancient world, nevertheless conceded that ‘though he is often referred to, he is little read’. Accordingly, Tozer extracted from the Geography what he regarded as ‘a number of the most interesting passages’, omitting such matters as listings of place names that surround them. He also ruled out Strabo’s comments on mathematical geography and statements later shown to be erroneous. But in what Tozer calls ‘a series of vignettes’ (in Greek, but with brief commentaries on each in English), he hoped both to introduce the student to fresh aspects of ancient history and to open up ‘a wider field of study than what is contained in the more familiar classical authors’.41 Tozer concedes that Strabo, like his predecessor Posidonius, was no explorer. But for the places he visited, ‘he kept his eyes open wherever he went’, and was an astute observer and critic. Tozer shared Bunbury’s view that Strabo wrote ‘cultured men in general’, both Greek and Roman, since many of the latter had studied the Greek language and even adopted aspects of Greek culture. Strabo was not, as has been commonly asserted by recent historians of geography, writing a handbook for politicians, generals, or colonial administrators. Strabo’s aim, said Tozer, was to instruct intelligent readers about their world, the human habitat. While, as Tozer suggests, Strabo ‘wished to be read by Romans’, he ‘expected to be read by Greeks’. This is an extremely revealing statement of purpose. While the information contained in Strabo’s book could of course be put to administrative and political purposes, Strabo’s primary aim was to teach, to advance learning, to make a case before thinking readers for the importance of knowledge ‘about the different countries of the world and their occupants’.42 Let it suffice to say that the effort to broaden the literae humaniores program by adding readings from a leading geographical writer had 125

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no more effect on the program than had his attempt two decades earlier to give a lecture course on the historical geography of ancient Greece. Memorizing locations and studying maps of ancient battlefields were, to most classicists, still a sufficient exposure to ancient geography. Even the Geographical Journal did not bother to review it, merely listing it as a new library acquisition with an eight-word summary, ‘This little book is deserving of special notice’ which, ironically, the journal did not give it. It seems also not to have been mentioned in the major obituaries, though a year after Tozer’s death the Loeb Classical Library’s translation of Strabo by Horace L. Jones, who relied heavily on Tozer’s notes, began to appear. But it was not until a century after its issuance that, in the ‘Missing Persons’ volume of the Dictionary of National Biography, Peter Fraser gave the anthology its due. Fraser called Tozer’s book ‘admirable’ and described its introduction as ‘still the most sympathetic introduction to Strabo’, a phrase retained by Elizabeth Baigent in her revision of Fraser’s sketch in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Baigent adds that Tozer was ‘a true follower of Strabo, the author to the dissemination of whose work he contributed most’ in his own time. Only in very recent years has significant new Anglophone scholarship on Strabo begun to appear (see Epilogue).43 Baigent, in her additions to Fraser’s brief biography of Tozer, claims that Tozer ‘is chiefly remembered as a pioneer in the establishment of geography in British universities….’ This is perhaps too broad an assessment. Tozer played only a minor (and skeptical) role in the negotiations leading to the Royal Geographical Society’s subsidization of an Oxford Readership for Halford Mackinder in 1887. Other Oxford dons, such as Hereford B. George, Professor James Bryce and others, and the Warden of Merton College, George Brodrick, were probably more consequential. Unfortunately, as both Tozer and his colleague George pointed out, the Oxford examination system had little place for geography of any kind, ancient or modern. Tozer was, however, probably the best person to consult on the prospects for success at Oxford. He, after all, had been through the wars, having lectured in the intercollegiate lecture program over a decade before (which, as a program, had been less successful in the School of Literae Humaniores than it had been in the School of Modern History), and having tried (unsuccessfully) to get Strabo and 126

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Pausanias onto the Oxford examination lists. But his response to the RGS inquiry is pessimistic, even jaded. John Scott Keltie, in his 1886 survey of geography for the Royal Geographical Society, had found that some knowledge of classical geography was expected of Oxford students in Literae Humaniores, but this was apparently to be gained on their own; no one, not even Tozer, was lecturing on it. Keltie also reported an effort (undoubtedly Tozer’s) to give Strabo a place on the Oxford examinations, which also never bore fruit. Tozer did not see much prospect of geography being recognized unless the literae humaniores syllabus was changed. Regardless of titled professors or readers, he wrote Keltie, the examinations dictated what the undergraduates would or would not study. ‘Into these’, he wrote, ‘geography enters only as subsidiary to history, and even in connection with ancient and modern history the attention that is paid to it is slight.’ Only one college had offered any geography lectures in the previous year, for one term only – undoubtedly a reference to George’s one-hour-a-week lectures in New College. Geography ‘is crowded out of our examination schools by other subjects which the University at large is not disposed to give up’. It was a realistic assessment of the politics of the situation, based on experience, as Mackinder was to discover. Tozer continued to be consulted by the Society, however, as to the progress of Mackinder’s program, and especially whether, without the Society’s subsidy, geography would be continued.44

TOZER THE SCIENTIFIC TRAVELER Three of Tozer’s major works, and several of his articles on topics concerning the ancient world, are based on his privately financed expeditions during the Long Vacation, usually made with his friend, T. M. Crowder of Corpus Christi College. His earliest journeys of this sort were undertaken in 1853, 1861 and 1865, and are described in his two-volume work Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, published in 1869 and dedicated to Crowder who, like Tozer, was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The two men had explored the Plain of Troy in the first and second of these journeys. Tozer discusses their 127

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findings in a chapter on ‘The City and Plain of Troy’ and an appendix to the second volume entitled ‘On the Topography of Troy’. Afterwards, both in 1853 and 1861, they went on to Mt Athos, where they spent time exploring the site as well as the monasteries. From there they went on to Albania and Montenegro, still then part of the Ottoman Empire and very wild country, as indeed it remains. Tozer’s analysis of Troy, like many topographical studies before the recent excavations there under the auspices of the Troia project, contributed only marginally to accurate knowledge of the site. Based primarily on the second visit, the chapter on Troy does, according to J. M. Cook in his review of travelers to Troy, contain ‘valuable incidental information’, and seems to confirm the theory of the eighteenth-century French traveler, Jean-Baptiste Lechevalier (whom Rennell had criticized). But Cook found Tozer’s topographical appendix ‘more speculative’. Tozer himself had pointed out that Troy ‘has been a battle-field, not only of heroes, but of scholars and geographers’, and the controversies, even by his time, had yielded a very large literature. But his dismissal of the hill of Hisarlik as the site of Troy undercuts the value of his observations.45 During this period, Tozer commissioned a number of landscape drawings from Edward Lear, done from Tozer’s own preliminary sketches. One modern scholar has called Lear ‘one of the ablest topographical draughtsmen of his day’, who showed Mediterranean lands ‘in that enchanting state of wilderness superimposed on ruins of ancient civilizations which they had reached when Lear visited them’. In 1872 Lear wrote to a friend that he had been doing some work for Tozer, and recommended his ‘capital book’ on the highlands of Turkey. Tozer bought several Lears, now among the 54 in the Ashmolean Museum, and received an extra one in exchange for a copy of his book.46 The Mt Athos stays of 1853 and 1861 were not, strictly speaking, related to the ancient Greek world, but they do show something of Tozer’s method in treating geographical as well as religious topics. His first account of the region was published soon after his return from the second journey, in a short-lived series edited by another Royal Geographical Society member, Francis Galton. Galton, as T. W. Freeman has pointed out, could hardly be identified as a geographer, but he had strong geographical interests, advocated geography in 128

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schools and universities, and devoted some of his considerable energies to improving both the scientific and literary value of traveler’s accounts. During the 1850s Galton had published an important article, ‘Notes on Modern Geography’, and a volume on The Art of Travel (1855). Beginning in 1854 he was a contributor to several editions of the Royal Geographical Society’s popular Hints to Travellers. In the early 1860s Galton edited a short-lived annual series entitled Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel, to which Tozer had contributed a long article on an 1860 trip to Norway, published in the 1861 volume.47 Tozer’s essay ‘The Monks of Mount Athos’ tells us much about the monks and their beliefs, including their belief that the Greeks would conquer Constantinople and turn it again into a center of learning. This was a persistent Greek fantasy about which Tozer is justifiably skeptical, and indeed was not quelled even after the disastrous Asia Minor campaign of 1919–22. But there is nearly as much about Mt Athos itself as about the monks. He discusses the topography of the peninsula, its vegetation, its scenery, its exports, the state of health and disease, and the architecture of the monastic buildings. He also includes a map facing the first page. In other words, he systematically describes people and place, the natural and the human elements, the human transformation of the site. Clearly, however it may be put, Tozer is writing geography, not theology.48 Tozer’s second major work as a scientific traveler was his Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (1881). This was a more important work, partly because of the paucity of descriptions of the area available in that period (and Tozer’s books always include descriptions of contemporary life and customs). It is important to us because he devotes part of his effort to attempting to uncover the sites associated with Xenophon’s Anabasis, from the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the emergence of the ‘March of the Ten Thousand’ on the shores of the Black Sea near Trebizond. Tozer had been anxious to explore the area for several years, but the great famine of 1874, followed by the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 which devastated portions of eastern Asia Minor, had prevented it. But in 1879 he was able to undertake it, and, as on his four earlier major expeditions, Crowder accompanied him.49

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July found Tozer and Crowder in Istanbul, hiring a Greek dragoman and other servants, selecting horses and equipping them with Turkish saddles, and assembling food, money, and other necessary articles before sailing for Samsun to begin their 1,500-mile journey. They visited Amasia, birthplace of Strabo, ‘to whom everyone who is interested in ancient geography is so much indebted’. Tozer praised Strabo’s description of his native city. In Armenia, they used as a guide Volume 10 of Carl Ritter’s Erdkunde, published in 1843, a thorough survey of what earlier writers had said about the region, as well as the germane portion of Volume 9. On the Plain of Mush [sic] they were able to compare Xenophon’s description of Armenian houses against their own observations. On seeing Lake Van (which Xenophon had missed), they attempted to establish the kernel of truth underlying the vague identifications of classical writers. And from time to time they tried to sort out other scholarly disputes in relation to Xenophon’s route.

8. Henry Fanshawe Tozer. Map from Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor

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Probably the section of Tozer’s book most interesting to presentday classical scholars is his description of the last stages of the journey of the Ten Thousand, especially the point where they caught their first glimpse of the Black Sea. Tozer and Crowder recalled (vocally or mentally) the famous cry, ‘Thalassa! Thalassa!’ (or ‘Thalatta’; either is correct), the phrase that everyone remembers and the site every classically minded person wants to visit. Indeed, it even appears in fiction. As Rose Macaulay, in her elegant novel The Towers of Trebizond, described it: ‘On the third day we got to the point in the mountains where it is proper for travelers sighting the Black Sea to cry “Thalassa” (or if they prefer it “Thalatta”) like Xenophon’s army….’50 Taken as a whole, however, Tozer’s identifications of the points on Xenophon’s track are probably no more persuasive than anyone else’s. The difference between his generation and Rennell’s (and Ritter’s) is that his method of establishing them relies on a thorough and personal examination of the topography, the plant life (including the famously toxic rhododendrons) and other features (including the structures and the culture of present-day inhabitants) in the interest of at least establishing greater plausibilities in the writing of classical geography. Rightly or wrongly, Tozer was not simply what eighteenth-century French scholars called a ‘cabinet geographer’ (or what we, 50 or 60 years ago, would have called an ‘armchair geographer’). He actually undertook the task of going through fifteen hundred miles of very wild, largely unknown, and often dangerous territories in the interest of establishing the realities of both their modern and their ancient geographies. In so doing, he differs from the largely library-based classical geography project of Rennell, but serves as a ‘representative man’ of the later time and generation. His descriptions of what later geographers were to call ‘the morphology of landscape’, enhanced by his field sketches and his power to describe the natural and cultural phenomena he encountered along his route, give his accounts enough of lasting interest that they were republished in the early twenty-first century, 138 and 125 years, respectively, after their original appearance. Tozer’s 1890 book, The Islands of the Aegean, is a slighter and less impressive work than his earlier volumes. It is compiled from his notes and recollections of three different journeys. The first, in March 1874, was also in the company of Crowder, who had hired as their 131

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dragoman the same person who had previously escorted John Stuart Mill and Arthur P. Stanley, among others. The second was in the spring of 1886, also with Crowder and the same dragoman. Both these accounts had previously been published in The Academy, but were revised for the book. Tozer’s third trip to the Aegean, in the spring of 1889, lacked Crowder, but Tozer secured the same reliable dragoman who had aided him in his earlier expeditions in European Turkey in 1861 and 1865. The Islands of the Aegean, though Peter Fraser called it ‘delightful’, is pretty much a straight travelogue, rather loosely written and intended for a more popular audience. Tozer himself admits in the first sentence of his preface that it ‘does not profess to be more than a sketch of the subject with which it deals’. Scott Keltie, reviewing it for the Royal Geographical Society, called it impressionistic and primarily devoted to historical and antiquarian aspects, though conceding Tozer did give ‘a fair amount of space’ to island geography and current conditions. His general map and three smaller maps follow the tradition of indicating ancient and modern names by using different type styles. But the work contains little geographic analysis. It was, however, reprinted as late as the 1970s.51

TOZER AND THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHIES The book for which Tozer remains best known, his History of Ancient Geography, was published in 1897, republished with additional notes by Max Cary in 1935, and reprinted in 1971. Coming nearly 20 years after Edward Bunbury’s massive two-volume, densely packed History of Ancient Geography, it is by contrast a more accessible and more compact work. Bunbury’s volumes remained the standard reference for scholars, and in places Tozer follows it closely, particularly in his appropriation of Bunbury’s idea, derived from Karl Ottfried Müller, of constructing the mental maps of ancient geographical writers. Tozer’s purpose, however, was to write a book for students, whether students of classics or, Tozer hoped, ‘other than classical readers’, who might then become interested in the subject.52

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Tozer’s History of Ancient Geography thus can be seen as a kind of pendant to his earlier attempt to get Oxford students interested in the geography of ancient Greece in his lectures for the ‘combined lecture’ series. It is also an extension of his earlier attempt to broaden the reading of Oxford literae humaniores students by preparing a selection of readings from Strabo. Tozer’s History begins with the claim that the history of geography is ‘an integral part of the history of the development of the human race’. And, Tozer argues, that history begins in the Mediterranean, and particularly among the Greeks, whose ‘comprehensiveness of mind’ he praises as essential to the development of a field requiring ‘a wide area of knowledge’ as its base. After a treatment of the legendary voyage of the Argo and the problem of Homeric geography, Tozer traces the development of Greek exploration, trade and colonization, as well as cartography, theories of the earth, and Roman conquest, all of which contributed to the emerging area of inquiry. Tozer examines the work both of little-known and well-known ancient writers on geography, concluding the tale with the work of Ptolemy. His own experiences of travel in the Aegean world and Asia Minor added interest to the work, and among his maps Tozer even dared to include one map partially tracing the route of Xenophon and his men through eastern Asia Minor. Both the original and the second editions of the work were reviewed in the Royal Geographical Society’s Geographical Journal and in other publications. G. R. Crone noted in his review of the second edition that, curiously enough, the notes added in 1935 mainly consist in updating the bibliography. ‘It is a tribute to the quality of Tozer’s work’, wrote Crone, ‘that scarcely any of his opinions have had to be radically corrected’ in the nearly 40 years since its original publication. In 1993 classicist Peter Fraser called it ‘one of the best, if not the best, handbook on both ancient geography and geographical writers’. Three years earlier, geographer Peter Haggett found Tozer’s History to be ‘one of the most readable accounts of this period’.53 In addition to his major classical geography books, Tozer was a steady contributor to several scholarly and semi-popular journals. For 20 years from its organization in 1879, he was a Vice-President of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and contributed several articles and reviews to its Journal of Hellenic Studies. (A Council 133

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member was, initially, Oscar Wilde, who had visited Greece as an Oxford undergraduate in 1877 and was ‘sent down’ for being three weeks late returning to Magdalen College.) Tozer edited what became the standard revision of George Finlay’s seven-volume history of Greece, published in 1877, and an updated edition of Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece: Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical in 1882. He also published articles and reviews on ancient and modern Mediterranean topics, and made contributions to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Tozer was a member of the Alpine Club, and climbed a number of mountains around the Aegean, including the highest peak in Asia Minor, writing an account of it in the Alpine Journal. From 1869 to 1893 he was Curator of the Taylor Institute in Oxford, a library of modern languages and literatures, during which time he published an edition of Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’ and a three-volume commentary on Dante, as well as a translation of the Divine Comedy. Several of his articles deal with current folk customs, legends, music and other cultural topics. Finally, his interest in church history found expression in The Church and the Eastern Empire, published in 1888 in the ‘Epochs of Church History’ series.54 The total volume of his scholarly output is eminently respectable by Victorian standards and staggering by our own.

TOZER THE ‘MISSING PERSON’ In 1993, Tozer was rescued from biographical oblivion by being included in the ignominiously titled ‘Missing Persons’ supplementary volume of the Dictionary of National Biography. Tozer was one of the 1,000 subjects (out of 100,000 nominees) who were deemed probable subjects ‘for intelligent enquiry on the part of an appreciable number of persons a generation or more hence’. In her revision of P. M. Fraser’s text in that volume for the more recent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Elizabeth Baigent retained Fraser’s encomium on Tozer’s 1897 History of Ancient Geography as ‘one of the best, if not the best’ of its kind, and further comments on Tozer’s importance in the history of British geography. Also in 1993, Robin Butlin, publishing a 134

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book reviewing the ‘history, theory and methodology of historical geography’, included a five-page section on the geography of the classical world that largely discussed, and reproduced mental maps from, Tozer’s History of Ancient Geography.55 Earlier students of the history of British geography had also taken some notice of Tozer’s work. Although the Oxford historian of geography, J. N. L. Baker, omitted Tozer from his 1936 survey of a century’s work of British historical geography, he rectified that omission in his 1951 Presidential Address to Section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. There he described Tozer’s Lectures on the Geography of Greece as ‘an admirable account of the relations of geography and history’. Baker praised Tozer’s work again in his 1954 address on the history of geography at Oxford. Andrew Clark, surveying American historical geography in the same year, coupled Tozer’s Lectures with George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land in a footnote, as works that ‘deserve special mention’; Clark also twice referred to Tozer’s history of ancient geography, though does not mention his edition of Strabo.56 H. C. Darby, a master of the literature of British historical geography, quotes Tozer’s encomium on Stanley on the dedication page of one of Tozer’s books, and refers to Tozer himself as ‘a classical geographer’. Darby appears also to have mentioned Tozer’s Lectures on the Geography of Greece in his own lectures at University College, London from 1954 to 1966 and at Cambridge University from 1966 until 1976.57 And, as already noticed, a tribute to Tozer’s work appears also (unexpectedly enough) in Peter Haggett’s The Geographer’s Art, though Haggett noted that, prior to his taking it out, Tozer’s History of Ancient Geography had not been checked out of the University of Bristol library for 40 years. Yet, to select a few examples from varying decades, one searches the indexes of T. W. Freeman’s A Hundred Years of Geography (1961), Oxford Professor of Geography E. W. Gilbert’s British Pioneers in Geography (1971), Freeman’s History of Modern British Geography (1980), D. R. Stoddart’s On Geography (1986), David Livingstone’s The Geographical Tradition (1992), or Alan Baker’s Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (2003), and other works by recent British historians of geography or methodologists of historical geography in vain for any reference to Tozer’s work.58

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Darby had, of necessity during the 1920s, to master the geographical writings of a number of authors whose home address was history or classics. He had learned his first historical geography from B. L. Manning, an ecclesiastical historian, temporarily serving as a lecturer in geography until a position in history opened for him. One of Darby’s two doctoral examiners was the economic historian, John H. Clapham, whom Darby repeatedly names as the major intellectual influence on his work. (Although Darby’s PhD degree was formally in geography, he later called his dissertation ‘geographical history’.) Darby’s principal substantive work was a monumental geographic study of the mediaeval Domesday Book, but he also published other writings on mediaeval geography. Had he accepted Harvard’s offer of a position in the late 1950s, it would have been in the history department there. He was acceptable to the mediaeval historians of the British Academy, presumably as a fellow mediaevalist. In short, Darby was not a conventional geographer in his own time, a period when most geographers were defining their discipline in terms of the study of the contemporary world. Rather he was a figure who, to use Alan Baker’s imagery, ‘bridged the divide’ between history and geography, and was at home in both disciplines. It is not surprising that, in his methodological essays and lectures, Darby mentions Tozer and his work several times. What is surprising is that in some of those late essays he approaches methodology like a catalogue librarian, setting boundaries between ‘historical geography’ and ‘geographical history’ and the like, which his younger self would have found neither necessary nor palatable.59 The result has been that the next generation of British historical geographers seems unaware of Tozer and others like him, either biographically or substantively, as noted in the preface to this book. That circumstance seems to be yet another example of what Peter Haggett, specifically referencing Tozer’s work, has called ‘our neglect of the earliest roots of geography’.60 Neither Darby’s or Clark’s, nor Butlin’s, Fraser’s, and Haggett’s more recent recognitions, seem to have done anything to provoke interest in Tozer and his work among current British historians of geography. Nor have Elizabeth Baigent’s additions to Fraser’s biographical sketch in ODNB, which stress Tozer’s specific contributions to geography, as yet evoked further interest. 136

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Tozer’s pictorial, boots-on-the-ground brand of classical geography partially bridges the distance between the age of the classical topographers such as Leake, whom he admired, and the advent of Germanic philology, which, though devaluing the kind of work Tozer did, was itself under fire by the time of his death (though lingering longer at Oxford than elsewhere). In his obituary notice of Tozer in the Geographical Journal, G. B. Grundy criticized the idealism that had permeated the earlier period and is indeed reflected in Tozer’s principal publications. But Grundy predicted (quite inaccurately) that Tozer’s edition of Finlay’s History and his little volume of ecclesiastical history would be read longer than ‘his works on the geography of classical lands’. Grundy conceded that Tozer ‘was an accurate observer’ and, in his time, second only to Leake as an interpreter of the geography of the classical world. In his obituary in the London Times, the writer described Tozer as ‘the last and not least distinguished of the classical tourists’. A few weeks before Tozer’s death, Douglas Freshfield noted in an article for the Geographical Journal that, until 1914, no one had successfully scaled any of the mountains in the Olympos range since Tozer had ascended Mt St Elias over half a century before. Grundy’s sometime Oxford colleague, James Bryce, who was both familiar with the field of geography and a contributor to its literature, noted at the time of Tozer’s passing that, as ‘an excellent observer, alert and acute, [Tozer] always saw what was best worth seeing, and knew how to describe faithfully what he saw’. And W. W. Jackson, the Rector of Tozer’s college, came to the same conclusion: ‘Tozer is one of the few writers who have described scenery in such manner as to enable the reader to realize the appearance of the countries described.’ Nearly eighty years afterwards, Elizabeth Baigent wrote that Tozer ‘was a keen observer of the landscape… and of the people who lived in it and the regimes under which they lived’.61 This is no mean achievement.

CODA: THE PERILS OF PROFESSIONALIZATION Horacio Capel, an astute student of the history of geography within the context of the history of the sciences, has argued accurately and 137

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insightfully, ‘During the last decades of the 19th century, the academic institutionalization of geography was made by affirming the notion of a break with the past.’ Everything prior to Alexander von Humboldt and Karl Ritter was ‘considered as a pre-scientific stage that was now superseded’. The history of geography became, to many, ‘simply an object of attention in the search for antecedents of current ideas’. And, as E. G. W. Bill and J. F. A. Mason have truly if tartly stated, ‘It is frequently a prior condition of reform that it should, not necessarily with a pious regard for the truth, discredit the system which it seeks to replace….’ There are two ways of using history to advance one’s professional goals and to establish one’s point of view of a discipline as new and exciting or, to use the contemporary vernacular, ‘hot’. One is to ignore or misrepresent the work of one’s predecessors, a process Mayhew has called ‘effacement…by historiographical sleight of hand’. The other is to disagree with or disparage those parts of a predecessor’s work that do not fit one’s own preferred pattern for the discipline, while praising as intellectual forerunners those who appear to have done so. In his 1895 Presidential Address to Section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Mackinder managed to do both in consecutive sentences.62 First, Mackinder falsely asserted that Benjamin Franklin had suppressed his Gulf Stream map (see Chapter 2) ‘lest it should fall into the hands of the English, and be of use to their ships in crossing the Atlantic’. In fact, the first version of Franklin’s chart was published when Franklin was still a loyal subject of King George III, as were his informants. One of the latter told Franklin they had repeatedly warned the captains of the British mail packets that this particular current would slow their ships. But ‘they were too wise to be counseled by simple American fishermen’. Franklin himself, Deputy Postmaster General for the American Colonies until 1774, was interested in cutting the two-week delay in the mails between Falmouth and New York, and, after he had his map printed, sent copies to Falmouth for the use of the captains of the mail ships, ‘who slighted it however’. Mackinder, who was still lecturing on the history of geography in 1895, could not have stated the basic facts more wrongly. Far from concealing his findings for some nefarious purpose, Franklin and his

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informants had taken special pains to acquaint English packet captains with them, and had been rebuffed. Immediately following Mackinder’s ill-informed comment concerning Franklin, he turned to Rennell, who, according to Mackinder, ‘by his map of India and his Herodotean identifications, presents a likeness to the best of the old school of geographers, showed his participation in the new by compiling an Atlantic current-chart’. It is certainly true that Rennell’s chart of Atlantic currents was an important contribution; indeed, he appears to have been the first to have attempted it. But what jumps out here, beyond a display of Mackinder’s growing pomposity, is the boundary-setting process engaged in by the new professional geographers on both sides of the Atlantic.63 Boundaries enclose, but they also exclude. Mackinder’s disparagement of Rennell’s work in ancient geography (‘Herodotean identifications’) and of his Indian mapping (the subject of much interest among current historians of cartography) as ‘old-school’ geography, might be called an attempt at ‘partial effacement’, in more than one sense of the term ‘partial’. Mackinder discusses Franklin’s and Rennell’s work under the rubric of late nineteenth-century oceanography, which Mackinder (and Davis in the United States), regarded in 1895 as a part of physical geography. Ironically, physical oceanography had been a part of ‘old-school’ geography, as exemplified by Matthew Fontaine Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea, among others. But oceanography itself became ‘old-school’ as part of professional geography’s remit by World War I, as the next generation of physical geographers (in the United States, ‘physiographers’) concentrated their studies almost solely on the forms and uses of the land. The boundary-setting of the first generation of academic professionals also put Tozer on the wrong side of the boundary. As we have seen, in the eyes of his younger, more specialist colleagues in Exeter College he had become something of an unsympathetic figure, uninterested in Greek archaeology or architecture. The only one of his books to be referenced in the late twentieth century in the literature of geography appears to be his History of Ancient Geography, a text useful for its clear and readable explanation of a topic in which professional geographers had long since lost interest. Like Rennell until recently, Tozer had become a forgotten figure in the history of geography. 139

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Yet Tozer was a keen observer of landscapes and cultures now largely lost to us, and he wrote about both with technical skill and narrative power. That his Researches in the Highlands of Turkey (1869) and his Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (1881) should have been reprinted in 2005 as ‘classics’ of travel writing is a tribute to Tozer’s ability to present geographic information in a pleasing and informative way. As the reviewer of his Turkish Armenia book wrote in the Saturday Review, ‘his style is remarkable for accuracy and clearness’.64 Whatever his other limitations, the man could write. And of how many geographers can that be said? The feminist icon, Germaine Greer, is reported to have said, ‘The world’s a wonderful place; how can geography teachers make it so boring?’ Tozer’s acute observations, command of both modern and ancient geography, and absorbing narrative skills confirm Greer’s first point. Her question remains.65

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William E. Gladstone and the Reconstruction of Bronze Age Geography

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) is best known as the leader of the Liberal Party in late nineteenth-century Britain, and four times Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister. An excellent two-volume biography has been published in recent years, and publication of a 14-volume annotated edition of his diaries was completed over a decade ago. Gladstone was also the most obsessively prolific nineteenth-century British commentator on the Homeric corpus. Yet, with the exception of J. L. Myres’ 1907 inaugural address as the Gladstone Professor of Greek at the University of Liverpool, unpublished for half a century, what Myres had termed ‘the meteoric Homerology of William Ewart Gladstone’ received relatively little attention from Victorian scholars until about 40 years ago.1 In a provocative 1975 essay calling attention to the neglect of Gladstone’s Homeric works, Hugh Lloyd-Jones pointed out that Gladstone ‘made no new factual discovery and initiated no new critical approach’. But to stop with such a global assessment, Lloyd-Jones argued, would be to obscure the way in which parts of Gladstone’s work are consistent with some modern thinking on the Homeric age. D. W. Bebbington, conceding that Gladstone’s opinions on Homer ‘were sometimes farfetched or simply wrong’, more recently argued that, by contrast to the increasingly narrow classical philology of his time, in spite of its faults Gladstone’s work ‘deserves to be seen as having anticipated the late twentieth-century approach of reconstituting Homer’s whole social world’.2

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Two important studies of the reception of ancient Greece in the Victorian age, published in 1980 and 1981, have usefully set Gladstone’s Homeric corpus in its relation to larger intellectual issues of the period. Frank Turner, pointing out that Gladstone’s Homeric work ‘constituted the single most extensive body of Victorian Homeric commentary’, calls it ‘the most curious of all serious Victorian interpretations of Homeric poetry’. Richard Jenkyns calls Gladstone’s opinions on Homer ‘eccentric’, but points to the implications of his work for Victorian education and politics. Both show how even his eccentricity, which in Jenkyns’ words ‘consisted in pushing certain Victorian tendencies to extreme limits’, can illuminate the thought of an age.3 Gladstone’s studies of the Homeric world are of interest for the relations of geography and the classics for two reasons: as a way station in the long debate on the reliability of Homer’s geography dating back to Eratosthenes and Strabo, and for his creation of one of the earliest of modern British mental maps. Thus the work of this preeminent Victorian politician provides, improbably enough, an early example of what has since become known as cognitive approaches in historical geography.

GLADSTONE’S HOMERIC STUDIES At Oxford Gladstone took a ‘double first’ in classics and mathematics and, like many of his contemporaries, kept up his reading of ancient literature in the original languages, as well as making maps as an aid to his historical studies. In November 1886, in his 77th year, he estimated that he had read the Odyssey about 25 times and the Iliad perhaps 30 or 35 times. As late as December 1892, the month of his 83rd birthday, Gladstone undertook a re-reading of the logoi of Herodotus, as part of a projected (but never completed) study that was to include discussion of the sources of the Nile, the Ruwenzori mountains and the boundaries of Uganda and the Congo.4 In addition to his eclectic reading (which included Strabo, Pausanias and many British and German writers on ancient Greece) and his numerous other commitments, over the 45-year period between 142

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1847 and 1892 Gladstone published five books on Homeric questions, one of them in three stout volumes, and numerous articles on the same subject in leading journals of the day. Gladstone’s Homeric studies (or, to use his term, his ‘Homerology’) were intended in large part as advocacy, both for the study of the Homeric poems in the British educational system and for the promotion of those moral and indeed religious values he perceived in the poems. Gladstone also made his own translation of the Iliad, spent many years compiling a thesaurus or concordance to Homer’s works, and near the close of his life began a treatise on the Olympian religion. Through these works Gladstone hoped to saturate British education and society with Homeric civic virtues as he perceived and interpreted them. In order to hold the position he did, Gladstone had to choose stances on issues that were among the most disputed questions of Homeric scholarship of his day and since. Are the Homeric poems to be read almost wholly as literature incorporating a few scraps of tradition, or do they report historical truths in some substantial way? Was Homer a real person, and if not an eyewitness of the culture he describes, was he at least so faithful a reporter of its traditions that the poems depict a real society in some quasi-anthropological sense? Gladstone stood on these issues as a ‘unitarian’, or defender of a single authorship of the two poems, and as a ‘realist’, a defender of the idea that the works portray a real society, not remote in time from the life of the poet. Gladstone was primarily a student of the works themselves; James Bryce, by no means an uncritical reviewer of Gladstone’s work, conceded that his ‘Homeric work had the great merit of being based on a full and thorough knowledge of the Homeric text’. But Gladstone and other nineteenth-century British Homerists were also inheritors of the mantle of the eighteenth-century British traveler Robert Wood, and his successors such as Sir William Gell and William Martin Leake, who had argued that in some sense the ‘truth’ of the Homeric poems was attested to by the landscape of the Mediterranean itself. For this group, and indeed for a persistent minority of Homerists since, Homer’s authenticity could be borne out or, perhaps, even countered, by bringing to bear on the texts what Gladstone called the ‘cogent authority’ of architecture, language, ethnology, and, not least, ‘the stubborn facts of geography’.5

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Gladstone’s primary interest in the Homeric corpus lay in its religious content and its implications for society and politics. But he also made himself master of enough of the linguistic, archaeological, ethnological and physical evidence then available to him to construct a Homeric geography as a significant, though lesser, share of his work. To be sure, his Homeric studies were largely in aid of proving what Gladstone described to Mrs Humphrey Ward as ‘the intimate connection between the Hebrew and Olympian revelations’, a formidable goal even by late Victorian standards. But one need not sympathize with that objective in order to examine Gladstone’s Homeric writings as, in part, a study in the uses of geography, pre-eminently a ’peculiarly Victorian science’, as a method of proving the authenticity of Homer in that pre-professional period of both classics and geography.6

GLADSTONE’S RECONSTRUCTION OF HOMERIC GEOGRAPHY Gladstone’s engagement with the geography of the ancient world had begun in his student days. At Eton he had worked his way through the ‘geographical’ logoi of Herodotus, a standard author both in the English public (i.e., private) schools and at Oxford. Though at first he found Book II (on Egypt) ‘extremely stupid and heavy for the most part’, it was ‘much better latterly’. He described the logoi of Book IV (on Scythia and Libya) as ‘dull and tedious’, as no doubt those sections of Herodotus would have appeared to any schoolboy who had to read them in the original Greek. As a Christ Church undergraduate, Gladstone both read and wrote about the ethnography and geography of the ancient Greek oikoumene. At age 19 he was researching both classical and modern sources for a Latin prize paper on the Scythians. The following year he was once again deeply into the logoi of Herodotus, as well as reading Conrad Malte-Brun’s geography text, James Rennell’s Geographical System of Herodotus (1800) and other works, ‘endeavoring to get up some Herod[otean] history & geography – slow work’. Part of the ‘slow work’ was the construction of a map to help him understand the text. He was to return to Herodotus in his final Oxford year, during which he also

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read the historian B. G. Niebuhr’s recently translated Dissertation on the Geography of Herodotus (1830).7 In maturity, however, Homer became Gladstone’s primary classical interest. As he points out in his first major publication on the subject, ‘For two thousand years… the Geography of the Odyssey has been a subject of interest and of controversy’. The first mention of an attempt to write on Homeric geography appears in Gladstone’s diary in December, 1846, while in the midst of giving his son ‘Willy’ geography lessons. The manuscript of that essay apparently does not survive, and he wrote early in the following year that working out the geography of the Odyssey ‘defies me’.8 Gladstone’s first published ideas on the geography of the Bronze Age are found in two sections of his three-volume work, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, begun in 1855 and published in 1858 by Oxford’s University Press. The first appears under the general heading ‘Ethnology of the Greek Races’, a topic that takes up all but about 100 pages of Volume I. In it, Gladstone principally dissects the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ in Book 2 of the Iliad, believed by many scholars then and later to be the oldest part of the poem and the section closest to Mycenaean times.9 For this section he also prepared two maps, one showing the main divisions and subdivisions, and the other a more detailed representation of the political divisions of the time. Throughout this section, Gladstone is greatly concerned with the relations of people and place, as well as in the relation of these people/place combinations with their surrounding cultures – a classic nineteenth-century model of cultural geography. Gladstone’s evidence in this early treatment is drawn entirely from the poems themselves. But he does a most ingenious job, if not always a convincing one, in deriving a real cultural geography by piecing together scattered material. Gladstone’s second geographical emphasis in this volume consists of his development of the distinction between the ‘inner geography’ of the Iliad and the ‘outer geography’ of sections of the Odyssey. ‘Nowhere is Homer’s precision more remarkable’, asserts Gladstone, ‘than in the numerous passages where he appears before us as a real geographer or topographer’. But, he argues, Homer’s ‘first-hand’ geographical knowledge (by which he means that gained either from travel, or from the knowledge of his countrymen, or from the correc145

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tions offered when his poetry was recited to knowledgeable audiences) was largely limited to the Aegean world. ‘Inner geography’, then, for Gladstone, is a term applying to the geographic and ethnographic material of the Iliad and the nearer locations (such as Ithaca) described in the Odyssey. Outside this circle, in what Gladstone calls ‘the outer geography of the Odyssey’, Homer ‘emancipates himself from the laws of space’. Here, Gladstone argues, Homer is relying on what he calls the ‘dislocated knowledge’ of Phoenician navigators, which Homer was unable personally either to verify or to correct. Hence the generous overlay of the marvelous that marks Odysseus’ wanderings. In Gladstone’s view, Homer’s ‘outer geography’ is ‘wholly irreconcilable with actual geography’ in the central and western Mediterranean. Rather it is of value for understanding what Gladstone calls ‘the imaginative geography of the Odyssey’, the basis for which were the scraps of legends and traditions associated with the Phoenician exploration of the western seas.10 Having disclaimed the possibility of reconciling the ‘outer geography’ of the Odyssey and ‘actual geography’ in the first volume of Studies on Homer, Gladstone returns to the problem of understanding Homer’s imaginative geography in the third. For about a hundred pages in Book 3 of that volume, in a section entitled ‘Thalassa: The Outer Geography of the Odyssey’, Gladstone wrestles with the question ‘What map of the earth did Homer shape in his own mind, that he might adjust to it the voyages and tours of his heroes…?’ Cautioning his reader once more that any attempt to reconstruct the geography of the Odyssey on the basis of the earth’s known surface today would be a bootless enterprise, Gladstone is nevertheless drawn by his faith in Homer’s credibility to assert that, even though his account may be erroneous by modern standards, ‘the Poet has embedded into his imaginative scheme a multitude of real geographical and physical traditions’. Furthermore, it is possible to use these to define, ‘with tolerable accuracy’, Homer’s image of the earth and, by extension, the limits of the known world of Bronze Age Greece. To define Homer’s ‘mental map’, Gladstone first had to determine how Homer dealt with the localization of phenomena. He concluded that the poet’s way of doing this differed by geographical region. The area where the poet had lived and moved, the area known to him 146

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personally, could thus be conceptually differentiated from the larger area beyond it that was outside his direct experience and, presumably, of the Greeks he had interviewed. In other words, Gladstone first had to differentiate Homer’s own terrae cognitae (in geographer and historian John K. Wright’s phrase), the ‘inner geography’ of the Iliad and parts of the Odyssey, from his personal terrae incognitae, the ‘outer geography’ of the remainder of the Odyssey. Then he had to uncover from the latter source what may have been the terrae cognitae of the Phoenicians, and thus to identify the gradations and types of Bronze Age geographical knowledge represented in the Homeric corpus. Given this general heuristic, he asks ‘can a line be drawn with reasonable confidence and precision between these geographical regions accordingly?’ The Homeric poems, taken together, contain two different forms of geographical knowledge. One of these he variously describes as ‘real’, ‘experimental’, or even, at some points (as at Ithaca), ‘topographic’. The other is vague and conjectural, ‘an imaginative, fluctuating, and semi-fabulous Geography’. Gladstone rejected the tradition of the Ionian origins of the Homeric poems. In his belief, Homer’s lived world was centered in Greece, probably at Mt Olympus or Mycenae. Gladstone sees the geography of the poems as ranging outward from that center, in three somewhat concentric zones. The first of these is the region of experience, a zone of familiar and folk knowledge shared among Homer’s contemporaries. The second, which Gladstone calls ‘the intermediate or doubtful zone’, is a somewhat indefinite transition area, which he views as analogous to the indeterminacies of dusk or of dawn. This zone was an area that Greeks of Homer’s day had visited, but rarely and occasionally. The third zone was a region wholly unfamiliar to the Greeks, knowledge of which depended on foreign reports, and therefore (in part because the Phoenicians wished to discourage others from penetrating it), a region of marvel, wonder, fable and potential danger. In these hundred pages Gladstone provides us with a ‘geography of the mind’, in this case of the mind of Homer and his nearcontemporaries. Although there is no direct link of Gladstone to twentieth century Anglo-American geography, in its notion that Homeric geographical knowledge could be differentiated spatially, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age resembles J. K. Wright’s later 147

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concept of ‘gradations of [spatial] knowledge’, suggested in Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (1925) and cartographically worked out as the ‘relative reliability’ diagrams of the American Geographical Society’s ‘Millionth Map’ series from the 1920s onward. More recently, geographer John Logan Allen has used the concept of ‘zones of knowledge’ in a way not fundamentally dissimilar to Gladstone’s usage.11 Gladstone, then and later, criticized previous writers who had attempted to tie Homer’s outer geography to actual places, and thus had necessarily ‘assigned to him geographical knowledge which he did not possess’, as he put it in an 1869 article. Instead, Homer had to deal with information that was not only false, but also some that was true but which he could not comprehend. Therefore, one must go back to a detailed study of the text and work out Homer’s geography on the basis of his use of wind direction, sea distances (measured in days) and physical features, such as his belief in a circumambient Ocean covering what is now Europe north of the known world, essentially by extending the Black Sea westward. Homer also conflates conflicting Phoenician reports. For example, conflicting descriptions of the north as either a land of perpetual light or one of perpetual darkness, says Gladstone, are explained by the fact that the observations were made in different seasons of the year. Then, by skillfully exploiting the mention of winds and wind directions in the Odyssey, as well as distance and directional information, Gladstone applies these data to the sites of Homer’s ‘outer geography’ to explain, not where they exist in relation to presently known Mediterranean locations, but where and why they fit into Homer’s mental map. This mental map, according to Gladstone, is a major imaginative attempt ‘to pierce the mist’, and ultimately ‘to form, by effort of the brain, for the first time as far as we know in the history of our race, an idea of a certain configuration for the surface of the earth’. Gladstone sees Homer’s ‘outer geography’, the global geography of the greater part of the Odyssey, as a great creative literary effort, a work of synthetic imagination analogous to Dante’s map of the Cosmos, which, though it, too, is a work of the imagination, is also a precise spatial system. Or, to quote Gladstone himself on Dante,

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Every line of his poem has a determinate relation to a certain point in space, fixed in his own mind; but whether every such point be fixed or not in nature is no more material, than if it were simply one to be determined by axes of coordinates.

In other words, the distribution of places in Homer’s ‘outer geography’ is a systematic one, without necessarily being an actual one. Still, Gladstone believed that enough could be determined from the text about Homer’s idea of the form of the earth (which Gladstone believed resembled, to Homer, an oval shield), that his mental map, like Dante’s, can be rather precisely reconstructed. Though based in part on Phoenician reports that are confused and sometimes conflated, the main sites as Homer describes them nevertheless can at least be located in relation to one another. The final surprise of the book is that during January 1858 Gladstone proceeded to do so cartographically, constructing a large map to be attached to the third volume, at the end of the text.12

THE RECEPTION OF GLADSTONE’S MAP Needless to say, both Gladstone’s method and his map rested on his own set of assumptions, quickly pounced upon by a legion of critics. William Smith, reviewing Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age for Blackwood’s, claimed that a student of Homer ‘will rarely have encountered three bulky volumes from which he has gained so little’. The acerbic Mark Pattison, including the same volumes in his review of recent work in history and biography for the Westminster Review, called Gladstone’s view of the poems as history ‘a preposterous theory’ and the work itself a ‘perverse essay’. Most reviewers devoted their major space to the political and religious sections of Gladstone’s book. A few, however, made attempts at detailed criticism of Gladstone’s ‘Outer Geography’ and its map. William Stebbing, reviewing the 1858 volumes for the North British Review, called Gladstone’s Homeric geography ‘well worth studying’, though his execution of it ‘makes him take a forced march over, we think, at least one philological morass’. Stebbing concluded, how-

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ever, that ‘These regions were regions of enchantment to Homer; they must be so to us’. William Jones, Bishop of St David’s, thought that ‘Mr. Gladstone’s enthusiasm for his author has in this and other matters rather run away with him’, and attacked his reasoning as ‘almost puerile’ and the book itself as ‘a failure’. Focusing specifically on the map, Jones argued that, as Gladstone had conceded that ‘Homer had never seen an actual map, it is not easy to understand how he could have had a map in his mind’s eye’. Even well educated people who had studied geography, asserted Jones, had problems understanding location and direction, and there was no such thing as a geographical sense in the absence of formal education. ‘The geographical inaccuracy of Shakespeare is proverbial’, he concluded; ‘why should we attribute greater carefulness to Homer?’ A reviewer for the London Times, criticizing the entire section on the Outer Geography in Volume III, found that ‘in this field of investigation all the author’s inferences, however curious, are utterly vain’ (The Times, 13 August 1858). Herman Merivale, reviewing Gladstone’s three volumes in the influential Edinburgh Review, treated the geographical portions of the work at some length, but concluded that Gladstone’s interpretation ‘will interest and amuse many readers, will astonish more, but will not obtain the assent of one’, in spite of its illustration ‘by a most remarkable map’.13 Despite such criticism, in 1865 the Scottish cartographer, Keith Johnston, solicited Gladstone’s permission to reprint his map of ‘The Outer Geography of the Odyssey’ for the second edition of his Atlas of Classical Geography. Gladstone made a few modifications to make it and his other classical maps more useful for teachers and students, but told Johnston that he thought his additional study of Homeric geography since 1858 had confirmed his earlier work, except for some qualification of his comments on the Ionian Islands. In the preface to the new edition of his atlas, which appeared in 1866, Johnston thanked Gladstone for allowing republication and for his work, showing the spatial aspects of the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ in red on other sheets. And in his introductory comments on ‘The Geography of Homer’, Johnston acknowledges having relied heavily on ‘Mr. Gladstone’s very learned and most interesting volumes, “Homer and the Homeric Age”.’

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9. William E. Gladstone. Map of The Outer Geography of the Odyssey

The issue of whether or not Gladstone’s method and map adds to our understanding of Homer is not here being argued. On that point, it may be best to adopt the stance of the historian E. A. Freeman, reviewing the volumes at length in the National Review for July 1858. While agreeing with Gladstone that the Catalogue of Ships ‘is a real 151

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picture of the Greek geography of the time’, Freeman comments that the ‘Thalassa’ section is entirely devoted to points of minute mythical geography, which, if examined at all, must be examined in great detail. It is better to pass it by than to deal with it cursorily and unworthily. We will only say that it shows Mr. Gladstone’s never-failing minuteness and never-failing ingenuity in a high degree; but we decline to pronounce any opinion for or against the accuracy of his theory.

All that is necessary to say here is that Gladstone’s effort was an extraordinary attempt to create from Homeric materials a conceptual geography of the Bronze Age for the nineteenth-century student, and as such deserves a place in the history of mental mapping, however it may be viewed in relation to the corpus of Homeric studies.14

GLADSTONE AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOMER’S ITHACA Gladstone’s Studies on Homer led directly to his appointment as High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, then a British protectorate, during 1858 and 1859. Gladstone took along the third (1854) edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece (which indicates the sites then believed to be associated with Odysseus), some maps, and his own selection of extracts from the Odyssey on the topography of the islands. Politically his mission was unsuccessful, but it gave him and his family a marvelous opportunity to roam over Corfu, Ithaca and nearby islands, as well as to visit Athens, and to locate, at least to Gladstone’s own satisfaction, the sites associated with Odysseus’ homecoming. This expedition eventually led Gladstone to publish an article in which he attempted to tie the Homeric text to the actual Bronze Age geography of Odysseus’ kingdom of Ithaca (unsuccessfully, according to Edward Bunbury) and, a decade or so later, to write a second on the supposed Phoenician links to that island. The latter essay, ‘Phoenician Affinities of Ithaca’, stems from a period in which he was attempting to work out the spatio-temporal linkages

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between Homeric Greece and the other cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, a task that occupied him well into the 1890s.15 In the former essay, ‘The Dominions of Odysseus, and the Island Group of the Odyssey’, Gladstone accepted the sometimes disputed idea that Homer’s Ithaca is the present island of that name, and claimed that the Homeric text gives ‘a good and just account of the general conformation of Ithaca’ (‘as I myself can in some degree testify from having visited the place’). But, in the Odyssey, Homer had said that Odysseus’ kingdom was a ‘geographical aggregation’ of Ithaca and three other islands, whereas in the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, the domains of Odysseus are identified as three islands (Ithaca, Cephalonia and Zante or Zakynthos) plus, apparently, a portion of mainland Epirus. How to explain the discrepancy? Gladstone’s method is one he had used in 1858, and was to defend later against Edward Bunbury, in his time the great English authority on classical geography. The practice of most students of Homeric geography had been to take a contemporary map and attempt to fit the Homeric text onto it. Though it may seem odd to us, this was a philological method, whose purpose was to establish the accuracy of the text itself. ‘But Homer had no map’, said Gladstone. Homer did have his own eye (Gladstone rejected the tradition that Homer was blind, except perhaps in old age), as well as navigators’ reports, ‘and out of these he had to construct a map in his own brain’. Conformity to present-day maps thus cannot be a valid method for establishing the truth or falsehood of the text. Rather, ‘what we have to do’, said Gladstone, ‘is carefully to construe the text as it is, and then to construct a geography according to it: and however wide this may be of the [present-day] map, it is the true, and the only true, Homeric geography’. The text is composed of both truth and error, but error itself may be nothing more than ‘the facts of the actual geography imperfectly comprehended’. In the case of the Odyssey’s fourth island, Doulichion, there is no large island fitting the Homeric description in the vicinity of the other three named in the text. But Gladstone hypothesized that had Homer believed Cephalonia to be two islands, separated by a channel, rather than the single large island it now is, the conflict between the texts might be resolved. Gladstone then suggested both how Homer’s description of Ithaca, which by 1877 Gladstone believed 153

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Homer had visited, fits the real geography of the island we know by that name, and how Homer’s other descriptions are plausible, if sometimes erroneous, reconstructions for the adjacent areas, of which he had no personal knowledge. ‘The Dominions of Odysseus’ is one of the most interesting of Gladstone’s writings on classical geography, not only because it directly conveys a sense of how his method was applied to a specific locale, but because it incorporates a number of his own observations of the natural features of the Greek world. These are not limited to Ithaca; they include the Straits of Messina (Scylla and Charybdis) and the river Ilissos at Athens. Gladstone also alludes to such geographical matters as the deforestation of the island and the effects of this on its water supply, and the practice of allowing swine to feed on mast. Gladstone (uncharacteristically) does not put forth his arguments concerning Ithaca as definitive, but simply offers them as his own methodological ‘contribution towards solving a vexed question of Homeric geography’. And he expresses his hope that some other ‘worshipper of the Poet’ will take the text to Ithaca and will give the topography of the region the closer comparison of site and text needed to prove or disprove his hypotheses. Indeed, the 1877 essay was immediately used to provoke such thought among classics students in at least one case. In Michaelmas Term, 1877 in Trinity College, Dublin, students taking the Homer examination were asked ‘What are the difficulties connected with the geography of Ithaca, and its adjoining islands, and what considerations has Mr. Gladstone suggested which tend to remove these difficulties?’16

JUVENTUS MUNDI AND LATER HOMERIC WORKS In December 1868 Gladstone began his first and longest term (1868– 74) as Prime Minister. Almost all of his Homeric and other writing had been done at his home in Hawarden, Wales, during the recesses of Parliament. Gladstone believed that ‘relaxation & refreshment are properly to be found in the alternation of different employments’, not by slacking off into ‘vacuity and dawdling’. His recreations fa-

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mously include felling trees, writing numerous holograph letters, reading and often annotating at least 17,500 books (counting only those listed in his diaries), and advocacy writing, especially on Homer, which he once called his ‘medicine’. His second Homer book, Juventus Mundi (‘the Youth of the World’), was written during the Parliamentary recesses of 1867 and 1868, and finished in October of the latter year, though Gladstone was making revisions for several months afterwards. For example, his diary entry for 12 December 1868, while the Gladstones were staying at Windsor, records laconically ‘Dined with the Queen. And revised a little of my Homeric text.’ Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age, published in August 1869, is a condensed, updated and somewhat reshaped version of Studies on Homer. Gladstone, by then Prime Minister, described it in a letter from 10 Downing Street to his friend James Knowles, editor of the Contemporary Review, as written ‘for the average young man who has had the average university education’, provided as an aid to study and an encouragement to read the text for more than aesthetic enjoyment. Although it would prove formidable reading for even the best of today’s students, and although one later scholar decried it as ‘extraordinarily dull, choked with factual analysis, without literary merit’, the book was something of a bestseller in its time. A corrected edition appeared in 1870. Some 52,000 copies had been sold by November 1874.17 Juventus Mundi marks something of a shift in Gladstone’s earlier emphases in its incorporation of recent scholarship on Phoenician and Egyptian parallels with, and influences on, Greece. In this way he was moving in a direction modern scholars have taken, seeing Greek culture not as autochthonous, as some scholars and laymen did in Gladstone’s own time, but as generated in part by its location and its spatial interactions with the older cultures of the East. Gladstone understood Homer’s use of the term ‘Phoenician’ to be a surrogate for ‘foreign’, meaning the Near East generally. This led him to argue for tracing routes of cultural diffusion – or what he called ‘the channels, through which the old parental East poured into the fertile soil of the Greek mind the seeds of civilisation’ in a number of areas. Mixed metaphor aside, Gladstone’s remarks on Phoenician influences earned him faint praise in what is arguably the most controversial work of classical scholarship of the last half-century: Martin Bernal’s 155

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Black Athena. (Gladstone had made much the same argument a year and a half earlier in a periodical article entitled, ‘Phoenicia and Greece’.) Juventus Mundi’s more strictly geographical sections, which occur mostly in Chapter XIII, ‘The Geography of Homer’, in part summarize Gladstone’s earlier work, but also contain new material. Section I, on the Catalogue of Ships, speaks again of Homer’s mental map or, in Gladstone’s phrase, his ‘mental figure-drawing’, and repeats the geographical sequences and character of the Greek Catalogue. Section II, the topography of the Plain of Troy, an old topic among British Homerists, was a matter Gladstone had only briefly discussed in Studies on Homer, in three pages devoted to the Trojan Catalogue. Homer draws a picture of the plain that is internally consistent, says Gladstone, but it ‘cannot be accurately fitted to the natural features of the plain, as they now are, or even as we can probably suppose them to have been some three thousand years ago’. This leads Gladstone to conclude that Homer had no personal acquaintance with the Plain of Troy. As with the ‘outer geography’, Gladstone sees Homer’s depiction of Troy as an imaginative reconstruction, though based in part on the testimony of others. In his 1869 discussion (Section III) of the ‘outer geography’, Gladstone simply repeats his earlier arguments and defends his map, which is included in a much-reduced form in the 1869 book. Beyond that, he took the position (which he was to change by 1877, as we have seen) that ‘Homer was not personally acquainted with the topography of Ithaca’ and was in error both on its size and its position. In his final, ‘Miscellaneous’ chapter, Gladstone briefly alludes to Homer’s appreciation of landscape as revealed in scattered references to the beauty of certain scenery and to his notion of the figure of the earth, providing the appropriate citations to the texts.18 Keith Johnston’s endorsement of Gladstone’s cartography, and indeed Gladstone’s ascension to the post of Prime Minister, may have helped to bring about more favorable consideration of his attempts to devise a Homeric geography by the time Juventus Mundi appeared in 1869. A reviewer in the Illustrated London News called the new work ‘a clear and thoughtful book’, noting its ‘conjectural view of Homeric geography, illustrated with a queer little map’ and its discussion of Homer’s concept of the universe. The reviewer for the Daily Telegraph, 156

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though concentrating on the book’s religious content, duly noted ‘its very useful section upon the geography of Homer, which is moreover illustrated by a map’. In his comments on the Homeric geography section, reviewer Robert Eden found Gladstone’s ‘Map of the Outer Geography of Homer’ both interesting and original, and asserted that, ‘This map, as novel in its purposes as it is beautiful in execution, will be found a great help to students of Homer, in traversing the hazy outer regions of his geographical system.’ James Bryce, reviewing Juventus Mundi for Macmillan’s Magazine, wrote that Gladstone must be credited with having ‘sufficiently proved that Homer conceived of a sea extending from east to west to the north of Thrace…’. Bryce also describes Gladstone’s remarks on Homeric geography as ‘throughout clear and practical’, and his method as having ‘thrown a good deal of light on [geographical] questions that were previously confused or misunderstood’.19 On the other hand, in his magisterial two-volume History of Ancient Geography (1879), Edward Bunbury dismissed ‘all the attempts to give a “local habitation” to the legends related in the Odyssey’, and added ‘it is certainly not worth while to enquire what geographical idea the poet formed in his own mind’. Criticizing Strabo for having begun this pernicious search, Bunbury found it ‘strange’ that it should have continued ‘even in our own day, and that one of the latest attempts to investigate its geography [i.e., Gladstone’s] should be based upon the assumption that Homer had present to his mind an elaborate and complicated map of the wanderings of Ulysses, utterly without foundation in fact….’ In a footnote, he identifies Gladstone as a chief offender in this regard, adding ‘But what right have we to assume [Homer] shaped any such map at all?’ agreeing with the position Jones had taken in 1858, that only those who have repeatedly studied maps can have an accurate mental picture of the world. This is by no means the only point at which Bunbury criticizes Gladstone’s Homeric geography. The notion that Odysseus should have passed from the Ocean back to the Mediterranean world ‘through a strait, like that which really leads from the Ocean into the Mediterranean, rests upon no foundation at all….’ In another footnote he argues against that fallacy, which ‘pervades still more strongly the views of Mr. Gladstone and the marvellous map in 157

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which he has embodied his conception of this part of the Odyssey’. (‘Marvellous’, in this context, seems less than praiseworthy.) Gladstone’s marginal comments in his own copy of Bunbury’s book (now in St Deiniol’s Library) on this, as on other strictures against his work, indicate his continuing disagreement with Bunbury’s criticisms. Gladstone and Bunbury were in a sense talking past each other, though there were also major points of agreement between them Bunbury fails to recognize. Bunbury is primarily interested in how the determinable ‘facts on the ground’ either confirm or refute references to actual geographical sites, and on those grounds dismisses Homer’s ‘Outer Geography’. Gladstone, as previously discussed, agrees that one can’t reconcile Homer’s ‘Outer Geography’ with the facts on the ground in the Western Mediterranean, but his interest is primarily how the sites of Odysseus’ adventures are arranged geographically in Homer’s mind, a concept and task that Bunbury clearly saw as unprofitable. Yet even the more austere Bunbury included a ‘Map to Illustrate the Wanderings of Ulysses’ (actually more of a cartogram) in his History of Ancient Geography. He defends himself against a charge of inconsistency by arguing that readers expect such a map in a treatise on ancient geography. He also argues for it on the grounds that ‘it will at least bring clearly before [the reader’s] eyes the utter absence of all relation with the real localities in the Mediterranean’, despite arguments from ‘local tradition and the perverse ingenuity of commentators’,20 among whom he clearly numbers Gladstone. Few present-day geographers or cognitive psychologists would accept the notion that extensive prior study of maps is prerequisite to one’s having a mental map. In any case, Gladstone was not claiming that his map is accurate in geodesic terms, only that it is systematic in relational terms. Nor is it entirely the opposite of a geodetic map; that is, it was not wholly an imaginary map, like the Phantasiekarten a number of German scholars had drawn earlier in the nineteenth century. Indeed, there were times in his later life when Gladstone insisted his rendering of Homer’s mental map had been empirically verified by later scientific evidence. His uncritical embrace of Heinrich Schliemann’s findings suggests such a stance, as does a remark of Bryce to J. R. Green in 1878 that Gladstone had insisted that recent geological findings in northwestern Europe confirmed Homer’s belief 158

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in an ‘Outer Sea’. In March 1882 Gladstone received an author’s presentation copy of Ignatius Donnelly’s new book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, and wrote Donnelly reiterating his belief that ‘Homer unquestionably… believed in a sea exit from the northern Adriatic’ and that the ‘expanse of water’ north of it had been confirmed by geologists.21 Shortly after Juventus Mundi was published, Heinrich Schliemann made his first surreptitious excavations on the hill of Hisarlik in search of Homer’s Troy. In so doing he became, however tenuously and uncritically, the father of modern Bronze Age archaeology. Gladstone became aware of Schliemann’s work in October 1873, and immediately commented ‘these discoveries much confirm me’. From 1874 onward Gladstone publicly championed Schliemann’s work at Troy, though criticizing his dating, and saw it as demonstrating experimentally the truth of the Homeric texts. Gladstone even wrote a 35-page preface to the English-language edition of Schliemann’s book on Mycenae, which its author had dedicated to him, and largely endorsed Schliemann’s subsequently discredited claim to have found the tomb of Agamemnon. In his later Homeric writings Gladstone gave ample credit to Schliemann and to the work of German Homeric scholars such as Eduard Buchholz, who dedicated the second volume of his Die Homerische Realien to Gladstone. In his Homeric Synchronism: An Inquiry into the Time and Place of Homer (1876), partly a revision of previously published articles, Gladstone compared the texts and the archaeological evidence for Troy/Hisarlik, and also moved into the field of Egyptology in order to draw out another part of Homer’s mental map, his knowledge of the geography of Egypt and other foreign places, which Gladstone discusses in relation to recent scholarship. This book, possibly because much of its content had been previously published, did not sell as well as Gladstone’s earlier Homeric works. Ten years after its publication the publisher still had over 1,300 copies in stock, and had sold only five copies the previous year.22 Gladstone’s two final Homeric books are much slighter works. One, simply called Homer, is a densely written, 153-page student’s guide, published in June 1878 in the ‘Literature Primers’ series edited by the historian J. R. Green. Green himself was interested in the relations of geography and history, and with his wife Alice had written a 159

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short geography of Great Britain. As an editor for Macmillan, Green had commissioned a brief (physical) Geography (1877) from the musicologist Sir George Grove, and also Henry Fanshawe Tozer’s Classical Geography (1877), a text used in its day on both sides of the Atlantic.23 (See Chapter 4.) In his own brief volume, characterized by Bebbington as ‘still a stimulating introduction to its subject’, and by Lloyd-Jones as ‘an excellent small volume’, Gladstone devotes three chapters to Homer’s cosmology, geography and ethnology respectively. Alexander Macmillan wrote Gladstone that the series was used not only in schools but sold in W. H. Smith’s railway bookshops, where ‘people seem to buy them as they do shilling novels’. In November 1880 Macmillan was able to report that Gladstone’s book had sold between 13,000 and 14,000 copies. Gladstone’s last Homer book to be completed, Landmarks of Homeric Study (1890), published when its author was past 80, contains a concluding chapter entitled ‘The Geography of the Poems’ that mostly summarizes his ideas on that subject as ‘conceived and arranged in the brain of Homer’. Throughout his later life Gladstone maintained his interest in geography, reading such modern works as T. H. Huxley’s Physiography (1877) and John Scott Keltie’s Applied Geography (1890), as well as Strabo, Pausanias and works on the geography of Palestine, including geographical information in Josephus and Eusebius.24

GLADSTONE AND THE HISTORY OF HOMERIC GEOGRAPHY Gladstone continued to read and even to speak on problems of Bronze Age geography, as well as to encourage young archaeologists such as Arthur Evans, who discovered the so-called Palace at Knossos two years after Gladstone’s death. He told Donnelly, after reading his book, that ‘I may not be able to accept all your propositions, but I am much disposed to believe in an Atlantis.’ And that same year (1882), during one of his later terms as Prime Minister, Gladstone proposed to his cabinet that the government send a naval expedition to find the site of the ‘lost continent’ of Atlantis described by Plato. Fortu160

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nately for the defence of the realm and the British ratepayer, if not for Gladstone, the expedition never got under way.25 In February 1890 Gladstone visited Oxford to speak to the Oxford Union. He chose as his subject ‘the connection of Homer with modern Assyriological [and Egyptological] studies’, delivering a lecture 75 minutes long on a topic undoubtedly mystifying to most of the young men present. The Oxford historian, Charles Oman, found Gladstone’s hypotheses ‘quite fantastical’ and the lecture dated in its knowledge of ‘Orientalist’ research. Oman concluded that ‘the lecture would have been a more distressing business than it was, if any perceptible percentage of the undergraduate audience had possessed any knowledge of the topics discussed’. One probable exception to Oman’s strictures was the future Homer scholar (and classical geographer) J. L. Myres, who had found ‘squatting room’ on the floor, literally at Gladstone’s feet. Equally clearly, it was a topic with which Gladstone was currently and vitally concerned. The visit was memorable for many, however, for other reasons, not least for the fascinating table talk at All Souls College, where Gladstone, an Honorary Fellow, was staying. Percy Gardner recalled in his memoirs that he, an acquaintance of Schliemann, had been placed next to Gladstone at dinner ‘in order that I might talk to him of Troy and Mycenae’. A small volume commemorating that visit, published after Gladstone’s death, contains a telling anecdote, recording a discussion between Gladstone and some of the young Students (i.e., Fellows) of Christ Church about certain London buildings. Gladstone had got somewhat confused over the location of St Bartholomew’s, Newgate. One of the men present whispered to another, ‘He likes maps, draw it for him’.26 He spoke more wisely than he knew. Gladstone not only ‘liked’ maps, he had constructed them as an aid to his literary and historical study for the past six decades. Gladstone’s objective contribution to Bronze Age studies is not at issue here; scholars in that field, particularly since the re-evaluation of the making of the Homeric text in the light of studies in oral traditions, have thrown it, along with much else in nineteenth-century Homerology, into the celebrated dustbin of history. But in his curious attempt to reconstruct the mental map of Homer, the Gladstone case reminds us that the history of classical geography is not only the rec161

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ord of the activity of professional geographers and classicists, nor does it consist entirely in what geographers and historians of a given age might characterize as ‘scientific’. Gladstone’s excursions into Homeric geography, a minor though significant part of his Homerology, cannot be divorced from the concerns of the larger culture and civilization of which it is unavoidably embedded. And in the high culture of Victorian Britain, as Turner and Jenkyns have made clear, the classical heritage was so universally understood and valued that the premier political leader of the time could turn his liking for maps into a serious attempt at a cartographical representation of Homeric geography from the ‘sacred texts’ of Bronze Age Greece, and find an audience that reached well beyond that of university scholars. The eminent classicist, Francois Hartog, has recently argued that Strabo was right to call Homer the founder of geography. ‘As the creator of the Greek understanding of space and the organizer of a Greek space of understanding’, writes Hartog, ‘Homer was certainly a founder, in the strict sense of the term.’27 Gladstone would, of course, have agreed that Homer was a founder. But while other believers in Homer’s geographical role, from Strabo to Luce, have attempted to demonstrate the literal accuracy of Homer’s understanding of Mediterranean space, Gladstone differs from them in attempting a serious cartographic representation of Homer’s organization of ‘a Greek space of understanding’. Gladstone’s representation of Homer’s ‘Outer Geography’ was neither wholly imaginary nor a map of real sites, to be located precisely at the Straits of Messina or Malta or the harbor of Bonifacio or the Lipari Islands, or any of the numerous and varied locations identified by twentieth-century and earlier trackers of Odysseus. Rather, it was an attempt to show how Homer had mapped out in his mind a plausible geographical system by allowing his imagination to play over the information at hand. That for centuries many men and women have worked away with great seriousness at the problem of Homer’s geography is a significant, if understudied, part of the grand tradition of Western humanism. That a major figure in British political history should have written extensively on Bronze Age geography, and even attempted a Homeric mental map, was a remarkable undertaking, certainly worthy of the notice both of historians of Anglo-American geography and of the classical tradition. 162

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Sir John Linton Myres, Oxford’s first Wykeham Professor of Ancient History, was associated with geography at Oxford from the day he met Halford Mackinder in 1895 through his service on the Board of the Oxford Honours program in the School of Geography in the 1930s. Since Myres survived into the 1950s, he became a resource for such younger scholars as J. N. L. Baker and T. Walter Freeman, who sought to understand the modern development of geography at Oxford and elsewhere. In 1947, at the Dundee meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Freeman had suggested that Section E (Geography) form a committee to collect records and reminiscences of the development of geography in Britain since its professional revival in the 1880s. The Committee lasted until 1951. Its work was supplemented for Oxford by Baker’s long interview with Myres in 1950.1 Writing in response to an inquiry from Freeman concerning the early years of modern geography at Oxford, Myres made a remarkable statement: ‘Mackinder came in on a wave which had begun with Freeman (E. A.) and [Joseph] Prestwich’, a historian and a geologist respectively. Myres then went on to list a number of Oxford scientists, historians and classicists who lectured on, wrote about, or were otherwise interested in matters geographical before, during and after Mackinder’s tenure, several of them influential in the creation of the School of Geography in 1899, or who had supported the School at critical moments. Equally significant was Myres’ reminder that the

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Oxford context needs to be given great weight if we are to understand the origins and early years of modern geography at Oxford. In his interview with Baker, Myres named further names, including alumni, who had been active in advancing geography and related disciplines in Britain at school and university levels.2 In August 1943, at a symposium on the future development of geography in which he followed Myres, H. J. Fleure had contended: ‘In reviewing geographical thought, let us not restrict ourselves to those who are called geographers.’ More pointedly, as Alice Garnett cautioned 25 years ago, ‘we should not forget that in those earlier years the advancement and acceptance of our discipline did not ultimately wholly depend on the personalities only of geographers, as some writers might seem to imply’. (See note 2 above.) This chapter, then, will examine the geographical activity of several Oxford and other British historians and classicists, particularly those who wrote on the geography of the classical world. As we shall see, the groundwork for the acceptance of geography as a modern subject of learned enquiry lay deep in nineteenth-century Oxford. It had begun nearly half a century before Mackinder was appointed Reader in Geography in 1887. And, as R. M. Ogilvie pointed out, even deeper lay the expeditions of the Dilettanti and others like them: ‘The interest in geography which had prompted these explorers and the discoveries which they published found their place in the commentaries and histories’, mentioning specifically the work of Thomas Arnold, E. A. Freeman, and Henry Pelham, who will be discussed in this chapter.3

THE ‘LIBERAL ANGLICAN’ SUCCESSION King George I had established the Regius Professorships of Modern History at Oxford and Cambridge in 1724. T. W. Hayek described the appointees during the eighteenth century as ‘all nonentities’. J. W. Burrow pointed out that they need not even be historians, Charles Oman derided them as ‘of the old do-nothing school’, and Baker described the Oxford chair as ‘a sinecure’.4 Thomas Arnold, the famed Headmaster of Rugby School, appointed in 1841, was Oxford’s first 164

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Regius Professor of Modern History to have a substantial prior record of research and publication. Oddly enough, given the title of the chair, his major publications had been in ancient history, though Arnold had also taught some modern (i.e., post-Roman) history to Rugby students and had done research on certain mediaeval and Renaissance figures. Beginning in 1830, Arnold had published a threevolume edition of Thucydides, with maps drawn from actual surveys, copious notes, and 92 pages of short essays, many on geographical topics. He had also published two volumes of a projected threevolume history of Rome, designed for a more general readership, based to a large degree on B. G. Niebuhr’s Roman history. By 1841 he had largely completed the manuscript of a third volume, carrying the story beyond where Niebuhr had left it. Unfortunately Arnold held the chair for only a brief period, dying unexpectedly in June 1842, one day before his 47th birthday.5 Arnold had been interested in both history and geography from his boyhood on the Isle of Wight. Among the fields he emphasized at Rugby School after he became its headmaster in 1828 were these two disciplines, largely as an aid to understanding classical literature, which, in Rugby as elsewhere, remained at the center of the curriculum. In 1834, in an essay describing the Rugby program for George Long’s Quarterly Journal of Education, Arnold included a table of instruction. The table shows the stress placed on history and geography, understood to be mainly classical geography and ancient history, in the Classical Division. After two years of English history, the Third Form was introduced to ‘Physical Geography’. Fourth Formers studied the ‘Detailed Geography of Italy and Germany’, presumably in concert with Latin authors, along with the history of Greece. In the Lower Fifth, during ‘History Time’, the pupils studied ‘Physical and Political Geography of All Europe’, along with selections from Herodotus and Arrian. Among the subjects for compositions (in Latin, Greek, or English) were ‘geographical descriptions of countries’. In the study of history, the boys were expected, as they read about ‘the greatest men of different periods’, to know their locus in time and place: ‘the part of the earth on which they lived’.6 Arnold’s students, as many later recalled, were impressed with his enthusiasm for geography, kindled in his own youth. As an adult, Arnold had made numerous trips to Europe, and his descriptions of 165

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the sites of famous battles were particularly appealing to the boys. In 1835, writing to his former pupil, the naturalist Hugh Strickland, who was about to set out for Asia Minor, Arnold recommended that he take with him William Leake’s map, Strabo’s Geography, Herodotus’ heavily geographical history and, should he plan to go as far as Trebizond, Xenophon’s Anabasis. He once set as a paper topic, a description, in Greek, of Oxford as Herodotus might have described it.7 As Baker has shown, Arnold’s History of Rome was informed by his travels, citing particularly the geographical segments, such as his description of the topography of Rome (which he had examined with C. C. Bunsen, the Prussian Minister to Rome) and the section on ‘Physical History’, in which he discussed the relations of ‘nature and mankind’, including the climate of the time and other features of the Italian landscape. In the second volume, Arnold had surveyed what his grandson later called ‘the face of that Europe which was very shortly to become Roman’. Historian Rosemary Jann has credited Arnold with being among the first British historians to visit historic sites in person and to use his experience of them in his writing. This not only gave his research additional credibility, but also brought his readers (or hearers) into the scene of the events themselves. It ‘gave historical imagination a habitation’, she wrote. Or, as a geographer might express it today, he ‘placed’ the events he describes. This was a defining characteristic of the Liberal Anglican school. For them, Duncan Forbes has written, ‘the country itself is one of the chief documents of the historian’.8 Arnold’s friend, Julius Hare, who assembled the third Roman volume from Arnold’s drafts, called attention in his preface to what he called Arnold’s ‘singular geographical eye’ that especially pervades that volume. The long-term influence of that ‘geographical eye’ was clearly demonstrated when Arnold’s grandson, William T. Arnold, reedited the manuscripts in 1885. William Arnold included Thomas Arnold’s original notes and added his own, under the title The Second Punic War. In it we find not only the senior Arnold’s correspondence with luminaries like Chevalier Bunsen on such contested issues as the route of Hannibal’s army across the Alps, but notes by his grandson, a journalist with a scholarly interest in Roman history, bringing research on such issues up to date. The reviewer in the Royal Geographical Society’s Proceedings praised the editor for adding to 166

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Arnold’s work his own ‘geographical researches, which are a fine example of the application of geography to history’.9 Arnold’s best-known advocacy of geography, however, is in his posthumously published Introductory Lectures on Modern History, composed of his inaugural address as Regius Professor on 2 December 1841 and his first series of Oxford lectures, given early in 1842. ‘A real knowledge of geography’, he said in his third lecture, ‘embraces at once a knowledge of the earth and the dwellings of man upon it; … it is just that part of the domain of knowledge where students of physical and moral science meet together.’ Forty-five years later, Mackinder was to echo the same idea in his famous paper ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geography’. Arnold had called for a geography that went beyond the locational, or, in his terms, ‘plan-like’, form of the cartographic mode. He suggested a more comprehensive vision that embraced the look of the land and its human content in three dimensions. This ‘morphology of landscape’ (to use Carl Sauer’s famous phrase), or what Arnold called ‘the real geography of a country, its organic structure’ is what marks him as a nineteenth-century thinker. As Jann has put it, for Arnold geographical evidence ‘was not just a backdrop, but a vital part of historical understanding’, a notion he shared with Thomas Carlyle, E. A. Freeman, and J. R. Green.10 His students, and those of his successors in the Regius Professorship who advocated the subject, tended to follow Arnold’s general pattern in this regard, as indeed did Mackinder. In contrast to Arnold’s nineteenth-century successors in the Regius chair, however, both his Inaugural and his subsequent lectures had drawn large crowds. Stanley estimated that an audience of from four to five hundred had heard Arnold’s inaugural lecture, and from three to four hundred attended the subsequent lectures. Arnold’s lectures had to be given in the Sheldonian Theatre to accommodate these numbers. The attendees may have included George Butler of Exeter College, who a decade later was to give the first course of lectures on geography at Oxford in modern times. The audience certainly included many of his former Rugby students, including Stanley, and also Edward A. Freeman, one of Arnold’s successors as Regius Professor.11 However, Arnold probably influenced more students by his heavily annotated edition of Thucydides, which was adopted as the stand167

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ard teaching edition of that ancient author at Oxford and elsewhere. Michael McCrum has pointed out that (at least in England) Arnold’s edition of Thucydides ‘broke new ground in combining linguistic with historical and geographical notes’ and that ‘his commentary on Thucydides’ History did much to make the geographical and historical elucidation of it fashionable’. Benjamin Jowett criticized Arnold’s philology in the Thucydides volumes (a weakness Arnold himself had conceded in his Preface to the first volume), but enthusiastically praised his ability to elicit an interest in geography and archaeology. Arnold had made it clear that his original purpose was to ‘illustrate the history and geography of my author’. For the geography he not only had ‘good materials of my own’, but also the assistance of the work of Gell, Leake, Dodwell and others associated with the Society of Dilettanti, the publications of Friedrich Kruse, the new Admiralty maps of Greece, and the recent maps published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, in which organization Arnold was an original participant.12 It is not easy to select from Arnold’s 92 pages of notes a representative example of his geographic method in relation to Thucydides, a feature that Arnold’s biographer in the Dictionary of National Biography called ‘especially valuable’. Perhaps one selected from his account of Megara in the second volume, however, will serve. ‘Mere literary men’, he wrote, might be tempted to follow the ancient accounts too literally, whereas ‘mere scientific men’ noting the differences between the coastline then and now, might ‘too hastily conclude that the accounts of the ancients are erroneous’. Neither, thought Arnold, could get it right without a sense that ‘the face of the country’ had changed over the centuries through such phenomena as earthquakes, alluvial deposits, windblown sands and the like. It is not possible to solve the problems of the ancient geography of Megara, he concluded, ‘without possessing the double advantage of the exact knowledge of the ancient accounts, and a personal examination of the places themselves’.13 Although these words are applied to Megara, they also provide a concise statement of Arnold’s methodology. Baker put the ‘new geography’ of Thomas Arnold at the same level of innovation in British geography as those of Richard Hakluyt and Mackinder. Albeit subordinate to classics and history, what was ‘new’ 168

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in Arnold’s formulation was primarily his emphasis on landscape morphology. Although in his Oxford lectures Arnold had decried the older locational/cartographic emphasis, or ‘plan-like’ geography, he certainly used maps (often hand-drawn) in his lecture room, and maps drawn from actual surveys in his books. But he wished primarily to emphasize the organic structure of the landscape as it actually existed or had existed at the time: its mountains, rivers, human dwellings and the like. The landscape was thus to be pictured as a gestalt, a phenomenon to be seen and described in three dimensions in order to make it intelligible. Thus Arnold draws heavily on his own extensive travels and personal recollections of ancient sites. In a letter to his former student, Reverend Trevenson Penrose, from his Lake District retreat, Fox How, Arnold wrote that, although he had no good maps there, he was able to continue writing about Hannibal’s march from his own memories of the sites, ‘which I think will give an air of reality to the narrative greater than it ever could have from maps’.14 It is clear from Arnold’s correspondence that he did not regard the landscape as fixed. On the contrary, he was greatly interested in all forms of landscape change, whether natural or human-induced. In his 1835 letter to Strickland, about to leave for Asia Minor, Arnold asked him to send back information on the geology, botany and meteorology, as well as on crop yields. But he also wanted to know about the prevalence of malaria, ‘whether there are any traces of destroyed forests, and whether the sands have encroached or are encroaching on the available soil’. Arnold also sought information on languages and dialects, signs of old roads, and other matters of human geography.15 In the same year, he wrote his friend, Chevalier Bunsen, expressing his dissatisfaction with Polybius’ geographical descriptions (or lack thereof). Then Arnold expressed his wish for ‘a physical history of countries, tracing the changes which they have undergone’, whether caused by such physical agents of change as volcanoes, or by human activity, such as occasional alterations of climate ‘caused by inclosing [sic] and draining; alteration in the course of rivers’, changes wrought by agriculture or herding, the advance or retreat of the sea, changes in the road system, ‘together with the changes in the extent and character of the woodlands’. Arnold’s ‘new geography’, 169

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then, prefigures the line of research produced later in the nineteenth century by the American, George Perkins Marsh, in his Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), and, in the third quarter of the twentieth century championed by the British geographer H. C. Darby in his advocacy and demonstrations of ‘vertical themes’ in historical geography. Such themes have also been the subject of much recent scholarship, including two major symposium volumes edited by geographers, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956) and The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (1990).16 Arnold’s successor in the Regius Professorship, John Anthony Cramer, was a classicist with ‘no achievements or interests in modern history’. Cramer was, however, interested in classical geography and had earlier published seven volumes tracing out the ancient geography of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, as well as issuing classical maps. Except for a visit to Rome in the spring of 1817, however, he is not known to have visited the places he wrote about. Cramer made no pretense to originality, however. He admitted that his work was a library study, and drew on such authors as the Society of Dilettanti’s Chandler and Leake, as well as German scholars such as B. G. Niebuhr. But the bulk of the volumes, designed for university students, were ‘scissors and paste’ compilations of passages from ancient writers themselves, thus representing no real advance in the discipline. In any case, as Regius Professor he was seldom in residence at Oxford, since he was a pluralist whose primary responsibility was as Dean of Carlisle Cathedral, in the far north of England.17 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, another ‘liberal Anglican’, edited Arnold’s Miscellaneous Works and his travel journals. He also wrote a biography of his former teacher that incorporates a great deal of primary material of interest here. Stanley himself, as Tutor at University College from 1843 to 1851, had influenced H. F. Tozer in the direction of geography, as well as J. R. Green, and undoubtedly other students as well. Following his journey to the Near East in 1852–3, Stanley wrote a book, Sinai and Palestine (1856), which in addition to being a travel account incorporates his knowledge of the history and geography of the Holy Land. When he returned to Oxford as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1856, Stanley lectured on the Eastern Church and other such topics, and included some geography in them. Green 170

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wandered into one of Stanley’s lectures in that period and soon found in him a mentor and friend. Green became, like Tozer, another of Stanley’s recruits to the study and use of geography in relation to history, in Green’s case the history and geography of England.18 Stanley had, of course, studied geography in relation to the classics in Rugby School, and maintained that interest during his tenure in University College. During his Tutorship and prior to the trip to Palestine that was ultimately to make his reputation as a scholar of Biblical or ‘sacred’ geography, Stanley published a much less wellknown essay on ‘Greek Topography’. Nominally a review of the second edition of William Leake’s Topography of Athens (1841), like many nineteenth-century reviewers Stanley ranged widely over the field, rather than staying with the book itself. It was published in one of the first English classical journals, the new (and short-lived) periodical, the Classical Museum. Its founder-editor, Leonhard Schmitz, had set the tone of the journal in its first issue by defining its coverage as ‘the Languages, History, Geography, Religion, Literature, Political and Social Institutions, Laws, Arts and Sciences of the ancients’, excluding nothing ‘which throws light on any point of antiquity’. Schmitz excluded, however, ‘Biblical criticism and all subjects of a religious or theological nature’.19 In his essay, Stanley praised Leake’s work as having laid the base for the accurate modern study of Greek topography. The second edition of Leake’s Athens book had incorporated many of the findings of the 20 years since its original publication. Since that time, Stanley contended, ‘Greek topography is occupying, if it has not already occupied, a large space in classical literature’, as shown in such works as Christopher Wordsworth’s Athens and Attica and his more popular Pictorial Greece, in the research of several German, British and Greek scholars on particular points, and in Leake’s own reconsiderations. All of the modern histories of ancient Greece, such as Connop Thirlwall’s, now began, Stanley claimed, with a chapter on classical geography.20 Underlying Stanley’s analysis is the concept that ‘the topography of a country throws a remarkable light not only on the events of which it was the scene, but on the mind of those who inhabited it’. Here Stanley reaffirms his Arnoldian roots. Classical topography, for both, was a method of interpreting both historical events and clas171

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sical (predominantly Greek) literature and culture. To demonstrate that by example, Stanley’s essay wanders far from Athens: to the Argolid, Delphi, Marathon, Chaeronea and even Greek Sicily. At the close of his 41-page essay, he returns to the importance of classical geography for his time, contending that ‘the topography of ancient countries is one of the few points in which philology and physical science converge’, and that ‘the interest and importance of the study is not unequal to any labour that is likely to be bestowed upon it’.21 Stanley’s essay stands as a kind of marker of the transition between early nineteenth-century classical geography, as an instrument for verifying and understanding the history and literature of the classical world, and the mid-century period, when we see the beginnings of classical archaeology emerging from it. Stanley’s essay allowed him to argue that Greek mountain structure and other elements of local topography exerted a ‘peculiar influence’ on the characteristics of the Greek city-state, and even that the ‘adaptation of the outward habitation to the inward soul of nations’ was ‘providential’. But he also suggested the need for excavation at places such as Mycenae, ‘where the rubbish of centuries is heaped up under the very gate of the Lions itself’.22 The emergence of a proto-classical archaeology, closely linked to art history and tied to highly specific sites, did not replace topographical analysis, which indeed persists to this day. But it certainly tilted the balance away from classical geography as an exploratory discipline and, eventually, as an academic study as well. Although the comparison of text and site would continue, particularly among historians of the ancient world, no longer would it carry those claims for topography as a key to the minds and talents of ancient citizenry that it had still mustered into the mid-nineteenth century.

‘HISTORY IS PAST POLITICS….’ Edward A. Freeman, as an Oxford undergraduate, had heard (and was captivated by) Arnold’s inaugural and subsequent lectures, was an admirer of his Thucydides volumes, and picked up Arnold’s idea that history was essentially ‘the biography of a political society’, as Freeman’s biographer put it. Although he, like Arnold, eventually became 172

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Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and is probably best known for his multi-volume history of the Norman Conquest (and its pendants, a two-volume study of the reign of William Rufus and a short biography of William the Conqueror himself), Freeman had a strong classical background.

10. Drawing of Edward Augustus Freeman, 1876

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For most of the 20 years following his graduation from Oxford in 1845, Freeman had immersed himself in the classical world, particularly ancient Greece. His first major book, published in 1863, was on Greek federalism, the only part of a multi-volume study of Federal government he ever completed. It was reissued in a new edition under J. B. Bury’s editorship in 1893, and 20 years later G. P. Gooch was able to term it ‘still indispensable’. After publishing that volume, Freeman embarked on a history of Greece, never published. That he embraced the Arnoldian idea of the unity of history is shown by his unsuccessful but almost simultaneous applications for two Oxford chairs: for the Camden Professorship of Ancient History in 1861, and the following year for the Chichele Professorship of Modern History. To Arnold’s concept of history as a continuum, Freeman added that of an ‘Aryan’ European culture that had begun in ancient Greece and manifested itself in his time, he believed, in the United States.23 Freeman claimed that his interest in geography dated to his boyhood in Weston-super-Mare, a town backed by a steep limestone hill where he was often taken as a child, a height that offered a sweeping view of the surrounding countryside. His geographical approach comes through in his major works, ancient and modern. Gooch exaggerates in claiming that Freeman ‘was the first English historian to realize the importance of an exact knowledge of the geographical sites and historical remains in the reconstruction of events’. But it is clearly true that Freeman considered geography one of the most important tools of the historian, as one of the traditional two ‘eyes of history’, to which he added geomorphology, climate and language. Freeman’s early interest in architecture had taught him the importance of travel to the sites on which he was writing. He took his first trip abroad in 1856, and his travels are central to all of his major works. Other historians, notably his friend and sometime traveling companion, Green, whose quick eye for the landscape Freeman repeatedly praised and learned from, had invested time and funds in travel. But ‘few modern historians if any’, said his biographer, ‘have made it such an essential part of their work as Freeman did’. Frederick York Powell, a later supporter of geography at Oxford, recalled that Freeman had told him that only once had he written about a place, Arques, that he had not seen. And Freeman had lived to regret it, 174

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since, he said, by missing it he had ‘made mistakes that five minutes’ eyesight would have saved him….’24 Freeman is best remembered today for his famous dictum ‘history is past politics, and politics are present history’, and perhaps also for his prejudices, which were many. Freeman’s friend the novelist (and granddaughter of Thomas Arnold), Mrs Humphrey Ward, described him as ‘brimful of likes and dislikes’. One of them inadvertently reflects his disinterest in lands relatively unknown to the ancients. When asked to contribute funds to establish an Indian Institute at Oxford, Freeman refused, reportedly claiming he had no interest in anything that lay east of Trebizond.25 But his relevance here is for his geography, particularly his classical geography. Given that he was so prolific, however, only his major work in this area can be sampled here: his book and atlas, The Historical Geography of Europe (1881); his first lectures as Regius Professor, published as Methods of Historical Study (1886); a selection of his reviews and occasional essays; and his final major research, his History of Sicily from the Earliest Times, published in four volumes (1891–4), as well as the more popular version, Sicily: Phoenician, Greek, and Roman (1892) in the ‘Story of the Nations’ series. Given his maxim that ‘history is past politics’, we should not be surprised to find that Freeman’s Historical Geography of Europe is predominantly the political geography of past times. That is, Freeman was primarily interested in states, their areas, their boundaries at given times and changes in them, and in the succession of place names for different territorial units. He made it clear, however, that in his Historical Geography of Europe he was writing historical geography, not history. In the preface, Freeman claimed for his own work ‘little more than tracing out the extent of various states at different times, and at attempting to place the various changes in their due relation to one another and to their causes’. Freeman conceded that ‘the physical nature of the country, and the settlements of the different nations which have occupied it, have always been the determining causes of its political divisions’. But, in accordance with his foundational assumption, Freeman contended that historical geography has to deal with political divisions. Even though he stated ‘we must look first at the land itself’, this did not save the third edition of his book (in this case, the edition posthumously edited by 175

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J. B. Bury and published in 1903), from a scathing review in the Geographical Teacher. The reviewer agued that the Freeman’s book had needed a ‘fresh treatment’, redefining its subject as ‘the distributions of man at any period within a defined area’, to be ‘determined from a geographical point of view’, which the reviewer described as ‘mainly a “geographical unit”.’ It should also be more practical, and describe and interpret human distributions (presumably in physical ‘geographical units’, or what came to be called ‘natural regions’) throughout historical time. Only then could it ‘claim the title of “Geography”.’ (The reviewer also carped at the price of the atlas volume, though it is keyed to, and essential to, the book.) In short, Freeman, writing in the 1880s, should have anticipated the turn-of-the-century ‘geographical determinism’ and written a different book. Yet, oddly enough, 30 years beyond the hostile review, such scholars as Isaiah Bowman, Richard Hartshorne and Derwent Whittlesey were redefining political geography in terms of area, boundaries, the state as the appropriate unit and so forth, in terms closer to Freeman’s than to the reviewer’s concept of geography. Only a few years ago, two leading figures in British historical geography recognized Freeman’s book for what it is: a pioneering historical geography of Europe.26 This is not to contend that Freeman’s book is flawless, only that it had a particular purpose. Freeman’s premise, like Arnold’s, was that history deals with organized political units. And one cannot understand organized political units without understanding where situated, how large, and what they were called at given times in history. The politically defined state known as Burgundy, for instance, occurs in ten different shapes and sizes in changing historic times. Therefore, the student of history needs to know that, and just where it was and who its neighbors were at the time in which he is interested. There is no way in which one can identify a fixed population as Burgundian, or a fixed ‘geographical unit’ in which ‘Burgundy’ was perpetually contained. Early twentieth-century assertions by academic geographers that this could in fact be done, that the core assumption of the reviewer would function as a sound form of explanation (or, worse, a ‘scientific law’), and that a legitimate academic discipline could be formed under that assumption, was simply a time-limited professional fantasy. 176

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Following Freeman’s appointment to the Regius Professorship, in succession to William Stubbs, he began his statutory lectures. Owing to recent university reforms, these were more numerous than those required in Arnold’s day, though they were much less well attended. According to historian Reba Soffer, the audience for his first series, given during Michaelmas Term 1884, consisted of three undergraduates and a middle-aged clergyman, who, when he was unable to attend the whole series, sent his 14-year-old daughter in his place. This series consisted of eight lectures on historical method, fortunately later published as his widely used The Methods of Historical Study (1886). The last of Freeman’s lectures, ‘Geography and Travel’, is of primary interest here. These geographical topics he regarded as the most important, as well as the most charming ‘means toward the acquisition of sound historical knowledge’. In this lecture he divided geography into two aspects: ‘a branch of history,’ and ‘a precious help to history’. The first, he argued, may be mastered by the study of texts and maps, and referred to his own Historical Geography of Europe and its atlas as an example. This first aspect, historical geography, he asserted (as one might expect) is ‘the knowledge of the political divisions of the earth at different times’, and comprises nomenclature, areas, locations, and above all accuracy for the period and place under discussion. ‘If history, past and present, is to be understood’, he continued, ‘nothing must be more carefully studied than Historical Geography’, though Freeman’s primary concern appears here to be accuracy in the history of place names.27 The other aspect of geography, in Freeman’s view, is travel, ‘a matter of seeing things with our own eyes’. One must begin with maps, but in Freeman’s view these were only the ABCs of history. They need to connect with ‘the more living study of geography on the very soil of the lands and cities whose history we are studying’. One must ‘make out all that one could make out as to the physical look… and the light which that physical look throws on its history’. The historian must necessarily be a traveler, Freeman argued: ‘thoroughly to understand a land or a place, you must see it with your own eyes’.28 That, as we shall see, was his own practice, both for his major work in the Norman Conquest and for his unfinished work on Sicily. 177

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Freeman’s advocacy of geography, whether as a part of historical study or an aid to primary historical research, may also be found in his essays for various periodicals. In his review of Ernst Curtius’ Greek history volumes, for example, Freeman judged geography to be the author’s strong point, particularly in his first, ‘most geographical’ chapter. Curtius’ ‘knowledge of the country, and his keen eye for the characteristic features of the whole land and of its several portions, stand him in good stead in every page’. Curtius’ descriptions kindle the reader’s imagination, and show him that Greece is more than simply the locus of important political events. Curtius shows his love for the land of Greece itself, ‘as for a personal friend whose acquaintance he has made and enjoyed’. Freeman takes a similar tack in his numerous travel essays, some of which he compiled into books. For instance, in his ‘First Impressions of Athens’ he asserts ‘Till we have really seen with our own eyes something of the geography of Attica and of Greece in general, we shall perhaps fail to take in the really unique position which Athens holds in the history of the Greek cities’. The histories are too vague without it, and we can see these matters only dimly on the maps.29 Freeman’s major historical work, as we have seen, was his History of the Norman Conquest of England, in six volumes. The two-volume work on the reign of William Rufus, his brief biography of William the Conqueror, and a travel book on Normandy and Maine came in the wake of that. This series was the result not only of his mastery of the primary source material in his library but also of numerous trips to historic sites, particularly battlefields and towns associated with his narrative, in England and France. He frequently inserted descriptions of these places in his text. His maps are marked by their simplicity and clarity, and illuminate the text well. In Volume 5, Freeman praises the Domesday Book as a vehicle for understanding the geography of England in 1086, describing it as ‘our best guide to the geography of its own time’. Freeman’s appraisal is an interesting anticipation of the importance H. C. Darby was later to place on it for the same purpose.30 His work on the Normans, far from bringing him closer to the modern era, stimulated his plans for a series of books on Sicily, which the Normans had ruled during the High Middle Ages. For Freeman, who insisted on the unity of history, and given his extensive classical 178

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background, it was only natural to begin at the beginning of settlement. Though he completed a more popular general history of Sicily through the Roman period, published in the year of his death, his first three volumes, on the early history of the island, went only as far as the Carthaginian and Athenian invasions. The fourth, which his son-in-law Arthur Evans (later the famed discoverer of Knossos) completed from the author’s manuscripts and published after Freeman’s death, took the study only down to the death of Agathocles in 289 BC. These are all based in part on Freeman’s four extended trips to and within Sicily.31 In his popular book on early Sicily, Freeman’s explanatory analysis is fundamentally geographical. In the first chapter, he suggested that the major changes in the history of Sicily are the results of two geographical factors, its centrality or geographical position (relative location, in today’s terms) and ‘the geographical character of the land’. Sicily’s early history is seen as a conflict between a western or ‘Aryan’ nation, the Greeks, and an eastern or Semitic nation, the Phoenicians. This phase ends with the Roman conquest and unification of the whole island as its first overseas province. Later there is a similar cycle, but religious in character, a northern or Christian side as against a southern (from Africa) Muslim or ‘Saracen’ side. This culminates in the Norman conquest of the twelfth century and the integration of Byzantine Greeks, Normans, Saracens and Jews under Roger II, and to a degree by his successors.32 It is fairly clear that these themes would have been worked out more fully had Freeman lived to complete his multi-volume history of Sicily. He prefigured his approach in an undated essay on ‘Sicilian Cycles’ and in a review essay on ‘The Normans at Palermo’, published in the British Quarterly Review in April 1879 and reprinted in the third collection of his Historical Essays that same year. The four books that were the subject of his review essay (two in Italian and two in German) included a historical topography of the Norman capital, Palermo, so that Freeman was again able to write of the changes in the geography of land and sea from earlier to modern times. It also gives a nod to the geography text of the Muslim geographer, Edrisi, which Roger II had commissioned and to which, Freeman thought, Roger may have contributed. Freeman also wrote essays on ‘The Emperor Frederick II’ (North British Review, December 1866), five sketches 179

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on Sicily from October 1878 to April 1879 in Macmillan’s Magazine, ‘Sicilian Travel’ for the September 1889 issue of the Contemporary Review, and the article on Sicily for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose editors, unknown to him, had made a hash of his essay prior to its publication.33 In his preface to Volume 1 (1891) of the larger history of Sicily, Freeman pointed out that most of the volume had been written ‘on or near the sites’ about which he writes, many of them, thanks to frequent visits, ‘as familiar to me as my own home or my own university’. Among his acknowledgements was an expression of thanks to William Watson Goodwin, Professor of Greek at Harvard University, who had gone over the sites around Syracuse with him, Thucydides in hand. Freeman’s second chapter, on ‘The Island and its Earliest Inhabitants’, is a masterpiece of regional geographic description. In the third volume, published the following year, he repeats his obligation to Goodwin for their joint examination of the sites, and adds his thanks for Goodwin’s technical scholarship, ‘his never-to-be-forgotten kindness in looking over the proofs’, and his suggestions ‘on endless points’ in all of the volumes.34 What, then, is Freeman’s place in the history of historical geography? Perhaps most interesting, in the light of later attempts to parse the combination of history and geography into ‘historical geography’ and ‘geographical history’ (to say nothing of ‘the history behind geography’ and ‘the geography behind history’ and the like) is that none of Freeman’s contemporaries who self-identified with geography would have made that sort of distinction. The curricular and scholarly emphasis on geography as fundamental to ancient and modern history, in Britain and indeed at Oxford, long predates Mackinder. We can say, somewhat contrary to Myres, that the ‘wave’ that carried Mackinder into his Readership does not begin with Freeman’s late nineteenth-century heyday, but further back, at least to Arnold, of whom Freeman was a disciple. Indeed, as Baker has pointed out, another of Freeman’s predecessors in the Regius chair, Henry Halford Vaughan, had ‘introduced a great deal of physical geography into his lectures which were illustrated by maps made by himself’.35 But Freeman’s tenure of the Regius chair (1884–92), combined with his wide readership among both historical scholars and literate lay readers, certainly influenced his colleagues in both the School of 180

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Modern History and the School of Literae Humaniores. In responding to John Scott Keltie’s questions concerning the possibility of adding a geography lecturer at Oxford, Freeman expressed his support of geography, but it was primarily for ‘geography as a branch of history’. Yet Keltie, evidently acting on the old principle that ‘he who is not against us is with us’, also acknowledged Freeman’s recent Oxford lecture on ‘Geography and Travel’ and praised both his historical atlas and work as an examiner in getting geography questions into the modern history examinations. The following year, Freeman lectured on ‘The Historical Geography of Europe’.36 One would not wish to appear to denigrate the importance of the Royal Geographical Society and its politically connected Oxford members in persuading the Oxford authorities to create a Readership in Geography for Mackinder in 1887. But the acceptance of Mackinder’s lectures in modern historical geography, coupled with his appointment to the School of Modern History, rested in part on the efforts of his historical colleagues and predecessors. Freeman, whose tenure of the chair overlapped the period of Mackinder’s appointment, had helped to lay the groundwork for Mackinder’s, and geography’s, initial welcome at Oxford through his defense of, advocacy for, and exemplary use of, geography in his historical analyses.37 His contemporaries regarded Freeman’s geographical work as a contribution to geography as well as to history, at a time when the separation of geography from history was by no means as sharp as it later became. After his death Freeman received appreciative obituary notices in both leading British geographical journals, the Scottish Geographical Magazine and the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. The anonymous memorialist in the former praised Freeman’s site visits in the interest of accurate depiction, pointing out ‘his works thus abound with geographical descriptions alike valuable and interesting’. The writer also praised his Historical Geography of Europe as ‘a special work on geography’.38 C. R. Markham, writing a four-page appreciation of Freeman’s services to geography for the Royal Geographical Society, claimed that no modern writer had done as much as he to show ‘the necessity for a geographical training and geographical instincts in a true historian’. He called the atlas accompanying Freeman’s Historical Geography of Europe ‘valuable’, praised his advocacy of the idea that the historian 181

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needed to have a personal acquaintance with the scenes about which he wrote, and even, like Freeman, to write up his observations on the spot. Markham also praised Freeman’s high degree of ‘geographical insight’ and his ‘conscientious geographical research’, some of which was carried out in the company of the geologist Boyd Dawkins. Markham quotes Dawkins’ praise of Freeman for the extent of his travels and ‘for the faculty of restoring the configuration of a country to the time of which he treats’. Dawkins described him as ‘a great geographer as well as a great historian’, and predicted that, because of Freeman’s contributions, geography ‘is likely to occupy a far higher place than it now enjoys’. Another Oxford friend quoted by Markham described Freeman as ‘a true disciple of his great master, Thucydides, the greatest geographer among the great historians’, which again suggests the link with Arnold. The same unidentified Oxford scholar then makes a highly significant evaluation of Freeman’s effect upon the university itself: ‘Of his influence in directing people’s attention to the vital importance of geography, it is almost impossible to speak too highly. We have all learnt this from him’. Markham himself suggested that Freeman had ‘given to geography its true place in relation to the history’, and that ‘his method will add a far wider and more numerous class of inquirers to the votaries of geographical science’.39 Those are strong words. But even if they are only partly true, they re-enforce Myres’ suggestion concerning Freeman’s role as an important (if presently underrated) figure in preparing the ground for the institutionalization and development of geography at Oxford. They also demonstrate that his geographical contemporaries regarded a significant part of his work as geography.

OXFORD CLASSICISTS AND GEOGRAPHY Numerous historians and classicists were a part of what Myres called the ‘wave’ that swept Mackinder into his Readership in 1887, contributed to the establishment and continuation of the Oxford School of Geography beginning in 1899, or worked to establish or contribute to its offspring, the biennial Summer Schools of Geography for teach182

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ers, instituted in 1902, and the Honour School of Geography and statutory Professorship of Geography, instituted in 1931 and 1932 respectively. If we combine Myres’ two lists with the list of six historians and classicists (and others) E. W. Gilbert lists as serving on the Committee for Geography, and with still others unearthed by Baker in his detailed local studies of geography at Oxford, we find a substantial number of Oxford historians and classicists who were actively involved in some way with the advancement of geography and its teaching before 1932. Of the original members of the Committee on Geography appointed to supervise the new School of Geography in 1899, excluding the Vice-Chancellor and the three Royal Geographical Society representatives, the four Oxford appointees included three ancient historians or classical scholars: Henry F. Pelham, Myres himself, and Frederick York Powell. The fourth, Henry A. Miers, Waynflete Professor of Mineralogy and Crystallography, had been a Royal Geographical Society medallist at Eton College and had already developed a reputation as a ‘good committee man’. The most important support for the early stages of the School probably came from Pelham, described by Myres as ‘a great historian and tutor and a born politician’. Pelham, earlier a Fellow of Exeter, had been active in the system of intercollegiate lectures. He was made Reader in Ancient History in 1887, the same year Mackinder was appointed Reader in Geography. Pelham had been elected Camden Professor of Ancient History in 1889 and had been President of Trinity College since 1897. Much of Pelham’s scholarly work consisted of essays published during the 1880s, but vision problems beginning in 1890 aborted his plans for a large-scale history of the Roman Empire. As a teacher he was superb, and Oswyn Murray has written of him that in his time he was reportedly the best lecturer in the University. He introduced work in geography and archaeology into his courses in Roman History and placed his lecturer in Greek History, G. B. Grundy, in the classical geography lectureship in the new School of Geography. His forte, however, was institutional organization, including founding or cofounding the British Schools at Athens and Rome, expanding the Archaeological Museum, and being a strong force behind the creation of Somerville College for women students. As a member of the Hebdomadal Council until 1905, and of the Common University Fund 183

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(which paid Oxford’s share of Mackinder’s salary), and as pro-ViceChancellor, he was exactly in the right position to wield the levers of power behind the scenes during the early years of the School of Geography.40 Pelham died early in 1907. Francis J. Haverfield, a Roman historian, succeeded him as Camden Professor in May 1907 and the same year was named to the Committee on Geography in place of Myres, who had recently accepted the new Gladstone Professorship of Greek at the University of Liverpool. By this time Haverfield had developed a reputation as a leader of Romano-British archaeology, though not himself an excavator. The bulk of his teaching at Oxford, however, was in Roman imperial history, and Haverfield is still regarded as a pioneer developer of a standard framework for the Romanization of Britain. After taking a ‘second’ in examinations for his Oxford degree in 1883, Haverfield had spent several years as a schoolmaster at Lancing College, where he supplemented his lectures with maps, many selfmade, and topographical models. When he returned to Oxford in 1891, as a Student of Christ Church College, he met and became strongly influenced by Mackinder, who among other things taught him better cartography. Haverfield subsequently published several maps of Roman Britain for atlases and texts. His edited map of Roman Britain for Grundy’s ‘Handy Classical Maps’ series laid the foundation for O. G. S. Crawford’s better-known Ordinance Survey map of Roman Britain. In 1906, in the Geographical Journal, Haverfield had criticized the existing Ordinance Survey maps for their handling of classical sites. In 1913 he published a book on ancient town planning, also a subject of interest to geographers. Myres had heard Haverfield’s lectures at Oxford and later became a close friend. Early in World War I, in the absence of a regular School of Geography lecturer in ancient geography, Haverfield lectured in the Oxford Summer School of Geography on the geography of Roman Britain. Like Pelham, he had become a member of the influential Hebdomadal Council, where he showed ‘a remarkable knack of putting things through’. Presumably this included protecting the interests of the School of Geography, in which he was ‘keenly interested’, according to one memorialist. The war, however, and the consequent deaths of some of his best students, set him off on a cycle of depres184

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sion and poor health culminating in a cerebral hemorrhage; he died four years later.41 The third major classicist and ancient historian, and the most important long-term ‘outsider’ associated with Mackinder and the Oxford School, was Myres himself. Myres dated his interest in geography from his days at Winchester, beginning in 1882. As an undergraduate at New College, he studied physical geography and geology with Alexander H. Green, Professor of Geology, Greek literature with Gilbert Murray, Greek art with Percy Gardner, and Greek history with his Tutor, Charles Oman. D. G. Hogarth of Magdalen College also influenced Myres during the years Myres was a Fellow there (1892–5). In the spring of 1893 Hogarth had given a series of lectures on ancient geography, which, Mackinder reported, ‘have been largely attended’. Myres was among those who heard them, and later claimed that they had ‘started me on my own studies in that field’. Hogarth also stimulated in Myres a desire to go to Greece, which Myres did independently in 1891, and again later as a Craven Fellow. In 1895 Myres became a Student of Christ Church, there becoming acquainted with Mackinder, and began a stint as University Lecturer in Classical Archaeology while associated with that college. Except for finishing up Arnold Toynbee’s course in 1915, Myres did not lecture on classical geography through the School of Geography. He did sit in on Mackinder’s lectures during the latter’s last year at Oxford, and under Andrew Herbertson, who also became a close friend, Myres lectured for the School on the geographical distribution of population. He also lectured in the geography Summer Vacation Courses on such topics as ‘The Physical Control of Greek Civilization’ (1904), ‘Greece and Asia Minor’ (1906) and the geography of the Western Mediterranean (1908). But his primary role in the School was his external support from 1899 through the 1930s. He, Mackinder and Pelham constituted the committee to draw up the original plan for the School and its diploma course. Myres served continuously on the Committee for Geography from its beginning, save for his three years at the University of Liverpool. He also served as one of the first examiners for the diploma in geography. When Kenneth Mason was appointed Professor and the School was authorized to award degrees and become an Honour School, Myres was

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appointed to the Faculty Board and served for several years as its Chair. He was also one of the first examiners in the new program.42 In 1907, as noted earlier, Myres had removed to Liverpool as the first Gladstone Professor of Greek there. But he also was appointed lecturer in classical geography in the recently formed Institute of Archaeology (later the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies). For the Institute he lectured on ‘Geographical Conditions of Mediterranean Civilization’ and ‘The Geography of the Greek Lands’. His ‘Classical Geography’ course was listed in the School of History, and his ‘Geography of the Mediterranean Region (for students of Classics and History)’, was also offered for credit in the geography program, then headed by Percy Maude Roxby. In his last year at Liverpool, Myres added a lecture course on ‘Principles of Historical Geography’ in the Honour School of History. He also held informal classes on special problems in the historical geography of the Mediterranean region in the Institute, and supervised the work of history students selecting the paper on ‘The Historical Geography of the Classical Period’ as an examination subject. In the spring term, 1908, Myres gave two public lecture series, one on ‘Geographical Conditions of Mediterranean Civilization’ (which he repeated in 1909) and one on ‘Archaeological Problems in the Classical Texts Prescribed for the Arts Course’. During the same year he gave a paper on ‘Mediterranean Geography in Relation to Classical Civilization’ at the Dublin meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science attended by, among others, the future geographer, Griffith Taylor. In August of that year Myres returned to Oxford to offer five lectures on the historical geography of the Mediterranean region in the Summer School of Geography directed by Andrew and Dorothy Herbertson. He also lectured on ‘Geographic Aspects of Greek and Roman Civilization’ at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow during the winter of 1909–10. This lecture was published in the Scottish Geographical Magazine and republished in his late Geographical History in Greek Lands. He also lectured to the Classical Association of Scotland on ‘Classical Geography in a Classical Curriculum’, a lecture subsequently published in its Proceedings. It would not be stretching the point to describe him as the foremost British missionary for classical geography in his time.43

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The combination of the effect of the damp Liverpool climate on his wife Sophia’s health and, as he wrote Alfred Zimmern, ‘the absence of books and periodicals in the North’ led Myres to apply for the newly created Wykeham Professorship of Ancient History at Oxford, to which he was appointed in 1910. (At that time the Camden Professorship became exclusively designated for Roman history, while the Wykeham, beginning with Myres, was devoted to Greek history.) But it is clear that he had made an impact at Liverpool, being especially supportive of Roxby, who was placed in charge of a newly independent Department of Geography there in 1909. The Liverpool University Council and Senate took special note of Myres’ return to Oxford in November 1910, pointing out that he ‘had been here long enough to make his influence felt and to leave his mark’. Roxby’s successor at Liverpool, Robert Steel, has claimed that, while there, Myres ‘had done much to help to create the atmosphere in which Liverpool embarked upon the establishment of an Honour School of Geography (the first in any British university)’ in 1917.44 Late in his life, Myres told Baker that during his association with Pelham in establishing the School of Geography he ‘first saw how university business was done’. He did not forget that lesson, and after his return from Liverpool he took, in the words of one university historian, ‘a prominent role in University politics’. Part of his efforts, especially after the death of Herbertson had left the School of Geography essentially rudderless, was to push for the further legitimation of geography at Oxford by campaigning with others, ‘mainly classicists and historians’ according to Steel, for a statutory professorship in geography (Herbertson’s professorship had been personal, and expired with him in 1915), along with an associated Honour School of Geography. The Oxford Diploma in geography had, in Steel’s words, ‘served its purpose’, and enrollments were beginning to decline as more and more universities began offering honours degrees. The result of this long siege was the university’s agreement in, 1929–30, to establish both. The first Professor, Kenneth Mason, credited Myres with a broad leadership role in the creation of the chair and the Honour School of Geography; ‘it was largely through his efforts and persuasion’. Steel went further: the Oxford Honour School ‘would never have come about but for the keen support of J. L. (later Sir John) Myres….’ Myres was also always ready to speak before governmental 187

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bodies on behalf of geography. He was President of the Geographical Association in 1925, and was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Victoria Medal in 1953.45 Myres was not only a teacher of classical geography and a political advocate, but also at home in Greek, geology, ethnology, classical archaeology (he was long on the Managing Committee, and later President, of the British School at Athens), folklore and linguistics. He was among the first to endorse Michael Ventris’ contention that Linear B script was an early form of Greek. Like his close friend Fleure, he combined interests in geography and anthropology. All of these, as well as his detailed knowledge of the Mediterranean (some of which was gained through his naval service during World War I), Myres brought to his studies in classical geography. Herodotus, that most geographical of ancient Greek historians, was his inspiration and the subject of the only traditional course he gave at Oxford. Myres’ first geographical publication was a reconstruction of the mental maps of Herodotus, published in the Geographical Journal in 1896. His penultimate book, Herodotus: Father of History, includes some of the 1896 material and maps produced in the Oxford School of Geography. He was to return to this theme of mental mapping in 1943, in his essay on ‘The Ancient Shape of Attica’.46 Few students attended Myres’ lectures, partly since most of his topics were chosen without reference to examinations, and partly because they were offered at an hour abhorrent to most Oxford undergraduates, 9:00 a.m. Yet for those who had the intellectual curiosity to attend, they were an inspiration, even as legendarily delivered through his beard. As one student put it, ‘we sat back and listened – the eight or ten of us who had the good sense to attend lectures so little directed towards Schools – and would be astonished at the overflowing of a mind of such exceptional range and curiosity’. The Oxford classicist, Maurice Bowra, recalling his early years at New College, remembered Myres as ‘a man of eager curiosity who saw the past in a full setting of archaeology, geography, anthropology, and ethnology. I attended his lectures with a bemused fascination’.47 Only his work in ancient geography need concern us here. In this respect, as John Boardman has written, his inaugural lecture as Wykeham Professor, entitled ‘Greek Lands and the Greek People’, ‘set the theme of his future interests’. Indeed, when asked on admission to 188

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New College whether his primary interest was in the language or the peoples, Myres had responded ‘the peoples’. But after his first trip to Greece in 1891 he had added ‘the lands’, for, as he recalled late in life, the trip had ‘changed my whole outlook on ancient history, and especially on Greece and Greek lands’. In his inaugural lecture Myres deplored the narrowly literary study of the ancient world (which continued, indeed accelerated, at Oxford, at least until the 1930s).

11. Sir John Linton Myres

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In a ‘Select List’ of publications (that runs to 30 pages!) included with Myres’ Geographical History in Greek Lands, published the year before his death, there are between 50 and 60 articles, short pieces for reference books, and reviews, that are clearly or largely geographical. Of these, the encyclopaedia articles and, akin to them, his essay on Cyprus in the first volume of Herbertson and Howarth’s Oxford Survey of the British Empire, are extremely routine, indeed formulaic, and of little interest. Most of the longer essays, however, are not only learned but display Myres’ remarkable ability at synthesis. A few are even playful, such as his pair of essays entitled ‘The Sign of the Mermaid: Notes on a First Cross Between Geology and History’ and ‘Wayside Geography’, both published in the Geographical Teacher. All are clearly and engagingly written, and far better than his more conventional geographical descriptions. Aside from the well-selected essays in Geographical History in Greek Lands, Myres’ Fraser Lecture of 1943 at the University of Cambridge, entitled ‘Mediterranean Culture’, is a kind of summa of his thinking on this favorite region. But there is much to be learnt concerning matters geographical in his other writings, whether in article or book form. Especially valued by geographers was his early book The Dawn of History (1911), written without notes during three weeks of the ‘Long Vacation’ period. It was praised by Fleure and used by Ellen Churchill Semple in her graduate courses at Clark University. Shortly afterwards he proposed a commentary on Strabo, to be written by a team of Oxford classicists, but the outbreak of World War I put paid to that project. Myres’ identification with geography was so close that, in comments delivered to the Geographical Association during World War II, he continually referred to ‘we geographers’. In his obituary of Myres for the Geographical Journal, Mason began by saying that in his death ‘geography has lost a scholar of the first rank’. And H. C. Darby, more inclined than most to draw boundaries, recalled that Myres’ ‘interests were so geographical that we almost forgot that he was a professor of ancient history’.48 Myres’ volume of collected essays, coming out in the mid-1950s, was titled Geographical History, and his 1943 Fraser lecture was subtitled ‘An Essay in Geographical History’. The terminological distinction between ‘historical geography’ and ‘geographical history’ arose in British geography only after about 1932, in part as the result of a 190

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joint meeting of the geographical and historical associations on the subject ‘What is Historical Geography?’ in January 1932, over which Myres presided. But only two of the articles in Geographical History in Greek Lands were published later than 1929, and in its first incarnation, as a proposal to the Oxford University Press in 1926, it was simply to be called ‘Collected Essays in Ancient Geography’. The original title describes the work much more accurately. The various essays demonstrate a mastery of geographical synthesis that professional geographers of his generation professed but seldom attained. The clarity and readability of his prose have almost never been matched, much less surpassed, in geography since he wrote.49

OTHER OXFORD SUPPORT FOR GEOGRAPHY Although this chapter has been focused on ancient historians and classicists, to assess the amount of support given to the School of Geography under Mackinder and his successors one needs to mention some other Oxford scholars who, according to Steel and others, were strong supporters of geography. Prior to the creation of the School, or even Mackinder’s Readership, the Reverend Hereford B. George, Tutor in History at New College from 1867 to 1891, had been an active member of the intercollegiate lecturers’ group. (See Chapter 4.) George lectured on military history and on historical geography (for George, the two overlapped under the theme of empire) in the School of Modern History once a week for one term, as background for an optional paper for the pass degree only. He was an active, though skeptical, player in the Royal Geographical Society’s movement to install a full-time geographer at Oxford in 1887. He also served on the Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science formed to cooperate with the Royal Geographical Society in its petition to the Oxford and Cambridge authorities to establish chairs in geography. Although Myres felt him to be too old and set in his ways to be of any real help to Mackinder, following his retirement as Tutor George wrote two textbooks in geography, The Relations of Geography and History (1901), which was used as a text by many students in the early twentieth century, and a Historical Geog191

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raphy of the British Empire (1904), which ultimately went into seven editions. Neither was the product of extensive primary research, however. George was also an active Alpinist and first editor of the Alpine Journal.50 Frederick York Powell, the Regius Professor of Modern History and primarily a mediaeval historian, seems to have been appointed to the Committee on Geography owing to his friendship with Mackinder who, like Powell, had been a Student of Christ Church College. Myres remembered him as ‘a wonderful and amazing person’, with an ‘enormous knowledge of French history’, although others have pointed out that his publication record as Regius Professor was meagre. Powell strongly supported school geography and was also a counselor to Mackinder when the latter became Principal of the University Extension College, Reading (now the University of Reading). York Powell was ‘a great admirer of Mackinder’, Myres recalled, and was also a friend of Peter Kropotkin, best known today among geographers as an anarchist geographer. Powell’s early death in 1904 opened the Regius chair for Charles Firth, a historian of seventeenthcentury Britain, who also strongly supported geography, as well as modern languages and expanded opportunities for women at Oxford. In 1906 Firth wrote a letter to the London Times deploring the absence of geography in the Civil Service examinations, and stressing its importance in international relations. A dozen years later Firth wrote a pamphlet on the history of the School that called for strengthening it, at a time when the deaths of Andrew and Dorothy Herbertson three years earlier had left it adrift and vulnerable to competition from recently established honours programs elsewhere.51 Other historians, anthropologists and classicists had lesser but still important roles in the promotion, creation, and sustenance of geography’s institutionalization at Oxford. Myres mentioned Hogarth, who as we have seen had lectured at Oxford in 1893 on ancient geography but did not enter formally into geography (on his way to archaeology) until W. M. Ramsay hired him as assistant on one of his expeditions to Asia Minor. Michael Sadler, discovered by York Powell (who also had an interest in university extension), was, as head of that division, the person who first discovered Mackinder’s talent for lecturing and gave him his first Oxford teaching position, as lecturer in physiography in the Oxford extension program. W. J. 192

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Barton, a former New College student and lead teacher of geography at Winchester (and later a public school headmaster) served on a committee composed of himself, Myres and Hogarth to select the maps to be purchased for the School of Geography. The broad interests of the well-connected James Bryce, Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford from 1870 to 1893, included Alpine climbing, travel and international relations, as well as strong support for geography, albeit of a somewhat deterministic sort. In 1886 Bryce gave a public lecture on the relations of history and geography as part of a series the Royal Geographical Society sponsored to increase public interest in the subject. And it was Bryce, writing in the Oxford Magazine of 8 December 1886, who advanced the definition of ‘Political’ (i.e., human) geography that Mackinder appropriated for his famous lecture on the scope and methods of geography the following year, ‘to trace the action and reaction of man in society, and so much of his environment as varies locally’. In 1902 Bryce addressed the Geographical Association on ‘The Influence of Geography in Education’. In the same year he made a strong endorsement of geography in his preface to H. F. Helmolt’s multi-volume The World’s History. This now forgotten work included an essay by Friedrich Ratzel, ‘Man as a Life Phenomenon on the Earth’s Surface’, that Ellen Churchill Semple made required reading for her geography graduate students at Clark University. Among other post-classical historians, Gilbert paid tribute to C. R. M. Cruttwell, a later member of the Committee on Geography, ‘who first guided my feet into the pleasant paths of historical geography’. Cruttwell, as Dean and then Principal of Hertford College and a member of the Hebdomadal Council, was a strong supporter of an honours course in geography at Oxford and worked to secure Kenneth Mason’s appointment to Hertford when Mason was named to the newly authorized statutory professorship of geography.52 In the conventional narrative, geography was instituted at Oxford by a combination of Mackinder’s personality and the offer of partial funding from the Royal Geographical Society. Yet this partial recital of names suggests that Mackinder and the School of Geography were not the whole story. There was a web of support among Oxford historians and classicists before, during, and after Mackinder’s time. Mackinder was a great academic politician before he became a public 193

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politician. His seeking out colleagues interested in geography, and particularly colleagues in positions of power and leadership in the University, requires acknowledgement not only of the actions of numerous others at Oxford, but also of the great skill Mackinder displayed in assembling the guardians of his flanks. The full story of the institutionalization of geography at Oxford, then, remains to be told.

OTHER BRITISH SCHOLARS OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY Although this chapter is a selection, not a survey, one needs to give some recognition to others in Britain, primarily identified with other disciplines or careers, who also contributed to the advanced study of the geography of the classical world. Among these, Edward Bunbury has pride of place. Bunbury was a Cambridge man, a high achiever in classics and briefly a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge before beginning a legal practice and, for five years, serving in Parliament as a Liberal member. Elected to the Royal Geographical Society in 1839, he served briefly on its Council and remained a member until his death in 1895. Around the time he joined the RGS, he began work as a principal author of entries for William Smith’s famous and still useful Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, as well as contributing to Smith’s dictionaries of classical mythology and biography. Clements Markham described Bunbury’s entries as ‘models of accuracy and of exhaustive erudition’, and Freeman said of him that whenever he saw an entry signed ‘E. H. B.’, he knew the research was accurate, and that he need go no further himself. In 1846 Bunbury had also produced a revised edition of Sir William Gell’s Topography of Rome.53 Bunbury’s most significant work, his two-volume History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans From Earliest Ages to the Fall of the Roman Empire, was initially published in 1879 and revised for a second edition, published four years later. In his preface, Bunbury explained his method: a combination of a close reading of ancient texts, compared with his own travels, the work of modern travelers to the sites discussed, and the work of recent German and French scholars. His primary motivation was to write an advanced work on 194

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the subject for an Anglophone audience, directed primarily toward serious scholars, not another elementary text. In its 1,400 pages, Bunbury produced a work of lasting value, reprinted in 1959 and again (on the centennial of the first edition) in 1979. Among its features was a series of mental maps, representing the geographical ideas of Homer and other classical authors, a device followed later by H. F. Tozer and other writers on the subject. Bunbury also shared his vast knowledge of the subject in a lengthy article on Ptolemy for the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1886, the same year he succeeded his brother in the baronetcy and became Sir Edward Bunbury.54 Bunbury’s enormous contribution was immediately recognized by his contemporaries, and his work became the standard authority for the next century. In 1880 two members of the Royal Geographical Society recommended him for a medal, describing his recently published book as ‘a work of the highest value, the result of 12 years of continuous labour, combining accurate scholarship with large observation and ancient knowledge with modern discovery’. Reflecting the RGS penchant for prioritizing exploration, they also pointed out that there was currently no ‘explorer of sufficient merit to claim the immediate distinction’. The Council agreed with both parts of this argument and awarded Bunbury a medal for his work. In his response, Bunbury pointed out that although he had contributed nothing to the advance of geographical knowledge (by which, of course, he meant exploration), he at least had done something to advance ‘that science which has been an object of interest to me from my earliest youth’. As recently as 2004, the work was praised in glowing terms: ‘as a thorough, balanced exposition of its challenging and fundamental subject, Bunbury’s work remains unmatched in any language’.55 Moving to the Scottish universities, we find that classical geography had been taught there sporadically as an enhancement to the standard classical curriculum. For example, in the eighteenth century, John Ker lectured on ancient geography at Edinburgh in 1741, Thomas Blackwell Jr at Marischal College in Aberdeen in 1753, and Thomas Gordon on ‘geography of the ancients’ in 1761 at Kings College, Aberdeen. It is probable that these early courses were studies of the geographical component of ancient texts. James Pillans, sometime 195

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Rector of the Edinburgh High School and from 1820 to 1863 Professor of Humanity in the University of Edinburgh, lectured there on ‘classical and ancient geography’, in addition to publishing three textbooks on ‘physical and classical geography’ between 1847 and 1854.56 The most famous nineteenth-century Scottish author of a work on the geography of the ancient world was George Adam Smith, a theologian and Biblical scholar, who wrote a classic book entitled The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894; 25th edition 1931; first paperback edition 1966). The work drew on his competence in Semitic languages, his personal travels, and to a degree on his knowledge of the work of Carl Ritter, whose Erdkunde sections on Palestine had been condensed and translated into English by the American clergyman, William Leonard Gage. Gage’s translation, subtitled ‘Translated and Adapted for the Use of Biblical Students’, was published in four volumes in the United States in 1885 and in Edinburgh the following year. Smith followed up his Holy Land book with a two-volume work on Jerusalem (1907–8) and an important Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land in 1917, used by General Allenby in the British campaign against the Turks in Palestine during World War I. Although his books seem to have been directed primarily at Biblical students, Smith was also an ardent defender of geography in relation to the classics. In a 1921 hearing before the Prime Minister’s Committee on the Classics, at which geographers were called to testify, Smith, a member of the Committee, gave an eloquent extemporaneous address on the importance of knowledge of the geography of the Mediterranean to classical studies.57 In Scottish classical geography, however, ‘the higher reaches of scholarship’ (to use C. J. Robertson’s phrase), were reached by Smith’s contemporary William Mitchell Ramsay, in his time the greatest authority on ancient Asia Minor and its links with Greek and Roman civilizations. Beginning in 1880, when he was granted an Oxford studentship for exploration in Greek lands, he frequently traveled to Asia Minor, including every year from 1880 to 1891 and again from 1899 to 1914. He resumed his explorations in 1924, the year it once again became possible for scholars to visit Turkey. Ramsay was a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford, but Exeter, consistent with its role in advancing geography in those years, elected him to a research 196

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fellowship in 1882 and to an honorary fellowship ten years later. His first important book, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890), published by the Royal Geographical Society, is partially a product of Exeter support. He received the RGS Victoria Medal in 1906, and was President of the Geographical Association in 1918; in his Presidential Address he expressed his own debt to geography and some ideas on how it might be better incorporated into ancient Mediterranean studies. In 1885 Ramsay had been appointed the first Lincoln and Merton Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford, but, disappointed by the lack of funding and with Oxford’s narrow definition for the new chair, he resigned after a year to become Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen, where he taught until 1911. He was enormously prolific in two areas: the geography and topography of interior Asia Minor, and early Christian history, particularly concerning the work of St Paul and St Luke. Both owe much to his extensive and detailed fieldwork. Although some of the latter work has been contested in recent years, Ramsay’s corpus of geographical work, which included a second book on The Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia (two volumes, 1895–7) and many professional articles, some of them in geographical journals, set a still useful pattern for Anatolian studies. At Aberdeen Ramsay turned out a group of students specializing in the historical geography of Asia Minor, particularly its topography, history and epigraphy.58 Ramsay’s first student of geography, however, was to become an equally distinguished geographer-archaeologist. Ramsay needed an assistant for one of his Asia Minor trips and selected David G. Hogarth, a graduate of Magdalen College who at the time had no field experience in geography. After traveling to Greece on a Craven Fellowship and spending a few months at the newly established British School at Athens, Hogarth met Ramsay in Smyrna and traveled with him through Asia Minor. The first of Hogarth’s 20 books, Modern and Ancient Roads in Eastern Asia Minor (1893) shows the influence of his two journeys with Ramsay and the private tutorials in geography and epigraphy they had become for him. Hogarth is probably best known in Oxford circles today as Arthur Evans’ successor as Director of the Ashmolean Museum, in classical circles as an archaeologist (particularly for his work on the Hittite 197

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civilization) and his Directorship of the British School at Athens, and in non-scholarly circles for his association with T. E. Lawrence, both as his archaeological mentor and as his Arab Bureau advisor during Lawrence’s 1917 military campaign against the Turks. But Hogarth also retained an interest in geography throughout his life. Douglas Freshfield considered his work to be ‘the most prominent instance of the use of Geography as an ally in other pursuits’, and Hogarth himself, in his last public speech, expressed his hope of ‘spending quite a respectable portion of Eternity in talking to Herodotus’. Hogarth had joined the Royal Geographical Society in 1896, had published in its journal, was awarded its Gold Medal in 1917, and at the time of his death in 1927 was serving as its President.59

BRITISH ACADEMICS AND ANCIENT EXPLORATION The Hakluyt Society, an organization devoted to the reproduction and translation of accounts of European travels and voyages of discovery, was founded in 1846. The Society’s membership included both historians and geographers, and their presence, and indeed the existence of the Society itself, appears to have had an influence in making the history of European exploration and discovery a feature of the Oxbridge geography curricula.60 The history of exploration was then considered as an integral part of the history of geography, and was, at Oxford, initially a part of Mackinder’s lecturing responsibilities. But as Mackinder became more heavily involved at Reading beginning in 1892, in his evening lectures at the London School of Economics in 1895, and the Directorship of the London School from 1903, his teaching at Oxford itself decreased, beginning with his lectures on the history of geography. From 1902 to 1909 Raymond Beazley, a historian and Research Fellow of Merton College, assumed this responsibility in the School. Beazley had held the Oxford Geographical Studentship in 1894. In 1895 he published his first book, a biography of Henry the Navigator, and three years later published a second, on John and Sebastian Cabot. He is best remembered, however, for his classic three-volume Dawn of Modern Geography (1897–1906). During his time as a lecturer 198

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in the School of Geography, Beazley gave courses of lectures on exploration and discovery, the history of geography, and the historical geography of France. In 1909 he left Oxford to become Professor of History in the University of Birmingham, where he moved into Russian history and international relations.61 After 1923 work in this field in the School of Geography was picked up by J. N. L. Baker, also a member and later President of the Hakluyt Society. Baker carried on in this field until his resignation as Reader in Historical Geography in 1947, though he continued to prepare students for the optional paper in the history of discovery for some years afterwards. Baker published a well-regarded general text in the field, History of Geographical Discovery and Exploration (1931; revised edition, 1937), the first such modern text in English. Although its major emphasis was on nineteenth-century exploration, the book begins with a chapter on the ancient Mediterranean. Some of the essays in Baker’s indispensable collection, The History of Geography (1963) also deal with the history of exploration and discovery. Eva G. R. Taylor was the other principal English geographer to have made an important contribution to the Hakluyt Society. Although her published works were principally concerned with the geographical thought of the English Renaissance and with the history of navigation, while teaching at Birkbeck College Taylor offered a course on the geography of the classical world.62 The Cambridge geography program had stressed the more scientific and physical side of geography, building on the work of Adam Sedgwick, who had incorporated physical geography into his lectures during his long tenure as Woodwardian Professor of Geology in the nineteenth century. However, after the agreement with the Royal Geographical Society to establish a lectureship in geography was finalized in 1888, the history of geography and the history of exploration became parts of the program. Its proposed continuation, under a Board on Geographical Studies, was sharply attacked by critics in 1903. One of these, a Dr Mayo, argued that historical geography must mean ancient geography, which would naturally involve the study of Strabo and Pausanias in the original Greek. When informed this would not be the case, he questioned the sincerity (and, by implication, the academic legitimacy) of the proposal.

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Both the history of geography and the history of exploration were included among the optional papers for the Diploma in Geography, beginning in 1907. That practice continued until the Tripos in Geography was instituted in 1918, when the history of exploration was folded into the general history of geography field. Visiting the university shortly afterward, William Morris Davis praised the Cambridge program for including ‘the history of geography, including the progress of exploration and discovery’, which he thought a subject like no other for its ability to ‘be made so attractive to a young man of active mind and body’, such that, after being exposed to it, he would be inspired to study some part of the world on his own after graduation. Both the first, short-lived lecturer, F. H. H. Guillemard, and Yule Oldham, appointed lecturer in 1893 and Reader between 1898 and 1908, had interests in geographical exploration. Guillemard, who never actually gave any lectures at Cambridge, had published a biography of Magellan in 1892. Oldham lectured on both the history of geography and the history of geographical exploration, among his other duties. In the Cambridge Summer Meeting of 1908, whose general topic was ancient Greece, Oldham lectured both on the geographical knowledge of the Greeks and on the geography of Greece, while Ian Hannah gave a single lecture on ‘The Relation of Greek History to the Geography of Greece’. Although Oldham claimed the two fields as the subject of his research, he published almost nothing, and was reduced to the rank of lecturer again in 1908 because of complaints about his performance as Reader. Oldham took an early retirement in 1921, and became a forgotten figure in British geography. After his death in 1951, aged 88, Oldham was so far lost to view that none of the major British geographical journals published an obituary.63 In a 1905 lecture at Cambridge, Clements Markham had praised the inclusion in the Cambridge program both of the history of geography and the history of exploration. With respect to the latter, Markham claimed that ‘Geography derives most of its charm from the stories of discovery and exploration’ and it was therefore a good thing that both were included. Both subjects supplied ‘that food for the imaginative faculty, that romantic interest’ that gave geography its zest. ‘With the setting of great deeds of derring-do, of stories of 200

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martyrdom for country and for science’, in Markham’s opinion, ‘the picture is made perfect, the study is made complete.’ But tales of derring-do apparently departed with Oldham. The Cambridge school continued to be best known for its work in physical geography (and indeed for its conduct of modern exploratory expeditions) until after World War II.64 The most important contribution to the history of ancient exploration in this period was, however, the product of two classicists at the University of London, one of whom was an Oxford graduate and the other a graduate of Cambridge. This was Max Cary and Eric Warmington’s The Ancient Explorers, published initially in 1929 and revised by Warmington for publication in Penguin’s Pelican paperback series in 1963. The emphasis, unlike earlier histories of classical geography, was on activities rather than geographical theories and ideas. Inevitably there is some overlap, but the authors specifically disclaimed that the book was an attempt to replace Tozer’s History of Ancient Geography and other such works. The authors produced an exceptionally readable account that remains standard; the only subsequent English-language example of the genre since 1929, the American classicist Rhys Carpenter’s Beyond the Pillars of Heracles (1966) does not replace it. There are, however, a number of recent books on specialized topics that have replaced some of the sources used.65 Cary and Warmington were to continue a concern with ancient geography. As previously recounted, Cary re-edited Tozer’s History of Ancient Geography in 1935 and late in his life produced The Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History (1949). Aubrey Diller, reviewing it for the Geographical Review, believed it to reflect the point of view of ancient history rather than geography, and suggested that it would have been a good idea to have written it jointly with a geographer. Reviewer Eva G. R. Taylor was somewhat shocked by Cary’s praise for Ellen Churchill Semple’s Geography of the Mediterranean Region as an ‘excellent book’. Cary’s book casts a wider net than Semple’s, however, to include areas outside the Mediterranean that had an effect on the ancient Greek and Roman history. Warmington had published a book in 1928 on the commerce between Rome and India that several geographers found useful, a compendium of quotations from ancient geographers with a lengthy introduction in 1934, and an excellent essay on Africa in ancient and mediaeval times in 201

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the Cambridge History of the British Empire in 1936. Soon afterwards, however, he began a 37-year stint as an editor for the Loeb Classical Library and seems to have published no more work in classical geography, though unlike Cary (or Oldham) he did receive a short obituary in the Geographical Journal.66 This chapter has surveyed in cursory fashion part of the broader spectrum of British classicists and historians who, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, welcomed or even contributed to the geography of the classical world. We have only begun to excavate their contributions or lack thereof. Such investigations may not be easy, but surely all are not as difficult as the case of the Reverend W. Hoskins Abrall, Professor of Greek at University College Aberystwyth at its opening in 1872. During the one term he taught geography, we are told, ‘What he actually taught under any heading no one has been able properly to comprehend, as it was said that the students utterly failed to understand what he had to say on any topic’.67 (Perhaps it was all Greek to them!) But many other classical and historical scholars took an active role in instituting, advocating for, supervising, and generally supporting the admission of new disciplines into the universities, including especially geography. By the 1920s and early 1930s, however, the historic ties between geography, classics and ancient history had frayed. In its quest for status as an independent and more ‘scientific’ discipline, geographers, except for a handful of perhaps eccentric and marginalized individuals, had separated themselves from the study of the ancient world and from traditionally humanistic university programs. The arc of classical geography that had begun in the Renaissance, and had been put on a new basis beginning with the Dilettanti expeditions two centuries before, had begun to accelerate its downward slope. As an unreconstructed humanistic geographer might put it, ‘vraiment sont finis les beaux jours’.

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7

Classics, History and Geography in NineteenthCentury Harvard

In the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard College was to initiate the steps that led it to become the leading university in the United States. An important part of this advance was the institution’s ultimately successful attempt to expand and liberalize its academic program, both laterally, to increase the range of its curriculum, and vertically, to offer more opportunities for research and advanced study. Harvard was by no means the only institution to begin such processes in the mid-nineteenth century, as Richard Storr has shown for contemporary institutions in general and Louise Stevenson for much-maligned Yale. But Harvard was the most prominent, and, particularly under Charles W. Eliot in the post-Civil War period, the most daring and, indeed, the most criticized for its innovations.1 As a part of this ferment, beginning around mid-century, there were numerous connections among humanists and scientists interested in geography, to the point that we can speak of a Harvard tradition of humanistic or historical geography. This stream existed independently of, and is somewhat in the shadow of, later and fuller developments in scientific geography or what was, in the midnineteenth century, called ‘physical geography’, a field more broadly defined than it was to become after 1870. As we have seen in Chapter 2, in the colonial period some geography had been a part of Harvard’s academic program. In the early nineteenth century, however, over the protest of future President of Harvard, Jared Sparks, in 1813, geography (along with arithmetic) was dropped from the college

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program and reduced to an admissions requirement. Plans for a Harvard-produced pre-college text, either in geography or specifically in ancient and modern geography, on which entering students would presumably have been examined, had been considered earlier, but never came to pass.2 Two developments in mid-century, however, inserted some humanistic geography into the Harvard curriculum by way of the subsidiary interests of classicists and historians. In classics, this began in 1849, with C. C. Felton’s translation of the Boston lectures of the Swiss geographer, Arnold Henri Guyot. Guyot’s lectures did not introduce contemporary European ideas of geography into America; a number of American scientists and scholars were aware of developments in German and British geography at that time. But Guyot’s lucid explanation of the ideas of his mentors, Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, attracted much attention among the Cambridge elite. Their translation by Harvard’s Eliot Professor of Greek Literature had significant effects both on the translator and on the general and educational publics.3 The second development began with the history department’s assumption in 1846 of responsibility for examining applicants to the course on ancient history and ancient geography. It was locked in with the appointment in 1856 of Henry Warren Torrey as McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History. Torrey, formerly Tutor in History and Political Economy, had then insisted, and during his 30year tenure as McLean Professor, continued to insist, that all students in his courses develop a working knowledge of historical geography. Although classical geography proper was to be dropped from the formal curriculum after the 1880s (though remaining an optional admissions requirement), some form of historical geography (in this case, the history of exploration and discovery) continued to be represented in the Harvard history department until the retirement of Samuel Eliot Morison in 1955.4

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WHO WAS FELTON? Until about 30 years ago, the name of Cornelius Conway Felton was little known to all but a few students of the history of higher education. He seems to have been regarded as a peripheral figure even in classics. Felton was mentioned occasionally in studies in the history of science, as little more than Louis Agassiz’ brother-in-law and a kind of honorary member of the Scientific Lazzaroni. Toward the end of his life Felton even became somewhat evanescent at Harvard, where his Presidency lasted for only a little more than a year. Beginning with a reconsideration by David Wiesen in 1982, however, and continuing more recently by Caroline Winterer in The Culture of Classicism and her other important contextual studies, and in Carl Richard’s The Golden Age of Classics in America, Felton is now being recognized, in Meyer Reinhold’s words, as ‘one of the most influential leaders in the reforming of classical education and learning in America between 1830 and 1860’.5 His achievements as a classicist and reformer of classical education were indeed substantial in the context of his time, though they did not long survive him. Yet as recent studies of the classical tradition in America make clear, Felton was a significant figure in mid-nineteenth-century American knowledge of and teaching about both ancient and modern Greece. He was one of a previously understudied generation of scholars predating the post-Civil War ‘university revolution’ in America who attempted to transform the teaching of classics from a narrow, text-based exercise assessed by endless classroom recitations to a more comprehensive study contextualized in the broader world of classical antiquity. An early indication of his significance had come in 1921, when he was praised in the Cambridge History of American Literature for his enthusiasm for antiquity, his criticisms of traditional minute textual scholarship, his support of comparative literature and his appreciation of modern Greek writers. James Turner has recently claimed that Felton was the first American classicist to have his students ‘read entire Greek works rather than anthologized scraps’, and praised him for having ‘nurtured a prophetic vision of education as humanistic cultivation’.6 Although Felton clearly merits his recent scholarly recognition, to focus only on his contributions to the study of Greek language and 205

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literature, and perhaps also his early advocacy of comparative literature, is to overlook his quite unusual interests in the advancement and popular diffusion of science in both primary and higher education. Felton did enjoy his close connections with a number of leading natural scientists, particularly with the reform group known as the ‘Lazzaroni’, of which his future brother-in-law, Louis Agassiz, was one of the most visible. One of the most important relationships for Felton’s own intellectual development, however, was the one he forged with the geographer, Arnold Guyot, a friend and former colleague of Agassiz at the Academy of Neuchâtel and, from 1848 to 1855, a resident of Cambridge. Felton’s association with Guyot broadened his own intellectual horizons and also served both the scientific and the educational communities through his role as translator and editor of Guyot’s first American work, Earth and Man. Born into a poor rural family in West Newbury, Massachusetts, Felton entered Harvard at age 15 in 1823 and was graduated in 1827.7 His first Greek professor, Edward Everett (who, as we have seen in Chapter 3, had advised Jefferson to link geography with the humanities), had, in 1815, been named to a newly endowed chair, a Professorship of Greek Literature, which after the donor’s death in 1820 was renamed the Eliot Professorship, which Everett held until 1826.8 Felton had then studied with John Snelling Popkin, Everett’s less accomplished successor in the Eliot chair. Felton had an enormous capacity for mastering languages and literature in several fields. In addition to the required Latin and Greek, he also attained a reading knowledge of Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, while still an undergraduate. Felton was brought back to Harvard in 1829, first as tutor in Latin, then in Greek. Promoted to Professor in 1832, two years later Felton was named the third Eliot Professor, a post he held until his election as President of Harvard in 1860. Felton’s academic career, in its early years at least, was one of presiding over a system of education characterized by routine drill over ancient languages, a major element in undergraduate education in his day at Harvard and elsewhere. As United States Senator George Frisbie Hoar remembered, at that time ‘there was nothing in the teaching of Latin or Greek to inspire the student with any love of Greek or Latin literature’, and accurately described the situation in 206

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the classroom by saying that, ‘The time of the good scholar was taken up in hearing the recitation of the poor scholar and so very largely wasted.’ Felton is also typical of his time in that his scholarship was unspecialized, and in that he often edited European texts for American students. Outside the classroom, however, Felton was an industrious and prolific writer. He contributed approximately 50 articles to the North American Review and about half that amount to the Unitarian quarterly, The Christian Examiner, as well as numerous short contributions to Appleton’s New American Cyclopedia (published 1858–63). He also contributed to various public documents as a member of the Cambridge School Committee and Visitor to Cambridge schools, and as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1855 onward. While on the Board he also served as a Visitor to the state’s normal schools.9 Commentators of the time noted Felton’s broad interest in intellectual developments on a variety of fronts and his wide reading, in modern literature and art and in scientific writing. He belonged to the Cambridge Scientific Club, a twice-monthly gathering of Harvard faculty and others who met in the homes of members to enjoy an elaborate repast and hear the host’s latest paper. He was elected both to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and to the venerable American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, to which he was an active contributor during the 1850s. Felton was notable also for his sharing in, and aiding the interests of, his many literary and scientific friends and colleagues in Cambridge and elsewhere. He collaborated with his colleagues Francis Bowen, Asa Gray and Jared Sparks on contributions in their fields to the North American Review, and it is probable that his offer to translate Guyot’s lectures was initially an office of friendship toward Agassiz.10 Although Felton described his field as ‘classical philology’, he did not mean the technical or ‘scientific’ approach to classical texts it increasingly meant in Germany and would become in America during the later nineteenth century. Rather, as his 1834 inaugural address as Eliot Professor showed, Felton saw the statutory requirement to lecture on Greek literature as an opportunity to use language and literature as an entry to all of Greek civilization, including its geographical setting. ‘A course of lectures should contain an account of the physical character, the scenery, the climate and the productions of 207

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Greece’, he declared. And he contended further that the landscape around Athens, ‘glowing with the softest beauty, shut in by picturesque hills, crossed by streams and rivers’ had stimulated a significant response in Greek writers and creative artists.11 To be sure, a good part of this was romantic imagining, since at this point Felton had never seen Greece, though like other educated Bostonians he had followed the course of the Greek war for independence, in which people he had read (e.g., Lord Byron) or knew (such as Samuel Gridley Howe) had participated. But during the 1830s and 1840s Felton was unable to follow through on one of the statutory requirements of the Eliot chair, to give courses of lectures on Greek literature, as Everett had done. Harvard’s parlous financial state and other constraints during the 1830s and 1840s kept him largely occupied, year after year, with elementary language teaching to Harvard undergraduates. Yet even the long-suffering George Frisbie Hoar recognized Felton, perhaps in hindsight, as ‘one of the best examples of a fully rounded scholarship which this country or perhaps any country ever produced’. Only beginning in the academic year 1851–2, however, was Felton finally permitted to lecture to the Junior class on Greek literature, once a week for half the year.12 Felton had, however, become interested in the tentative first steps Harvard was taking in postgraduate instruction as early as 1831, when he joined the German-trained Latinist, Charles Beck, in an experimental seminar in classical studies. Under the proposed curriculum, Felton was to lecture on Greek literature and to direct the intensive study of certain classical Greek works, and Lane to do the same for Latin. Six Harvard graduates had enrolled, but despite the enthusiasm of the instructors the experiment was discontinued after a year for lack of funding. Half a dozen years later, Felton supported the adoption of the elective system in his department, and he continued to advocate postgraduate work in literature and philology at Harvard into the 1850s.13 Felton was also to be involved in another experiment in advanced education following Everett’s assumption of the Harvard presidency in 1846. The following year a committee report, which Everett had drafted, proposed that Harvard should institute a ‘school of science and literature,’ to include French, German, rhetoric, history and geography among its offerings. Although it emerged as a ‘Scientific 208

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School’, its purview was originally intended to be greater than that, and Beck and Felton were originally appointed staff members. A few months later, however, Abbott Lawrence offered a $50,000 endowment for the new school, and early in 1848, in accordance with the donor’s wishes, the president and corporation abandoned the philological and other proposed courses, including geography. The scope of the newly named Lawrence Scientific School as it actually developed was limited to the natural sciences, plus engineering.14

FELTON, AGASSIZ AND ARNOLD GUYOT A turning-point for Felton’s interest in what modern science might offer the teaching of classics came in 1847, when, thanks to Lawrence’s donation, Harvard was able to appoint the Swiss scientist, Louis Agassiz, of the Academy and College of Neuchâtel, as the Scientific School’s Professor of Zoology and Geology. Just as Beck (PhD Tubingen, 1823) had stimulated Felton’s concern with advanced study and teaching in classics in the early 1830s, reinforcing what he had learned as a student from the Gottingen-trained Everett, so Agassiz (PhD Erlangen 1829, MD Munich 1830) was to be a critical influence in Felton’s outreach to science and science education in the 1850s. Soon after his arrival in America in 1846 to give a series of lectures at Boston’s Lowell Institute, Agassiz had begun developing close relationships with American scientists. He soon became a part of the group of ambitious research-minded scientists known initially as the Florentines and more lastingly as the Scientific Lazzaroni. This group was centered around Alexander Dallas Bache, head of the Coast Survey, and in addition to Agassiz its core members included Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; Benjamin Peirce, Harvard’s Perkins Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics; and others connected with Harvard and other east coast institutions. This group of influential leaders and their allies were active in the early years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in attempts to create a genuine university and other research institutions in America, in the early work of the Smithsonian Insti209

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tution, and ultimately in the creation of the National Academy of Sciences.15 Felton was not a member of this group but had close ties with many Lazzaroni, supported their work, and indeed became related to Agassiz through their marriages to daughters of the wealthy Boston merchant, Thomas Cary, who himself was a son-in-law of the even wealthier Boston merchant, Thomas Handasyd Perkins. In addition to being a boon companion at dinner (or at the luncheons of the Saturday Club), Felton sometimes accompanied Harvard scientists on their various excursions. From 1855 to 1860 he taught in Elizabeth Agassiz’ school for girls, was a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution from 1856 until his death, and was promoted by the Cambridge Lazzaroni for the Presidency of Harvard in 1860.16 Agassiz was also at the center of a group of émigré European, mostly Swiss, scientists. Many of these had come to America as a consequence of the revolutions of 1848. Though a Swiss canton, for complex genealogical reasons Neuchâtel had become a fiefdom of King Frederick William IV of Prussia. During the revolutions of 1848, liberal reformers in Switzerland had shut down the Academy and College of Neuchâtel, whose professors were royal appointments and therefore were assumed to share the king’s political views. A number of Agassiz’ former colleagues were thus ejected from their jobs. It was natural for some of these émigrés to turn up in Cambridge, for Agassiz to put them to work on his various scientific projects, and for Felton to meet them.17 In this way Felton made the acquaintance of Guyot, who had earned a doctorate in geography under the internationally known geographer, Carl Ritter, at the University of Berlin in 1835. Guyot had been Professor of History and Physical Geography at Neuchâtel, and remained in Cambridge until his permanent removal to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1855. During this period Guyot, who was the sole support of several relatives who had emigrated to be with him, initially had to depend for financial resources on the kindness of Agassiz and of Agassiz’ friends in the American scientific community. Late in 1848 Agassiz secured the opportunity for recently arrived Guyot to give a course of lectures in Boston, for which tickets of admission were sold. On Wednesdays and Saturdays between 17 Janu210

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ary and 27 February 1849, Guyot delivered 12 lectures, in French, entitled ‘Comparative Physical Geography, considered in its relation to the development of human society’. Boston’s Daily Evening Transcript commended them to its upper-class readers by promising that not only would these lectures ‘make the civil history of man intelligible in a different point of view’, but also increase their hearers’ facility in the French language, which at that period the Transcript frequently interpolated into its columns.18 Since he had not originally intended to publish his lectures, Guyot spoke from rough notes, illustrating his points by reference to handmade diagrams, maps and models. After the editor of the Boston Traveller, which frequently published lectures of scientific interest, requested a text of the first lecture, his friends persuaded Guyot to write all of them out in full text on the mornings following their delivery. Since English was still, for Guyot, an alien language, the original texts were written out in French and required translation. Felton, then on Harvard’s winter vacation, volunteered to make rapid translations for the newspaper readership.19 Recognizing the importance of these lectures as a conduit for European thinking about geography, Felton also suggested that they deserved the wider audience and more lasting impact that book publication would bring them. Once a publisher had been located, Felton read the proofs and Agassiz, Peirce and the Harvard botanist Asa Gray read and revised sections of them. By May Agassiz’ publisher, the Baptist-related publishing firm of Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, had Guyot’s book ready for publication. Guyot dedicated the published lectures to Felton, to whose ‘devoted friendship that I owe the idea and the possibility of publishing this little work in a language not my own’. Felton revised his first hasty translations for the second edition, published the following year.20 Under the title The Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in its Relation to the History of Mankind, Gould and Lincoln published several American editions between 1849 and 1870, when Scribner’s took it over. It was also published in England, Germany, France and Sweden. A Swiss visitor in the mid-1850s noted a comment by Agassiz that 5,000 copies had been published by then. From the 1861 edition onward, editions began to carry the notice ‘Six-

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teenth Thousand’ which, if true, is noteworthy for a scientific work at that time.21 The original lectures had attracted, as one reviewer put it, ‘a large audience in Boston’ which included Everett, just retired as President of Harvard, and the Yale undergraduate Daniel Coit Gilman, a future geographer and eventually president both of the University of California and of the Johns Hopkins University. But it is clear that it was Felton’s translation that brought Guyot a wider audience and made his American reputation. To be sure, a translator seldom gets the recognition he or she deserves, though the editor of the Traveller was quick to acknowledge Felton’s ‘efficient aid’ in his prompt translations of the lectures. Few of those reviewing Earth and Man, however, did more than routinely acknowledging Felton as translator. One exception was the anonymous reviewer [Gilman] in the New Englander, who mentioned ‘the generous proffer of assistance from a most competent quarter, Prof. Felton; who has thereby laid the American public under obligations which we take pleasure in acknowledging’. The French traveler, J. J. Ampère, commenting on Guyot’s book during a visit to Cambridge in 1851, said that Felton’s zeal in thus obliging a stranger at the cost of surrendering his own free time ‘méritent d’être cités’. But such kudos is rare.22 Guyot himself sent copies to a large number of influential scholars, who read it avidly. They included, in addition to Everett, Harvard’s new president, Jared Sparks, Longfellow, George Ticknor, the essayist ‘Ik Marvel’ (Donald G. Mitchell) and numerous others outside the sciences. Mrs Peter Lesley, wife of the geologist, commended it to her father-in-law as ‘a book that has delighted us much’. Everett sent copies to the Scottish geologist, Sir Roderick Murchison, and to the Royal Geographical Society, and George Hillard reported that another scientist, William Barton Rogers (later founding President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who as we have seen had taught physical geography at Jefferson’s university, had taken a large number of copies to England for distribution there.23 Guyot’s book appears to have been widely used by teachers as well as by scientific and other educated men and women. Agassiz made it a required text for his students in the Lawrence Scientific School, and it appears in the curricula or as independent reading in many other colleges and schools. J. O. Murray, a senior at Brown and a later col212

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league of Guyot at Princeton, recalled the widespread enthusiasm Earth and Man had aroused among students there. The influential educator, George B. Emerson, pledged to ‘do what I can to make so valuable a work known to my fellow teachers’. A reviewer of recent geography texts in the Massachusetts Teacher in 1849 recommended Guyot’s book as one that ‘makes us feel grateful to the man who made it’. The next year another writer in the same journal opined, ‘We know of no book whose influence upon the teacher, and through him [sic] eventually upon the whole mass of the people, is so quickening and suggestive.’ Harvard Law School professor, Theophilus Parsons, reviewing several scientific works a year or so after Earth and Man was published, noted that ‘this little book has already been widely circulated and introduced as a text-book in many schools’. Ten-year-old Goodwin Stone (later Harvard AB 1863), growing up in Newburyport, is said to have ‘understood and delighted in the generalizations and analogies of Guyot’. And in far-off San Francisco the 1861 catalogue of the First Unitarian Church’s Sunday School library listed not one but two copies of Earth and Man.24

FELTON, GUYOT AND GEOGRAPHY IN MASSACHUSETTS SCHOOLS Felton’s own appraisal of the importance of the work is made clear from a letter he wrote the publishers, printed in the first edition of Earth and Man. Felton asserted Physical Geography, as treated of late years by Humboldt, Ritter and other European investigators, has risen to a rank of paramount importance…. It is not too much, perhaps, to say, that the history of mankind cannot be properly understood unless it rest on the basis of this science.

Praising the ‘simplicity and elegance’ of Guyot’s lectures, and modestly discounting his ability as translator to capture these qualities adequately, Felton also caught an important part of their appeal to

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American audiences: Guyot’s argument for a providentially designed order, displayed both in nature and in human history.25 After Earth and Man was published, Felton continued to provide Guyot with platforms on which to expound his ideas on what was then termed ‘comparative physical geography’. Felton’s first teaching experiences, on Harvard vacations and in a New York State academy, appear to have engendered a life-long interest in the common schools. After Felton became a member of the Cambridge School Committee, the Committee’s annual reports suddenly began to stress instruction in geography. They also offered fulsome praise for Guyot’s methods (which were evidently adopted in Cambridge) and support for his announced series of texts, which in the event did not begin to appear until after Felton’s death.26 In 1851 the Massachusetts Board of Education had hired Guyot as a lecturer for their newly reorganized system of ‘Teachers’ Institutes’. These were six-day long programs, intended both to expose teachers in rural schools to the latest pedagogical methods in the common school subjects they were teaching, and to engender public support for the common schools through a series of evening public lectures in those subjects. In 1852 the Board extended these institutes to urban schools, in four-day programs. During the first year of these, Felton, George S. Hillard and George B. Emerson joined Agassiz and Guyot in giving public lectures at the teachers’ institute held at Lowell.27 In the spring of 1851 Guyot began lecturing in the state’s normal schools, also under the Board’s auspices, and continued to do so, both in Massachusetts and in the newly established Trenton Normal School, after moving to Princeton in 1855. As chair of the Visiting Committee to the Framingham Normal School in 1856, Felton praised Guyot’s ‘excellent course of lectures on geography’ at Framingham, noted the use of Earth and Man as a text there, and hailed the ‘great improvement’ that Guyot’s methods of teaching geography were making in Massachusetts schools. Felton remained a member of the Board of Education after Guyot’s departure. Felton was thus positioned to continue to advance American adoption of the ‘new geography’ of Humboldt, Ritter and Guyot. That task was accompanied by a genuine friendship with Guyot himself; as Henry Barnard described it, ‘his kind regard for Guyot’. In congratulating Felton on his election as President of Harvard in 1860, Guyot thanked him for his en214

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couragement ‘dans les moents difficile’, for his many services, and for his agreeable intimacy.28 Felton was clearly stimulated by Guyot’s lectures into developing more than a nodding acquaintance with contemporary European geography. Through sharing some of Guyot’s and Agassiz’ excursions, Felton gained something of a sense of the importance of field inquiry and, to a degree, of measurement, since Guyot during his residence in Massachusetts was also doing measurements of the heights of New England mountains and establishing a network of meteorological stations in New York and Massachusetts during the 1850s.29 Guyot’s primary influence on Felton lay in his eloquent use of both history and science to illuminate the special character of the lands most significant for educated Americans of the time: Greece, Rome, and the Holy Land. These were seen as the progenitors of what Guyot called ‘the geographical march of civilization’. Felton and other Cambridge intellectuals had been or became familiar with the work of earlier scholars associated with the Society of Dilettanti, German scholars such as Karl Müller and Ernst Curtius on the topography and antiquities of Greece, Alexander von Humboldt on the Indian cultures of Latin America, the writings of the German geographer Carl Ritter, the British clergyman A. P. Stanley and the American Edward Robinson on Palestine, and the German scholar B. G. Niebuhr and the British educator Thomas Arnold on Rome, among others. It is likely that Felton’s commitment in his inaugural address as Eliot Professor to introduce descriptive geography into his proposed course of lectures on Greek literature was distilled from such authors as these. Indeed, in that address he specifically praised the work of Gell and Leake as ‘giving freshness and beauty to the study of classical antiquity’.30 Guyot’s new synthesis of the ideas of these and other writers, and particularly those of Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt, resonated with his hearers and readers. Geography and history together could be used in an explanatory and not simply a descriptive fashion to illuminate the special importance of those sites of human creativity deemed by men of that age to be especially important in the creation of what they knew as civilization. As Guyot himself summarized it much later, ‘Were there special geographical features which enabled Palestine, Greece and Italy to play on the theatre of history 215

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the brilliant parts for which they have been conspicuous?’ The answers would come through the study of ‘Historical or Philosophical Geography, the sister and indispensable handmaid of the Philosophy of History’. And, as Felton was quick to see, Guyot’s synthesis could be applied successfully to his own discipline. ‘I know that Comparative Philology… receives important light from the great conclusions of Physical Geography’, he wrote the publishers in 1849.31

12. Cornelius Conway Felton

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It is an accepted consensus among historians of geography that Guyot’s Boston lectures were a primary conduit for the geographical ideas of Humboldt and Ritter in America. The point to be made here is that their function as a catalyst for awakening American scholars and others, including teachers and others interested in educational reform, to the significance of European geographical ideas, and leading them to appraise their significance in mid-nineteenth century America, could not have happened as quickly and efficiently without Felton’s offer to produce an English translation and his recommendation that they be republished in book form.

FELTON’S GEOGRAPHICAL EXPERIENCE OF GREECE Felton, as translator of Guyot’s lectures, had become the gatekeeper who allowed those European geographical ideas, largely though not entirely new to Americans, to be more widely disseminated. But his role was not a passive one, for Felton himself had been changed by the experience. He not only absorbed the point of view Guyot had expounded, but he also understood its implications for his own work. After all, in his final lecture, ‘The Geographical March of Civilization’, Guyot had praised ancient Greece as ‘the teacher of the whole world’, the basis of culture in ancient times, and as providing ‘the guides and the models of the man of taste and intelligence, in all countries and in all ages’.32 To understand Greek literature truly, it followed that one must study with care the sites where this creative activity had taken place. Accordingly, during the 1850s Felton made two trips to Greece, the longer one as part of a European trip lasting from April 1853 to May 1854, and the other during the summer of 1858. His teacher, Everett, had of course done the same in 1819, but Felton, 35 years later, was heir to a larger and more recent literature of geography and scientific travel. That he understood this is shown, among other ways, by spending three months in preparation in northern Europe preparing himself further for the Greek experience. While in London Felton repeatedly went to the British Museum to study the Parthenon or ‘Elgin’ marbles and other Greek sculptures 217

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there. In France he attended lectures at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, as well as hiring a tutor to improve his French. While in Berlin, he had the pleasure of meeting Ritter and the less pleasant experience, to his conservative Whig ears, of hearing Humboldt’s diatribe against American slavery and his tart reminder that America’s mother country, Britain, had abolished it years previously. At Heidelberg he spent time with the editor of Herodotus, and in Bonn an evening with Professor Welcker, an eminent classicist who had traveled in Greece and provided Felton with ‘many interesting and valuable details’. He also spent a week in Munich, both studying the Greek collections in the Glyptothek and also meeting and talking with a number of eminent scholars at the university there, as well as the Greek ambassador and a former member of the Greek regency council. While in Switzerland he visited Neuchâtel and talked with several academics there, conveying news of Agassiz and Guyot and exploring the glaciated areas Agassiz had earlier studied.33 Felton then departed for Rome and Constantinople before spending three months (30 October–4 February) in his beloved Greece. He launched this experience with the enthusiasm of a Byron and a sense of humor that would not have surprised his friends, but might have done so for students who knew him only in the classroom. Arriving at the harbor of Piraeus ‘on the quay where Miltiades and Themistocles and Pericles had landed a hundred times before’, for example, he was driven to Athens: ‘O unclassical contrast! – in a rickety coach, with a pair of spavined horses.’ That did not prevent Felton from directing the driver to take him to all the major monuments of ancient Athens on his way to his stopping-place.34 ‘There is not an inch of its hallowed ground which does not deserve a careful study’, Felton wrote while on his way home. His primary method of study included, while visiting the sites of ancient events, reading the description of classical writers on the spots they had described. This method, comparing text and site, went back at least to the late eighteenth-century travelers to Greece and Rome. Thus, in passing through the straits of Messina, Felton took his copy of the Odyssey with him to the bow of the ship. Here he looked for the whirlpool of Charybdis and the rock of Scylla, but Scylla, rather than seizing his companions, merely drenched him from head to foot with a huge wave. Further along on the voyage, he read the Iliad off 218

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the coast of Asia Minor and found Homer’s description of landscape features ‘as true to-day as it was three thousand years ago. I do not see how any one can traverse these seas’, he continued, ‘and not believe in Troy, and the personal existence of Homer’. While in Athens, Felton read the Crito and the Phaedo at the site of Socrates’ prison, and studied many of the locations connected with Plato, including three visits to the site of the Academy.35 Felton began a three-week horseback trip through other parts of Greece celebrated in history and literature in mid-November, 1853. He saw the fortress of Phyle, the base from which the Thirty Tyrants were overthrown; recalled Oedipus, Epaminondas and Pindar at Thebes; was thrown into the waters of the consecrated Ismenus by an unruly horse and tore his coat in a fall from the same steed (‘think of being out at the elbows on the side of Helicon and in sight of Parnassus’); and discovered that the hot springs that had given their name to the Pass of Thermopylae were now prosaically turning a mill to grind corn.36 None of these experiences curbed Felton’s enthusiasm for Greece. Writing his friend George S. Hillard from Athens just before turning homeward, Felton wrote, ‘I have enjoyed every part of Europe, but none so much as these classical scenes of glorious Greece.’ Felton came back from Greece in the spring of 1854 with two fresh missions: to interpret (and, indeed, to celebrate) the contemporary Greek world before American audiences, and to show the connection, wherever possible, of Greek literature to the Greek landscape, as he prepared to resume his work or, as he put it, ‘subside into the diligent – perhaps plodding – Greek Professor’. In fact, as one commentator wrote of Felton after his death, on his return from Greece ‘he seemed almost a new man’, and his enthusiasm for his Greek studies had been ‘fed and rekindled’ by the experience. The impressions Felton received from having trod the sites he had read about for years were widely shared through a notable series of Lowell Institute lectures, through his published articles and speeches, and through opportunities to speak to groups concerned with teaching and scholarship.37 With characteristic industry, he set about sharing his new-found knowledge almost as soon as he landed back in Boston. Aside from his Lowell lectures, the first product was his American edition of the British historian William Smith’s History of Greece (1854). Smith is re219

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membered today for his dictionaries on Greek, Roman and Biblical subjects, for which he enlisted the aid of many other authorities as contributors. His Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography in two volumes (1857) and Atlas of Ancient Geography (1875), which he edited with George Grove (better known today for his own dictionary of music and musicians), are still admired by classical scholars. (See Chapter 9.)38 Felton regarded Smith’s Greek history text as ‘the best summary in our language of the ancient history of that country, for the use of schools and colleges’. Felton’s American edition, completed in January 1855, was in part a revision, with corrections, a more up-to-date rendering of classical and modern Greek names, and his own substitutes for some of Smith’s translations. Felton added numerous footnotes based on his Greek visit, as well as new illustrations and maps prepared by Guyot’s émigré nephew, Ernst Sandoz, an artist who had learnt cartography at Gotha under the renowned August Petermann.39 Felton’s academic experience of ancient Greece was enriched also by his encounter with contemporary Greece. He has fulsome praise for its constitutional government, its burgeoning literature, its universal public educational system and other signs of progress which, Felton says, ‘are entitled to respect, even if their roads are rough, and their plains ill cultivated’. So to Smith’s text he added a long section on ‘Greece from the Roman Conquest to the Present Time’, since, as he says in his preface, ‘the interest that attaches itself to the Hellenic name does not cease at the Roman conquest’.40 His enthusiasm for contemporary Greece was, in that same year, to result in his edition of Selections from Modern Greek Writers, in Prose and Poetry. Certainly Smith’s first chapter, on the geography of Greece, must have pleased Felton. But it is his editorial footnotes to the American edition that best show Felton’s response to the sites Smith describes, since Felton had visited them in 1853–4. ‘The situation [of Crissa] is one of remarkable beauty’, he writes, and notes the survival of its ancient walls. He tells us in another note that one of the columns depicted in Smith’s illustration of the temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens ‘was blown down by a hurricane a few years ago’. He confirms George Finlay’s view of deployments at the battle of Marathon by ‘an inspection of the ground – Herodotus in hand’. The extent of the 220

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Laureion silver mines is demonstrated for him by personal examination of the shafts and mine waste. He describes the scenery around Marathon as ‘wild and picturesque’, and recommends a bath in its hot springs as ‘very refreshing after a hard day’s journey’ as well as a remedy for rheumatic complaints. He translates Simonides’ famous epitaph for Leonidas and his fellow Spartans while on the spot at Thermopylae.41 Possibly as a nod to Guyot’s (and Von Humboldt’s) interest in hypsometric measurement, Felton places the summit of the Athenian Acropolis as ‘three hundred feet above the town, and three hundred and fifty above the surrounding plain’. Again from his first-hand experience, he makes note of such matters as the authenticity of Sophocles’ description of the Hill of Colonus as the setting for his final Oedipus drama, the appropriateness of the site of the so-called Tomb of Themistocles at the harbor of Piraeus, and the fragments, then lying on the ground, of the marble Lion of Chaeronea.42 His notes thus add a personal and contemporary sense of being on the spot that must have been an enticement to students, reading what otherwise would have seemed to them a remote historical account. Felton’s American edition of the 7th Earl of Carlisle’s Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters, completed in May 1855, was his second book-length publication of that year. Lord Carlisle was a Whig politician with a taste for literature and theology as well as an educational reformer – all traits that must have recommended him to Felton. Felton and Carlisle had met and talked extensively in London, and met again at the home of the British Ambassador to Greece, Sir Thomas Wyse, in Athens. Carlisle’s diary provided a picture of events, places and people in that region just before British and French forces, in an expedition Felton was to liken to that of the Hellenes against Troy, entered the war between Turkey and Russia that became the Crimean War. For these reasons, Carlisle’s memoir appears to have attracted Felton’s interest as a project, particularly since he had visited most of the sites Carlisle described at around the same time.43 Felton was clearly delighted that so much of Carlisle’s text recalled fond memories of his own experience of Greece. His one criticism is that Carlisle had used Pope’s translation of the Odyssey, a translation Felton regarded as not only deficient in Greek but also notoriously inaccurate in topographic detail. As evidence, he notes that Pope had 221

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Odysseus sailing between Cape Malea and the island of Cythera. But both Odysseus and Felton had been driven south of the island by the local winds and currents, an example of how Pope had misunderstood both the language and the site. ‘So much for want of a little geography and a Greek preposition’, Felton wryly observed.44 In his notes Felton called Carlisle’s description of the topography of Troy ‘singularly concise, clear, and sensible’. Felton, like Carlisle, had read the Iliad ‘with the plain of Troy outstretched like a map before me’. Concluding that the scenery Carlisle described was ‘the best commentary on the Iliad’, Felton enthusiastically claimed that ‘an hour on the Hellespont is worth years of study in the close air and perhaps tobacco smoke of a professor’s library’. He frequently responded to Carlisle’s descriptions with his own memories of the sites. For example, commenting on Carlisle’s claim that ‘the ground [of Marathon] completely explains and illustrates the battle’, Felton glosses it by writing ‘This is perfectly true; and it is true of all the great historical places in Greece. Marathon, Salamis, Thermopylae, Plataea, perfectly illustrate the great events which have made them immortal’. Further along, Felton responds to Carlisle’s description of the sites on Corfu associated with Odysseus by another comparison of site and text, Odyssey in hand. Arriving at the site in Corfu where Odysseus was believed to have encountered Nausicaa and her maidens doing their laundry, Felton found that ‘a young Greek woman was standing in it, and washing linen’, though, he noted, somewhat ruefully, ‘I cannot say she was quite as handsome as Ulysses found Nausicaa’.45 In a long note on Carlisle’s description of the region around Mycenae, Felton reported his own reading of the Agamemnon both under the Lion Gate and while riding over the Argolid. Having asserted in notes to his edition of Aeschylus’ play, on the basis of German critical scholarship, that Argos rather than Mycenae itself was the setting for the description of Agamemnon’s murder, while in Greece Felton thought ‘perhaps there might be something in the natural scenery of the region’ that would prove his hypothesis. After studying the topography, he concluded that the chain of signal fires originating in Troy could have been seen from Argos but not from Mycenae, a finding he claimed to have been the first to show from the evidence of the ground.46 222

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Felton defends his method of comparison of text and site by claiming that the Greek poets were faithful to ‘the truth of nature’, and had repeatedly been shown to have written with ‘geographical and topographical niceties’ in mind. The geography of Sophocles in the tragic tale of Oedipus, for example, is in exact accordance with the features and relative positions of Corinth, Delphi, Thebes, Mount Cithaeron, and the ‘place where three ways meet’; and one who visits these places, and reads the tragedy there as I did, can entertain no possible doubt that the poet had in his mind a very accurate picture of the country.47

And at the close of his Greek travels, he asserts ‘the voyage to Constantinople, and the voyage along the western side of Greece, have illustrated both the Iliad and the Odyssey more than all the commentators of Germany’.48 A modern skeptic might claim that Felton saw what he wanted to see, and that a certain amount of circular reasoning is involved here. The point is not that his findings are necessarily true, but that he attempted a geographical task in accord with the Humboldt, Ritter, and Guyot mandate: to establish those elements in the natural world that accounted in part for the creative activity of human civilizations. In 1855, Felton intended to produce a third book of his own observations of Greece. He mentioned it, in his preface to Lord Carlisle’s book, as a project for which he hoped to find the time in ‘the coming season’, meaning, as he wrote Reverend J. H. Hill, in the late spring and summer of 1855, ‘if I can make up my mind to add to the immense mass of traveller’s trash’. Although he had six volumes of travel journals to draw upon, such a book was never completed, in spite of the encouragement of his friends, including Lord Carlisle. His Familiar Letters from Europe and his 1854 Lowell lecture series on modern Greece, which Felton had written out rapidly but in full upon his return from his travels, are a taste of what the Greece book might have looked liked. In a November 1856 letter in response to Arnold Guyot’s inquiry about when his proposed volume of letters would appear, Felton exclaimed ‘Alas! What can a man do about writing a book, all of whose mornings and afternoons and evenings are occupied with exhausting labors….’ According to his colleague and

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the nominal editor of the Familiar Letters, Andrew Peabody, Felton had gotten far enough along to arrange and edit the letters for publication, so that Peabody had very little to do other than seeing them through the press.49 The Familiar Letters are still of interest, both for their lively descriptions and because they are among the earlier observations of an independent Greece by an American academic. The letters do show that he packed in a formidable amount of ordinary sightseeing. But it is also clear that Felton had used his weeks in Northern Europe in diligent preparation, by intensive study and through conversation with experts along the way. ‘In all my travels I have chosen to combine study with sight [sic] and place seeing’, he wrote, ‘rather than to spend all the time in running about….’50 Felton combined the older tradition of Leake, with whom he corresponded around the time of his 1858 trip and who sent him a copy of his new Disputed Questions volume, of topographic observation and literary inference, with the newer ‘Humboldtian’ emphasis on topographical measurement he had absorbed from Guyot. Late in 1854 Felton was invited to give a general account of contemporary Greece to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1855 he made two more presentations to the same group. In the first, he paid special tribute to Leake for laying the foundations of modern classical topography, and presented a physical map of Athens showing the sites of the surviving ancient monuments. He also reviewed references by both ancient writers and modern scholars to the Pnyx and the Bema, the assembly place and speakers’ platform in Athens. Felton had investigated this subject himself while in Athens, and showed a topographic map of the Pnyx and Bema he had made to exact scale. After his 1858 trip he also gave a presentation to the Academy, speaking again of modern Greece and the progress it had made since his last visit. A realistic touch to a later paper before the same group, on the honey of Mt Hymettus, was a small quantity of that celebrated product, sent him by Reverend J. H. Hill, headmaster of a girl’s school in Athens, whose acquaintance he had made on his earlier trip.51 Felton had planned to return to Greece with his brother-in-law, Agassiz, for a year’s stay. Agassiz would study the topography and natural history of Greece, while Felton would do cultural studies on modern colloquial Greek and make collections of mountain poetry. 224

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The two would then publish their researches jointly, in a work, Felton said, which would be ‘Greece – physical, picturesque, and poetical’.52 Felton regarded his 1853–4 journey as the advance preparation for such a project. As we have seen, he had proclaimed after that visit, ‘there is not an inch of its hallowed ground which does not deserve a careful study’. Unfortunately the project never came to fruition but the plans themselves suggest Felton’s continuing commitment to linking environment and culture in the service of understanding classical literature and language.

FELTON, GEOGRAPHY AND CLASSICAL STUDIES Of Felton’s four series of lectures on Greek subjects on the Lowell Institute foundation during the 1850s, two of them had been given before he went to Europe, in 1852 and 1853. The other two he gave after his return, in 1854 and 1859. These, like his letters, were also published posthumously, in 1866, with a second edition in the following year. The first series, ‘The Greek Language and Poetry’, delivered before his first trip to Greece, is concerned with language and literature narrowly conceived. The fourth series, delivered in 1859, was on ‘Constitutions and Orators of Greece’. But it is the second series, given in 1853, on ‘The Life of Greece’ and the third, on ‘Modern Greece’, given the following year, which contain the most material of geographical interest. In several of these lectures Felton, as he does in his letters, reveals his eye for the landscape and his view of the role of geography in the study of the classical humanities. Felton’s purpose, as he states it in his Lowell lectures, ‘is not to illustrate the geography of the country in detail, but only to mark out the framework within which the scenes of its ancient history were enacted’, a purpose very much in harmony with the prevailing function of geography as a ‘handmaid’ of economic, political, military and cultural history. He also articulates a secondary purpose: to show the connection of the landscape with what he calls ‘a thousand brilliant associations of history or poetry, consecrating to immortal memory every inch of the classic soil of Hellas’.53

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As his 1854 lectures on ‘Modern Greece’ illustrate, however, Felton did not, like so many romantics, simply regard Greece as a country of interest solely for its ancient associations. Like the best of the scientific travelers before and since, he was also interested in the modern Greeks and their very different culture. Felton combined in his own person two great geographical streams – the continental and the English traditions. The content of his lectures resembles that of the traditional British mode of classical topography, derived from travelers who emphasized the linkage between literature and site. But the Guyot influence is also apparent: in the visits to Humboldt and Ritter, in Felton’s adoption of Guyot’s concept of the ‘geographical march of civilization’, and in the most general way in the incorporation of geography into Felton’s concept of classical philology.54 Felton returned to the sense of place that had been one result of his trips to Greece both in his weekly classroom lectures to Harvard Juniors on ‘Greek Language and Literature’ and in his inaugural address as President of Harvard in 1860. The journeys appear to have energized him and reawakened his enthusiasm for teaching, resulting in increased success after his Greek tours. He had been suggesting some of these things to his classes, as he had in his public lectures, before and after his return from his first trip to Greece in 1853–4. From that trip also, Felton had brought back a large collection of photographs for use in the teaching of classics at Harvard. In his lectures he might draw on his own experience of following in the footsteps of Pausanias, for example. Or he would give a lecture on the geography of Greece, or the geography and topography of the Troad. In his inaugural address he recommended to his hearers that they emulate his experience of reading the Iliad while sailing through the Hellespont, standing at the Bema while recalling the speeches of Demosthenes, or repeating their Plato among the olive groves of Academe, and thus capture it for themselves.55 Some insight into Felton’s influence on Harvard students may be gained by looking at the topics for Harvard’s prize essays and public performances, particularly those of a geographic nature. For instance, in 1850–1 the two topics set for the Bowdoin prize essay were ‘Physical Geography’ and ‘Athens in the Time of Socrates’. Among the performances for exhibitions were such topics as ‘The Traveller in Modern Greece’ (1846), ‘Athens as a Modern Capital’ (1847), ‘Nineveh’ 226

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(1849) and ‘The Present Condition of Naples’ (1857). Commencement exercises included a conference on ‘Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome’ (1841) and essays on such topics as ‘Recent Political Changes in Greece’ and ‘Fashionable Travelling’ (1845), ‘Rome in 1849’,’Nineveh and its Remains’ and, these being given the year Guyot received an honorary MA from Harvard, ‘Earth and Man’ (1849). The year 1852 saw essays on ‘The Civilizations of the Mediterranean’ and ‘The Empire of Trebizond’. Commencement 1854 saw an essay on ‘Ancient Travellers’, and that of 1855 one on ‘Ancient Greek Settlements in the Crimea’, immediately following a review of ‘Humboldt’s Aspects of Nature’. The following year shows a topic that reveals increasing interest in foreign travel by Harvard graduates: ‘European Travel Considered as Part of an American Liberal Education’. Those of 1857 show both sides of Felton’s interests: ‘Modern Arcadia’ and ‘Early Sea Voyages of the Phocaeans’. Many other topics are of some classical geographical interest.56 Though it is true that Harvard students frequently traveled to Europe in some numbers, at least from the 1840s on, after Felton’s return in 1854 many more begin to include Greece on their itineraries.57 Some of them have left letters or memoirs expressing just the ‘sense of place’ and associational linkages that Felton himself had experienced and recommended. In 1856 Horace Furness (later the great Shakespearean editor) visited the grove of Academe by moonlight with several Harvard companions. As he wrote in a letter home, We wandered through the long allies [sic] and thousands of old schoolboy recollections came crowding upon us of Socrates, Plato, Zeno and Aristotle. But how everything was changed, the deformed, transformed, the bugbears of college into the glories of Academe. Socrates was no longer the eight Greek letters comprising his name, and we saw him right before us….58

Such language underscores a discovery of the connection between literature and landscape that filled the gap between what was merely a classroom exercise and personal insight into ‘the framework within which the scenes… of ancient history were enacted’ (and thus, for each student, re-enacted).

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Felton died of a heart condition in 1862, after just a little over a year in the Harvard presidency. He had missed teaching, lamenting in his first annual report as President of Harvard, ‘The President retired from the Greek Department with a regret which time has not yet begun to lessen.’ He would sometimes urge William Watson Goodwin, who had succeeded him in the Eliot chair, to take the day off so that Felton could take his classes. After one such, he told his successor: ‘Goodwin, there is no more comparison between the pleasure of being professor and president in this college than there is between heaven and hell.’ Thomas Chase, a classicist who had also traveled in Greece in 1853 and shared Felton’s interest in the Greek landscape, dedicated his 1863 book, Hellas: Its Monuments and Scenery, to Felton’s memory. Morison described Felton appropriately, seventyfive years after his untimely death, as ‘a true Hellenist…; a warm, genial, sparkling spirit…; a sound scholar….; and one of those rare New England minds whose aesthetic sense was as keenly developed as his intellect’.59

THE ‘HARVARD SCHOOL’ OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY Herbert Baxter Adams of the new Johns Hopkins University, surveying the growth of history in American colleges and universities in the 1880s, credited Jared Sparks, first holder of Harvard’s new McLean Professorship of Ancient and Modern History, with laying the foundations for what, under his successor, Henry Torrey, became a centerpiece of the Harvard history program, its linkage of history with geography. Sparks, a well-known American historian who occupied the chair from 1839 until he became President of Harvard in February 1849, had, as we have seen, argued for the retention of geography in the Harvard curriculum as a student in 1813. The freshman and sophomore history courses were still entrusted to tutors, who now began to require freshmen to own copies of Samuel Butler’s Ancient Atlas for their ancient history, and sophomores to purchase Joseph Worcester’s History Atlas for modern history. Sparks continued to lecture to seniors on American history even after becoming president.60

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Sparks’ chair in history was largely left vacant for the next seven years. Francis Bowen, a former tutor in a variety of subjects, was primarily a moral philosopher. He had, however, edited Georg Weber’s Outlines of Universal History, used at Harvard from 1853, and translated Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, as well as writing four biographies for Sparks’ ‘Library of American Biography’ series. Named to the McLean chair in 1853, Bowen lectured on Greek, English, and Modern European History for one term. Owing to his vociferous opposition to the Hungarian Revolution and its charismatic leader, Louis Kossuth, however, Bowen had become a controversial figure. The Overseers, therefore, refused to ratify his appointment, but moved him instead to the Alford Professorship of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, vacated when James Walker succeeded Sparks as President of Harvard.61 From the standpoint of historical geography, particularly that of the Mediterranean world, a more interesting appointment to the McLean chair was that of George Perkins Marsh, elected by the Corporation in 1855 at the urging of Felton and George Ticknor. Marsh’s historical essays and his Mediterranean travels while Minister to Turkey were his primary qualifications for the post. Felton argued that Marsh’s experiences ‘in the actual scenes of history’ (i.e., in their historical geography), coupled with his published articles, had made Marsh the best person in the country to seize the opportunity offered by the chair. But Marsh, beset by financial problems and ambivalent about teaching anyway, turned down the offer.62 Marsh’s refusal of the McLean chair raises one of the great ‘mighthave-beens’ in the history of American geography. His primary influence on geography, a half-century and more later, was through his argument against environmental determinism, exemplified in the title of the second edition of his book Man and Nature (1864), published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action. This was largely written during his time as Minister to Italy, to which his former House of Representatives colleague and fellow Whig, President Abraham Lincoln, had appointed him in 1861. Marsh had a long-time interest in geography, had begun working out this theme as early as 1847, was an admirer of Alexander von Humboldt, and was to foreshadow his later book in an important essay on ‘The Study of Nature’ in 1860.

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It has been well said ‘there are no “ifs” in history’. But the questions remain. What effect would Marsh have had on the course of ancient and modern geography had he accepted the Harvard post? Would he have published the same book (which his wife, Caroline Crane Marsh, had been urging on him for several years) in 1864 without the experience of living in Turkey (while Minister there) and then in Italy? The questions are unanswerable, of course, but perhaps we can conclude, with Marsh’s biographer, David Lowenthal, ‘the loss was both Marsh’s and Harvard’s’.63 Ephraim Emerton (AB Harvard 1871), who had taken a doctorate at the University of Leipzig before returning to Harvard as an instructor in history and then as the first Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History, remarked in the 1880s of the earlier generation of historians that they had no special preparation for teaching the subject. It was believed that ‘any classical instructor could teach the history of Greece or Rome’, Emerton wrote, and ‘any “cultivated gentleman” could teach European history’. Also, as H. B. Adams pointed out, Harvard had a history of making appointments from the ranks of its own alumni who had proven their teaching ability for a few years as Tutor.64 This combination accounts for the appointment of Henry Warren Torrey to the McLean Professorship in 1856. Torrey lived to be almost the last of his generation at Harvard, holder of an endowed chair in a field for which he had had no professional preparation, and which he had refused once before being persuaded to occupy it. Torrey was a teacher first and last, producing no published scholarship in his field or outside it. For this, he was to be dismissed out of hand by the prolific Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, as ‘an excellent representative of the school of dear old gentlemen who taught history as an avocation’.65 Unlike Sparks, Torrey came with no established reputation as a historian. But, appointed at the age of 41, Torrey can scarcely be called a ‘dear old gentleman’. Nor can it be said that he taught history as an avocation. Teaching history was clearly his vocation, and it ill became Morison, for whom teaching Harvard undergraduates history was, at best, an avocation, and at worst an annoying impediment to his scholarly writing, to have made that particular criticism. Torrey’s great-grandmother was the Revolutionary War historian, Mercy Otis Warren. He had a strong interest in history and brought 230

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to his task a new approach toward how to teach it. As his pupil and later colleague, William Watson Goodwin, put it, in a day when instruction at Harvard consisted largely in recitations from textbooks, ‘it was a new revelation… to find ourselves face to face with a master who was there to teach us history out of his own stock of knowledge, and not merely to ask us questions to which we had already learned the answers’. Goodwin took his classes during the period when Torrey was a mere Tutor in History and Political Economy, from 1844 until 1848, after which he had left to open a private girls’ school.66 By all accounts Torrey took his teaching responsibilities extremely seriously, even expressing doubts as to whether his election to membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1859 would detract from his Harvard commitments. Goodwin believed Torrey’s appointment had ‘made an era in the teaching of history in the College’, and described him as a ‘striking example… of an enthusiastic scholar, full of his subject and eager to make others full of it’. Not only was Torrey thought of as ‘a master who was there to teach us history out of his own stock of knowledge’ but, Goodwin recalled, ‘we all saw at once that he knew more than the man who wrote our text-book, and we respected and admired him accordingly’. Apparently Goodwin, who took Roman History with Torrey in his first year (1847–8) at Harvard, found Torey’s course the only one that year in which the teaching did not leave him ‘much disappointed’. Charles Eliot Norton, another student from those early days, spent four extra days in Paris in 1856, largely visiting Torrey, ‘mainly’, says his biographer, ‘to keep company with his “good old friend and tutor”,’ who was temporarily suffering from an injured knee. Goodwin also quotes some of Torrey’s students from the girls’ school: ‘He made us think about our work’, said one, and another remembered his ‘talent for awakening thirst for knowledge and interest in study’.67 These qualities appear to have been carried over into his professorship, as his students and former colleagues have testified. Torrey’s one publication, ‘Lecture on the Uses of the Study of History’, was privately printed in 96 copies at the request of his students of the Class of 1868. His sometime colleague, Ephraim Emerton, called him ‘much beloved’, bringing ‘a gleam of light’ to his new position, and ‘a born teacher’, who impressed his students ‘with a sense of the meaning and importance of history’. His successor in the McLean chair, 231

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Silas Macvane, who devoted ‘a good deal of attention… to historical geography’ as the instructor in Harvard’s famed History 1 (Medieval and Modern European history), remembered that, while Torrey did not depart radically from college rules on teaching, he would never simply hear lessons. Rather, the lesson supplied the topic, to which Torrey added clarification and correction, as well as suggesting other writers with alternative views, and encouraging his students ‘to read history for themselves’. According to Macvane, numerous alumni had spoken to him of ‘the surprise and pleasure’ Torrey’s approach gave them. For the first time, for many of them, history became something to be thought about, rather than simply to be learned.68 Torrey’s former student and later colleague, Albert Bushnell Hart, called him ‘an inciter to learning’, and credits him with introducing the practice of parallel readings, ‘a blow at once to autocratic teaching and to too much intimacy with a single textbook’. As Goodwin put it, he taught that ‘history is not a mass of undisputed narratives of events’, but rather ‘an account of occurrences on which we often have only scanty or conflicting testimony’, about which wise men can draw differing conclusions. ‘He was one of the best professors who ever taught in Harvard University’, claimed Goodwin (who himself taught there for more than 40 years), ‘and also one of the best appreciated by all who were competent to pass judgment on his work’.69 This is a long way from Morison’s snide portrait of the doddering old gent who knew nothing outside the textbook.

HENRY TORREY AND HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY Torrey, as McLean Professor, heading a program that was still essentially a pioneering venture, set its distinctive tone in his emphasis on the salience of geography for the study of history. Colleagues inside and outside Harvard commented on it. Emerton, for example, wrote of Torrey’s insistence on knowledge of historical geography among students in his department. He required the students to use historical atlases and to be able to draw freehand-maps in examinations. The Harvard library had acquired the American maps previously owned by Professor Christoph Daniel Ebeling of Hamburg in 1818, but the 232

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collection had not been greatly expanded since. On taking up his duties in 1857, Torrey wrote the librarian complaining of Harvard’s nearly moribund map collection. ‘History cannot be read to advantage without geographical apparatus and particularly good maps’, he wrote. ‘Our deficiency in this quarter is almost ludicrous.’ That deficiency was not to be fully remedied, however, until the distinguished historian of cartography and exploration, Justin Winsor, was appointed librarian in 1877.70 Writing in 1886, the year Torrey retired, the Johns Hopkins historian Herbert Baxter Adams noted Torrey’s geographical emphasis in Adams’ survey of the teaching of history in the United States. Noting that ancient history and ancient geography were still the chief historical requirements for admission, Adams called attention to two distinctive characteristics of the history program under Torrey: its foundation in ancient history during the first year, and its emphasis on the study of geography in relation to history. Adams also noted ‘the evident stress laid upon map-drawing, physical and political, and the ingenious questions for determining and combining historical and geographical knowledge’ in all of Harvard’s history courses.71 President James Walker, in his annual report for 1857–8, noted that Torrey had used Thomas Arnold’s Introductory Lectures on Modern History (see Chapter 6) as one of the texts in his senior course. In these lectures, taking it for granted that all Oxford students, like those at Rugby, had gotten into the habit of combining ancient geography with other subjects in their classical programs, Arnold had asked them to apply the same techniques to later periods of history.72 Torrey’s program for the department, and indeed his own courses (originally ancient Greek history, using Felton’s edition of Smith, in the first semester, and modern history, originally American, in the second) mirrored precisely the methodology Arnold had suggested. After 1870, given the enlargement of the history staff, Torrey taught only modern history and law. Torrey is also credited with introducing written essay questions into his history courses, departing from the more conventional method of recitations from a set text. The examination questions in geography, or those combining history and geography, range from the incisive to the routine. A selection of Harvard examination questions in ancient history and geography from the 1870s suggests both types. 233

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In June 1874, for example, two of the three required questions were, ‘By a map or by words represent or describe Sicily. Point out its place in Grecian and in Roman history’ and, ‘Name eight places that were noted in ancient times: four Greek, and four Roman. Give their situation, and show their importance in history.’ An examination in October 1875 opened with a less analytic question: ‘Mention in order (1) the ancient divisions of Greece which lie upon the eastern coast [of the Aegean, presumably]; and (2) the important islands near that coast. In both cases proceed from north to south.’ Yet other ancient geography questions in that period suggest that ancient geography was not limited to Greece and Rome. There are geographical questions on Palestine, Egypt, Persia, Asia Minor, Africa, and Gaul. These also often involved map drawing, as in the following: ‘Draw an outline of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas, with the principal islands; and give the ancient names of the countries and rivers in the regions now occupied by Italy, Spain and Portugal, France, and Great Britain.’73 What we might call a ‘Harvard School’ of historical or humanistically oriented geography emerged under Torrey’s direction to become a continuing emphasis within the Harvard history program, and lasted in attenuated form there into the mid-twentieth century. Overshadowed by the strongly physical geography program begun in the 1870s and robustly developed by William Morris Davis, its alternative nevertheless can be traced among Torrey’s students, and particularly those who, as historians themselves, continued a geographical element within the Harvard history program. Among these we might call attention to Brooks (AB 1870) and Henry (AB 1858) Adams. According to his biographer, Brooks Adams’ interest in historical geopolitics began at Harvard, although as a student at Wellesley House in England he had been taught both [ancient] history and geography ‘in conjunction with the classical languages’. In his first year at Harvard he studied Greek history out of Smith’s text as edited by Felton, and in his second took a mediaeval history course with E. W. Gurney, soon to be made Assistant Professor of History and, like Torrey, interested in the relations of geography to history. In his final semester Brooks finally got to Torrey’s course in modern history, an experience Brooks Adams’ biographer has called ‘a fortunate experience for Adams’. Torrey was still using 234

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Arnold’s Lectures and emphasizing historical geography, as well as critical thinking. Adams’ biographer further asserts that Adams took away two important ideas from Gurney and Torrey. One was ‘a high estimate of the value of the study of history’. The other was ‘the seeds of his later emphasis on geography’.74 Henry Adams, who taught American and mediaeval history in Torrey’s program from 1870 to 1877, also emphasized map drawing. A June 1872 examination in Adams’ mediaeval history course begins with a blank map on which students were to label 21 provinces and 22 other places. Adams’ famous six introductory chapters in his history of the United States in the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, later separately published as The United States in 1800, were a pioneering attempt at a cross-sectional view of the historical geography of the United States.75 More influential were the two American historians, also students of Torrey, who formed the backbone of the American wing of the Harvard history department from their initial appointments under Torrey until at least the 1910s. Edward Channing, who began as a European historian and later turned to American colonial history, gave a brief paper to the National Educational Association on ‘The Relation of Geography to History’ in 1895. In his colonial history course, Channing lectured with his own hand-drawn content on large outline maps, required his students to copy them on smaller outline maps so as to produce their own atlases, and in every examination asked a question on geography. Further, of the four ‘special studies’ each student was required to make, two were geographical: one on the exploration and settlement of his home town or state, and the other on ‘a problem in the historical geography of the colonies’. Albert Bushnell Hart contributed a chapter on ‘Methods of Teaching American History’ in G. Stanley Hall’s influential Methods of Teaching History (1884). Hart also required students in his course to answer questions on geography. In their famous and bestselling book of bibliography, the Guide to the Study of American History (1896), Channing and Hart placed great stress on historical geography, an emphasis that was continued and indeed even reinforced in the 1912 revision, in which they were joined by their notably geographicallyaware colleague, Frederick Jackson Turner.76 235

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The other great geographical influence on the history program, after 1877, was Justin Winsor, and under his aegis classical geography comes to the fore again. Winsor began in 1880 to search for contributors for a massive multi-volume work, published between 1885 and 1889 as the Narrative and Critical History of America. Torrey was on the advisory committee of the Massachusetts Historical Society that oversaw that project. Torrey had a former student, William Hopkins Tillinghast (AB 1877), who had hoped to become a historian, and had spent an additional year at Harvard as a Resident Graduate. Like Torrey’s earlier, in the spring of 1878 Tillinghast’s eyes had temporarily failed him. Nevertheless, he had gone to Europe in 1878 to matriculate for the PhD at the University of Berlin. His health not allowing him to continue, he had heard only a few lectures before spending time in travel, including ten days in Greece. Winsor, who had arrived at Harvard at the beginning of Tillinghast’s graduate year there, had guided him independently in historical cartography and the literature of discovery. In 1882 Winsor hired him for the Harvard Library staff, where he remained (though unable to complete a Harvard PhD) until his death in August 1913.77 As the first essay in Winsor’s ‘Great Work’, Tillinghast wrote a 52page essay on ‘The Geographical Knowledge of the Ancients in Relation to the Discovery of America’. This was probably the most important, and certainly the most durable, essay on classical geography written by an American in the nineteenth century. It began by noting the shock to European humanists stemming from the discovery that a land mass to the west, unknown to the ancients, had bifurcated the world ocean over which Christopher Columbus had hoped to sail to East Asia. Then Tillinghast proceeded to explore the geographical ideas, true and false, contained in ancient sources that made up the body of ideas about the world in the pre-Columbian period. Beginning with Hesiod and Homer, Tillinghast traced conceptions of the earth such as its form, its size, the distribution of its lands and waters, its climatic structure, and ideas concerning its habitability. Turning to a second group of ancient writings, which he called ‘the literature of the imagination’, Tillinghast eviscerated such tales as those concerning Atlantis and other presumptive lands beyond the Pillars of Heracles, asserting that ‘geography, by right the handmaid of history, is easily perverted to the service of myth’. He then sur236

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veyed post-Columbian attempts of Renaissance humanists to find passages in ancient literature that could be construed as intimations of the American continents, but dismissed all of them as misguided interpretations. Finally, asserting that ‘the domain of Greek geography has not escaped the incursions of unbalanced investigators’, he dismissed a long list of such, including Gladstone’s writings on Homeric geography (see Chapter 5). The essay and its notes and additions are an extraordinary demonstration of the critical and comparative methods Torrey and Winsor had encouraged.78

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY CODA One final note should be made of the individualistic initiative of a Harvard student, John Kirtland Wright (AB 1912), son of a Harvard professor of Greek and destined to become the foremost American historian of geography between the 1920s and 1960s. Wright had spent a year in Greece as a teenager, where his father had held a visiting appointment. The younger Wright, as an undergraduate, had majored in geography. But, in 1912, his advisor, Douglas Johnson, a geomorphologist, moved to Columbia University, and William Morris Davis, founder of Harvard’s graduate program in geography, retired. Moreover, Wright was interested in both humanity and nature, not the ‘nature-minus-man’ form of geography he had seen too much of in the strongly physical Harvard program. Indeed, Davis dismissed most forms of geography that did not fit his tight-knit paradigm for the discipline, and was later to claim that he would say nothing about historical geography, since ‘nearly all studies under that title are better classd [sic] with history’. Accordingly, though at the time he had had only one undergraduate course in history, in the fall of 1912 Wright registered as a graduate student in that department, resolved, he said later, ‘to make my history geographical’.79 During his first year of graduate study, Wright elected to do six papers or oral presentations in lieu of the conventional master’s thesis. Wright wrote two of these papers, ‘Herodotus as a Geographer’ and ‘Eratosthenes as a Geographer’, for William Scott Ferguson’s already legendary year-long course History 4, ‘History of Greece to 237

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the Roman Conquest’. Wright also took History 41, ‘Age of the Renaissance in Europe’, for which he gave an oral presentation on the thirteenth-century opening of Asia to Europeans, and submitted a paper on the ‘Atlantic Islands, 1270–1558’. There is no evidence in his papers for Ferguson that Wright was then aware of Tillinghast’s essay. He probably became aware of it the following year, after Tillinghast’s death, while taking a reading course with Channing on books and maps relating to American history. Channing almost certainly introduced Wright to Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History, to which Channing had contributed and parts of which were required reading in his colonial history course. Knowing that Wright’s father was a Greek scholar and Dean of the Graduate School, Channing could hardly have ignored Tillinghast’s essay in Wright’s tutorial. In addition to mining the classical sources, Tillinghast had suggested that ‘Medieval cosmology and geography await a thorough student’, and called attention to the sources for such a study.80 Wright was to pick up on that suggestion, writing his dissertation on mediaeval geographical lore under the distinguished mediaevalist and historian of mediaeval science and education, Charles Homer Haskins who, as we shall see, was also sympathetic to combining history and geography and, as an instructor at Johns Hopkins, had coordinated the undergraduate course in physical geography and history there (see Chapter 10). In his 1922 dissertation, published in 1925 as Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades, Wright acknowledged Tillinghast’s essay and praised it in the same year as an ‘unusually profound study of ancient geographical thought’ in a paper for the History of Science Society.81 Although his two graduate papers on classical geographers were never published, and his early pleas for the history of geography went unheeded, Wright’s pioneering work was not only to frame his own trajectory as a scholar on the staff of the American Geographical Society, but, particularly after his Presidential Address to the Association of American Geographers, ‘Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography’ in 1946, his ideas began to influence a diverse group of younger scholars and, through them, the students they trained. Most of these are geographers, though not necessarily of the ancient or the mediaeval worlds.

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Their intellectual genealogy is therefore traceable not to those scholars such as Davis, whom conventional histories of geography see as the founder of the modern professional discipline in America. At Harvard there was an institutional tradition of geography linked to ancient history dating from the early days of Jared Sparks, Cornelius C. Felton, and Henry Torrey. These scholars had upheld the tradition of combining geography and history that, as we have seen, had begun in the Renaissance. It had been broadened into American history under Channing, Hart and Turner. It was taken back in time both in the extraordinary exploratory essay of Tillinghast and in the early work of J. K. Wright, the independent-minded graduate student pursuing his own path under the guidance of two great Harvard historians, Ferguson and Haskins. One of them (Ferguson) was called by Chester Starr in 1991 ‘the greatest ancient historian trained in this country’. The other (Haskins) had taught ancient history at Wisconsin before becoming ‘the great medievalist at Harvard’.82 It is an intellectual lineage of which today’s small cadre of humanistic geographers may rightfully be proud.

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Classical Geography in the Oxford School of Geography, 1899–1915

The early history of modern geography at Oxford has generally been focused on Halford Mackinder and Andrew Herbertson, and on the School of Geography they established in 1899. Although the role of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in nurturing Oxford geography’s early years through its financial support of Mackinder’s Readership (1887) and the School of Geography until 1924 is well known, much less has appeared in the geographical literature, as we have seen in Chapter 6, concerning Oxford scholars in other disciplines who participated in the affairs of the Oxford program in geography. Similarly, other scholars associated with the School as lecturers in the School of Geography between 1899 and Herbertson’s death in 1915 have not been examined by historians of geography. This chapter is primarily concerned with one of those positions, the School’s lectureship in ancient geography, as well as the fate of the field in the School of Geography after the lectureship was de facto suspended in 1915.1

THE OXFORD CONTEXT Mackinder earned his original position at Oxford as Reader in Geography as the result of a now legendary lecture, ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geography’, given before the Royal Geographical Society

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on 31 January 1887. This lecture argued strongly for the unity of physical and ‘political’ (i.e., human) geography, with approximately equal attention given to each. Mackinder had originally intended to give equal attention to physical and political geography in his Oxford lectures since, as he said in 1888, ‘I regard physical geography as the foundation of the whole subject’. He had already made a welldeserved reputation as a powerful lecturer on physiography on the Oxford extension circuit.2 Within the university, however, Mackinder’s initial lectures on physical geography had drawn an audience of only three to five people a term. Even after opening the lectures up to townsfolk, waiving fees for ‘lady students’, and transferring their location to the Science Museum, Mackinder’s attendance did not increase. At one point he wondered publicly whether he would be giving his lectures to no (male) students. In June 1892 he reported to the RGS that just two undergraduates had attended his lectures in physical geography. By 1892–3 the proportion of his lectures on physical geography had been reduced to one-third, and they appear to have disappeared entirely in 1897.3 As J. L. Myres reminded us (Chapter 6), the specifics of the Oxford context were important here. Physical geography had been an optional examination subject in the new Honour School of Natural Science, created in the 1850s. Though the Oxford University Commissioners appointed in 1854 had recommended the university create up to ten new professorships, including one in physical geography, nothing came of it. No other provision had been made for teaching it, and in 1872 the field had been folded into the general examination in geology. Accordingly, for the few Oxford students concentrating in natural science at the time, the incentive to attend lectures in physical geography was much reduced, since there was no reward in the examination schools for the effort.4 Geography was acceptable at Oxford in the early years, as Mackinder had quickly discovered, primarily as a service course for undergraduates preparing for examinations in the two principal Honour Schools. The demand for, and acceptability of, geography in humanistically inclined Oxford in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lay primarily in its utility for historical and classical studies. Most students attending geography lectures were in fact 242

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enrolled in the two most prestigious and populous Oxford schools, the Honour School of Literae Humaniores (commonly called ‘Greats’) and the newer Honour School of Modern (i.e., post-Roman) History. The latter had been established in 1853 as part of a new School of Law and Modern History, but was given separate status in 1873. Mackinder had refused a request from the history school that he ‘lecture on the geography of specific periods… [because he feared that] it would make my teaching merely historical’. But he had told the RGS Council as early as 1889 ‘it is clear that if the Readership is to have an established position and a wide influence in the University, it must be through the History school’. The School of Modern History was ‘first in numbers and second in importance of the Honour Schools’. But the School of Literae Humaniores was ‘the premier school in dignity and importance’, in the words of the 1903 Oxford Handbook, and attracted ‘the greatest proportion of the ablest students’. Although there was no statutory requirement in geography for this School, at the time of Mackinder’s appointment its regulations required that for Greek and Roman history examinations students should know as much classical geography ‘as shall be necessary for the profitable study of the authors and periods which [the candidates in the Final School] offer’, though they evidently prepared for this on their own. In 1914, the year before Herbertson’s death, nearly a third of the 460 honours graduates had taken their degrees through the School of Literae Humaniores, and 36 per cent had earned honors in modern history. From the reforms of the 1850s to World War I the School of Literae Humaniores had pride of place in Oxford, and attracted ‘the intellectual elite of the university in 1914 and for many years afterward’. As one scholar, who called these graduates ‘the Proconsuls’, has written, the degree led to lucrative posts: ‘Most of the Oxford men who ruled the Empire in London and India had read classics.’5 Mackinder, a political realist long before he wrote Democratic Ideals and Reality, was not slow to discover where his local support lay. As J. L. Myres put it later, ‘Mackinder had a genius for taking help where he could find it….’ The Roman historian, Henry Pelham, the Camden Professor of Ancient History, had played an important role in rendering the Royal Geographical Society’s proposals acceptable to the Oxford establishment. As we have seen, Mackinder, Pelham, and J. L. 243

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Myres had formed the three-person committee that drafted the plan for the School of Geography and its diploma course. Two of the three were ancient historians, and in the initial plan a lectureship in ancient geography was to be one of the first positions created in the new School. George Brodrick, who had taken a ‘First’ in classics in 1853, was now Warden of Merton College, in which capacity he had entertained delegates to the London International Geographical Congress in 1895 in Merton College Hall. Brodrick was both a member of the Council of the Royal Geographical Society and of Oxford’s Common University Fund, and played an important role at higher levels.6 Though Mackinder had theoretically resisted the separation of physical and human geography, in practice he had come to accept the fact that at Oxford his bread was buttered on the side of the humanities. Enrollments in geography lectures from 1887 onward largely depended on the requirements of the examination schools. As he wrote in an unfinished autobiography, ‘The decisive move at Oxford itself came when I arranged an alliance with the faculty of modern history…. I could not have carried out my mission had I limited myself to one or two faithful and probably second rate disciples [!] who would have seen the subject whole’. In contrast to his physical geography lectures, those on the historical geography of Great Britain and of Europe drew from 60 to a 100 listeners a term. Students attended them not because Mackinder was a great lecturer (though he was), but because his lectures aided them in their examinations. In lecturing in these fields, Mackinder was essentially enlarging the bridgehead in modern history earlier established by Hereford B. George, who as we have seen had for many years given weekly lectures on modern political and historical geography one term a year for the School of Modern History. In that School, however, the previously required paper on ‘Historical or Political Geography’ had been abolished in 1885 as a requirement of all degree candidates, though the School continued to require some knowledge of geography as appropriate to particular periods and examination papers.7 Mackinder’s use of the terms ‘mission’ and ‘faithful’ are important here. Mackinder was the St Paul of early British professional geography, inserting himself into various walled citadels to convert as many of their inhabitants as possible to the new teaching. Leonard Cantor had caught this element admirably when he observed, 244

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‘Mackinder worked with fanatical zeal spreading the gospel of modern geography’ [italics mine]. The new School of Geography, when it opened in 1899, was not authorized to offer degrees, but only a oneyear diploma course for those who had already graduated in another subject. As Cantor said, ‘its prime object was to convert graduates in other subjects such as history into teachers of geography for public and grammar schools’ [italics mine]. Cantor also noted that this was only a part of a larger effort. Mackinder continued to lecture in the Oxford Extension program for another six years after his appointment as Reader in 1887. In the winter of 1893 he gave a series of ‘Educational Lectures’ at the University of London on ‘The Relations of Geography to History in Europe and Asia’, he lectured regularly at teacher training institutions, and indeed wherever he could get a hearing, much like the missionary journeys of St Paul. In addition, from 1888 onward he and Keltie were co-editors of a new series of school texts, of which Mackinder’s own was still in use in the 1930s. During the 1890s Mackinder resembled the Anglican church pluralists of the earlier part of the century, in that while Reader at Oxford he simultaneously held posts as Principal of the Oxford extension college at Reading (now the University of Reading) and Lecturer in Geography at the new London School of Economics, of which he subsequently became Director. Cantor reminds us, again using religion-laden rhetoric, that the new School’s vacation courses in geography, beginning in 1902, were ‘also used to convert practicing teachers and others to Geography’. In 1903 the School was authorized to award a certificate to those, presumably history or classics teachers, who wished to specialize in only one particular area of geography. In short, though Mackinder was certainly no saint, he was an avid practitioner of what, in religious circles, is called ‘sheepstealing’, in order to build up the geographical flock.8 Mackinder became an ex officio member of the governing board of the School of Modern History in 1892. Three years later, in a discussion of educational progress at the London International Geographical Congress, Mackinder declared that, at Oxford, ‘it is absolutely essential that we should subordinate [geography] to the historical faculty’. And in Mackinder’s last year at Oxford, 1904–05, a perceptive American student noted 245

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the courses are planned to meet the wants of several classes of university students, rather than those of professional geographers. All but a small minority of students pursue one or more of the courses in geography as adjuncts to courses in ancient and modern history, education, military science and civil administration’.9

To the extent that geography was serving a useful purpose, throughout Mackinder’s reign that service was as a ‘handmaid’ to other university programs. Tailoring the new School’s programs to the prestige schools as a strategy for recruiting ‘converts’ was less successful than Mackinder had initially hoped, though a handful of them, especially from the School of Modern History, did become leaders in British geography in the next generation.

G. B. GRUNDY: RESEARCHER IN GREEK TOPOGRAPHY In his survey of geographical education just prior to Mackinder’s appointment at Oxford, J. Scott Keltie had remarked of Oxford: ‘classical geography is expected in the Literae Humaniores School, but classical geography in this country is an extremely meagre affair’. Given the preeminence of the Honour School of Literae Humaniores and the makeup of the joint Oxford-RGS committee formed to supervise the newly contemplated School of Geography in the late 1890s, it is not surprising that, in setting up the table of organization, the Oxford committee had agreed, with Keltie’s approval and as recommended by the RGS President, Sir Clements Markham, that one of the part-time lectureships should be devoted to the geography of the ancient Mediterranean world. As Mackinder later saw it, this lecturer was ‘to supplement on the side of Ancient history my teaching in connection with Modern history’. The choice of lecturer in classical geography fell to G. Beardoe Grundy of Brasenose College, ‘a protégé of Pelham’, Myres recalled. Since 1897 Pelham had been President of Trinity College, and was thus a powerful ally in Mackinder’s campaign to establish the new School.10 Grundy, a graduate of the School of Literae Humaniores, was currently Pelham’s professorial lecturer for ancient Greek history. Grundy

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accepted the School’s ancient geography lectureship as a supplementary responsibility, even though he makes it clear in his autobiography that he had little use for Mackinder’s scholarship. He was to be paid 50 pounds a year for his ancient geography lectures. A kind of rough justice was in play here, since a Readership in Ancient History, originally established by Brasenose funds, had been suppressed by the Delegates of the Common University Fund to provide for Oxford’s share of Mackinder’s Readership in Geography in 1887. In 1892 Grundy had been the first recipient of the Oxford geographical traveling studentship, as the best of four ‘qualified gentlemen’. This award had been worth 100 pounds, a substantial sum in the 1890s, and was funded equally by Oxford and the Royal Geographical Society. It was one of a series of such awards, open only to literae humaniores graduates, presumably in the hope of attracting some of the university’s best students to geography and, perhaps, of lending it some of the prestige associated with that program. The matter of disciplinary status was of some moment in that time and place. A few years later, when O. G. S. Crawford switched from ‘Greats’ to the geography diploma course (which initially could only be counted toward a third of a ‘pass’ degree, and not at all toward honours), the move was perceived, he recalled, as ‘like leaving the parlour for the basement’. Breaking the news to his tutor, he claimed, was ‘like a son telling his father he had decided to marry a barmaid’.11 Grundy had spent the first of his two fellowship years preparing for and then doing fieldwork in Greece, initially in Boeotia, then in Italy. Part of his preparation was taking instruction in cartography and surveying at the Royal Geographical Society, which at that time had such a program for intending scientific travelers. Grundy, who had headed the Oxford Military College at nearby Cowley, had a special interest in battlefield topography, and in several cases, braving summer heat, winter rain and sleet, as well as malaria and human hazards, was the first to make accurate surveys and maps of ancient battlefields, notably Thermopylae and Plataea. The Plataea research was undertaken in December 1892 and January 1893. Though Grundy initially had in mind only a paper to be delivered before the Society, his research was eventually published in book form in 1894, as an RGS ‘Supplementary Paper’. Support from Oxford sources enabled

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him to continue his research in Greece during the Long Vacations of 1895 and 1899.12 Grundy’s Persian War studies had been stimulated by his association with R. W. Macan of University College, Oxford, an authority on Herodotus. Grundy’s research was directed toward establishing the reliability of the ‘Father of History’ (and, some would argue, ‘Father of Geography’ as well) through precise topographical surveys of the sites of major battles of the Persian Wars. For Plataea, Grundy concluded that Herodotus had either visited the site himself or spoken with reliable witnesses who had been at the battle. Grundy’s approach was in sharp contrast to the earlier rough and ready observational analysis and crude sketch maps of the sites by earlier classical travelers. Even William Leake’s observations, valuable as they were in awakening interest in Greek topography, had often been made on the basis of brief site visits. They had, of course, been unaccompanied by the detailed archaeological investigations common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The topographical survey method Grundy was the first to establish in Greek lands was a more accurate way of establishing potential sites to be excavated. Crawford pointed out in 1955 that Grundy, ‘with his usual eye for topography’, had identified the Hill of Colonos at Thermopylae as the place where the Persians had slaughtered Leonidas and his 300 Spartans and Boeotians, a location confirmed by the evidence of the spade only in the 1930s.13 Grundy’s dogged persistence in the area where he was able to spend lengthy periods of time in the 1890s convinced him that earlier observers had not studied the ground in sufficient detail, and thus had developed elaborate and unnecessary theories to explain discrepancies between text and site that actually did not exist. ‘When I had been on the field three days’, he says of Plataea, I thought I knew the ground off by heart. After I had been there a week I found that I was only beginning to know it, and it was not until I had surveyed the whole of it, and had been over the important parts of it twice, or in some cases three times… that I fully recognized how exceedingly erroneous was the impression I had formed at the end of the first three days.

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Grundy estimated that he had hiked for more than 200 miles during his stay at Plataea, much of it through muddy tracks and across streams filled with winter rainwater. His monograph contains three maps, one a plan of the battlefields of Plataea and Leuctra at a scale of four inches to the mile, another of the whole Plataea site, at eight inches to the mile, and a plan of the ruins at the northern end of that battlefield.14 In 1901, during his time as lecturer in classical geography in the School of Geography, Grundy published his major work, The Great Persian War and its Preliminaries, subtitled ‘A Study of the Evidence, Literary and Topographical’, which he dedicated to Pelham. Among other maps, the book contains an important topographical map of Thermopylae, which he had surveyed in the summer of 1899. The work is illustrated with Grundy’s own field sketches, photographs, and other maps, as well as a selection of Edward Lear’s watercolor Greek landscapes. This massive, nearly 600-page volume incorporates Grundy’s continuing topographical research into a study of the accuracy of Herodotus and subsequent commentators. In it, he called Herodotus ‘the best topographer among ancient historians’. He varied greatly in precision, however, depending on the differential quality of his knowledge of the different sites. Grundy thought that Herodotus’ description of Marathon, for example, was weakly developed, suggesting that Herodotus had never visited the site. But for Thermopylae, Grundy argued, ‘the author’s exceedingly accurate description of the topography of the district could only proceed from the pen of one who had seen the place, and had examined it with some care’.15 Grundy, though clearly interested in geography as setting the environmental context of Greek and Roman history (which meant, for the most part, of military history), was both more precise and somewhat less determinist in his approach to nature-culture problems than, for example, the older H. B. George. Although Grundy occasionally slipped into such deterministic generalizations as ‘it is the land that creates the man, not man the land’, his actual topographical studies described a landscape full of options. His Persians and Greeks choose this or that site or trail for reasons that seemed rational given their degree of knowledge of the site and the technology of the time. Once these choices had been made, however, topographical constraints became central to their actual military operations. In 249

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these respects, Grundy’s mind-set resembles that of Herodotus, whose narrative he was testing by his surveys. Grundy’s special claim for his book was that it rested on field evidence of the topography combined with accurate survey mapping.16 Dacre Balsdon called Grundy ‘the hero of every one of his own rousing adventure stories’. But Balsdon gave him credit for thoroughness. To prove Herodotus correct in saying that Greek hoplites had run for a mile in August heat before they began to fight, Grundy had a suit of hoplite armor custom-made, ran a mile to Marathon in August, and claimed he was still in ‘fighting fit’ when he completed it.17 Despite Grundy’s bent toward exact measurement, he was still capable of the high level of pictorial imagery and analogy that marked his nineteenth-century predecessors, such as Arnold or Tozer. In his Herodotus book, for example, he reconstructed the Boeotian plain as it would have been seen from Oak Heads Pass in 479 BC by the Greek army approaching what would become the Plataean battlefield. ‘The comparative monotony of the scenery of the plain itself is disguised by distance’, he wrote, ‘and that which strikes the eye most forcibly is the contrast between this huge extent of comparatively low level ground, and the magnificent frame of mountains which forms the horizon on every side.’ After describing the individual peaks, including Helicon and Parnassus, Grundy concluded that ‘there are but few extensive views in Greece comparable with it, and perhaps only one which excels it, that from Thaumaki on the road from Lamia northward, when the great plain of Thessaly, with its fringing ranges, is spread out like a sea before the spectator’. Lest this verbal description not make the look of the landscape sufficiently clear, he inserted Edward Lear’s sketch of the nearby plain of Kopais opposite his text.18 The reviewer of Grundy’s Persian War book in the Geographical Journal praised the author’s grasp of geographical and topographical features, referred to his earlier work as ‘full of promise’, and found in the new volume ‘ample justification… of the policy adopted by the [Royal Geographical] Society, of encouraging the scientific study of geography at the Universities’. On the basis of his substantial research, Grundy was awarded the new Oxford degree of Doctor of Letters (Litt.D.) in 1902. His The Great Persian War is a more substantial 250

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and original work of scholarship than Mackinder’s much-praised text, Britain and the British Seas, also published in 1902. Although by this time Mackinder had been Reader for 15 years, his Britain book was the first scholarly volume he had produced. (T. W. Freeman, a major historian of British geography in his time, later claimed that Mackinder’s book ‘has acquired a veneration from [British] geographers that is exaggerated’.) In half that time (1894–1901) Grundy had published two books and a substantial number of articles in leading classical journals.19 Grundy followed his Herodotus book with further journal articles and by his major work, a massive volume published in 1911 entitled Thucydides and the History of his Age. At the time of its publication, it was the only major study of Thucydides in English. That book also incorporated Grundy’s knowledge of the Greek landscape, and like its predecessor was illustrated with survey maps, field sketches and photographs. By virtue of its subject this book is less focused on topographical detail. But Grundy included in it a long essay, with informative and sometimes amusing footnotes, on ‘The Topography of Thucydides’. Essential to Grundy’s treatment of the ancient Greek economy is his ‘intimate acquaintance with the local conditions of the land’, to use a phrase he uses to praise other writers on ancient Greek history who possessed it. The Thucydides volume, long out of print, was reprinted without substantial change in a two-volume ‘second edition’ in 1948. One present-day military historian and classicist has concluded that Grundy’s book ‘remains a fascinating review of Thucydides’ own knowledge about the military, economic, and social conditions of fifth-century Greece.’20 Some of Grundy’s topographical identifications were challenged even in his own time, however. A bitter debate between Grundy and R. M. Burrows, both of whom had explored the region around Pylos in the summer of 1895, erupted over the pages of the principal classical journals between 1896 and 1908. Inevitably, after a century, Grundy’s work has either been superseded or corrected both by field reconnaissance and by archaeological excavation. Stretches of ground he was unable to survey on foot, by reason of such environmental hazards as snow in the mountain passes around Plataea or murderous Vlachs along what was then the Turkish border near Thermopylae,

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have since been studied by others, and some of his identifications have been altered as a result. A number of modern students of Greek topography have also criticized some of Grundy’s Plataean identifications, though others have found these criticisms too harsh. His sometime Oxford contemporary, Myres, credited Grundy for having been the first to make that battlefield intelligible. ‘The recent Greek staff-map adds little to his brilliant reconnaissance’; Myres wrote in 1952, ‘but not all his identifications are certain.’ An American classical topographer, W. K. Pritchett, while disagreeing with Grundy’s identifications in several papers, nevertheless said of Grundy’s contour map of the Plataean battlefield that it ‘remains the basic topographical tool’. Andrew Burn, who also made specific criticisms of some of Grundy’s work, reminds us that all great scholars were once young and remain ‘humanly fallible’. Burn refers to Grundy, however, as one ‘to whose work all local topographical studies owe so much’ and as ‘the father of modern Persian War topography’. John B. Wilson, in his more recent study of Pylos, believes both Grundy’s and Burrows’ solutions are inaccurate, but calls them ‘essential reading’. He also calls Grundy ‘the founding father of detailed topography in this period’, and acknowledges ‘a large debt’ to Burrows. But, Wilson writes, W. M. Leake remains ‘the most perceptive and sensible on Greek topography in general’.21

G. B. GRUNDY: GEOGRAPHY LECTURER AND CLASSICAL MAP EDITOR During his 13-year tenure (1899–1912) as University Lecturer in Classical Geography and staff member of the School of Geography, Grundy lectured on such topics as ‘The Historical Topography of Greece and the Greek World’ and ‘The Geographical Development of the Roman Empire’. In Hilary Term, 1901, he lectured specifically on ‘The Topography of Greece in Relation to Herodotus and Thucydides’, a topic not only growing out of his research and current publication but of interest to literae humaniores students, for whom these were essential authors. But, at least in theory, Grundy’s lectures were 252

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intended as partial preparation for one of the optional papers on the geography diploma syllabus, ‘Ancient Historical Geography (Political and Economic)’, whose terms required ‘A general knowledge of the historical geography of the Roman World, considered in relation to the influence of physical features. A more detailed knowledge of the historical geography of Greece and Italy’.22 As early as 1901, there were discussions in the supervising committee for geography, nominally over the compensation of the physical geographer, Henry Newton Dickson, but undoubtedly part of Mackinder’s larger struggle with Dickson over the intellectual direction of the School. In it, Mackinder defended the ancient geography position to the Committee, pointing out that Grundy could prepare students for the optional paper in military geography, one of Dickson’s offerings, should it be required.23 The principal demand for Grundy’s courses, however, came not from geography diploma students but from candidates for honours in the School of Literae Humaniores. Surviving figures show that Grundy’s enrollments consistently outpaced those of all members of the School of Geography save Mackinder’s historical courses, and sometimes exceeded even them. They were substantially ahead of the physical geography courses offered through the School by Dickson and others, which were low for much the same reasons as Mackinder’s had been. In 1901–02, Grundy’s Greek geography course, with 15 hearers, outpaced all others save Mackinder’s 47. In 1904 Mackinder had 56 students in the ‘Historical Geography of Europe’ and Grundy had 39 in his ‘Strategic Geography of Greece’ course. Raymond Beazley had 13 students for his lectures on Tudor discovery, Herbertson’s courses ran between five and seven students, and Dickson came in dead last, with three students in his military topography course, two in climate, and none in surveying.24 Grundy’s and Mackinder’s numbers indicate conclusively the continuing importance of Oxford geography’s service function for the examination schools in classics and history. But among students enrolled in the School of Geography full time, there seems to have been little interest in Grundy’s field among potential candidates for the geography diploma (or the later certificate). A 1904 survey showed that, although Grundy lectured during all three terms on various 253

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topics, including the geography of Herodotus, none of his students was taking any other geography courses. His courses were thus not advancing the program of the School of Geography, but rather preparing students for the honours examination in Greats. Grundy’s enrollments ran as high as 60 students in 1906. But in 1909 a Geography Committee survey noted that in the previous year no geography diploma candidate had taken the optional field in ancient historical geography.25

LATER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CLASSICAL LECTURESHIP In an address in December 1885, John Scott Keltie of the RGS had asserted that, despite the place of classics in British education, ‘in classical maps…we seem to be further behind Germany than even in ordinary maps’. As a teacher of classical geography and a sometime student of cartography, Grundy was also interested in improving the quality of classical maps and atlases. During the late 1890s Grundy had been asked by the publisher, John Murray, to revise William Smith’s Atlas of Ancient Geography (1872–4). These plans were never fully carried out, but between 1899 and 1905 Grundy edited or supervised the revision of a series of 11 maps from Smith’s atlas under the general title ‘Murray’s Handy Classical Maps’. (See Chapter 9.) The series included maps of Roman Britain (edited, as we have seen, by Francis Haverfield), Alexander’s empire, Gaul, the Roman Empire, Germany, Spain, Italy and Sicily, the Aegean Sea and Palestine as well as, of course, Greece (newly drawn by Grundy), and city maps of Rome and Athens. The Greek map was to prove useful to at least two other Oxford classicists with interests in the geography of ancient Greece. Arnold Toynbee, a successor in the School’s ancient geography lectureship, used Grundy’s map of Greece in his first major publication, on the growth of Sparta (1913), and Alfred Zimmern referred readers to it in his well-known and frequently reprinted classic, The Greek Commonwealth (1911).26 An inexpensive classical atlas designed for schoolboys, first published in December 1904 as Murray’s Small Classical Atlas, followed these. Like his maps, Grundy’s atlas was of far better quality than the 254

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standard British product of its time. He had selected a particularly legible typeface, taken from an ancient inscription, for both maps and atlas and substituted colored contours for the more traditional hachuring. Grundy’s inspired choice of typeface made the place names more legible, particularly the ones that on older maps had been set across hachuring. His recommendation that Murray use colored contouring both for the maps and the atlas was based on Grundy’s knowledge of European, and especially Austrian, cartography, and enabled him to give the topography greater prominence in his maps. ‘The configuration of a country must necessarily be the most important factor in its history’, he wrote, ‘since it exercises an influence not merely on events but also on the character of its population.’ Not surprisingly, the atlas contained 14 maps of famous battlefields.27 Nora MacMunn of the Oxford School of Geography staff, drawing up a list of historical maps and atlases for a leaflet published by the Historical Association, found Grundy’s cartographic work ‘very useful’ in that his orographical maps depicted ‘the physical nature of the country as well as its changes of destiny’. Apparently, other teachers found Grundy’s cartography satisfactory as well: the wall maps were reissued as late as 1967, and a second edition of the atlas, published in 1917 as Murray’s Classical Atlas for Schools, was reprinted seven times over the next 50 years. O. G. S. Crawford had been impressed by the small map of Roman Britain in Grundy’s atlas at school, and went on to publish a larger and better-known map of Roman Britain for the Ordnance Survey in 1924 (2nd edition, 1928). In the 1940s, a British historian of classical geography described the maps in the second edition of Grundy’s atlas and his ‘Handy Classical Maps’ series as ‘really beautiful, with coloured relief’. And as late as 2000 another Oxford ancient historian held, with somewhat exaggerated local pride, that Grundy had been ‘responsible for the best maps ever produced of the ancient world’.28 The School of Geography was experiencing financial difficulties, however. In 1904 the stipends for all three lecturers (Grundy, Beazley and Dickson, all productive and original scholars) were cut back to 30 pounds and the number of lectures reduced, an action that was part of the background for Dickson’s resignation in that year. Grundy’s enrollments continued to remain high in relation to those of other 255

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members of the faculty, however, particularly after total enrollments dropped following Mackinder’s departure in 1905. Since the School was to some degree fee-dependent, Mackinder’s leaving had meant a further drop in income. By 1907 the School could no longer fund either Grundy or Beazley for more than one course of weekly lectures for one term per year. Myres left the School’s supervisory committee that same year for his three years at the University of Liverpool. In lieu of Mackinder’s historical geography courses, Herbertson first arranged a year of lectures on the historical geography of Britain by various Oxford scholars, beginning with one by Francis Haverfield on Roman Britain. Then the School’s Demonstrator, Nora MacMunn, who had graduated in Modern History, offered a few lectures on ‘topography in relation to history’. Those geography students wishing to offer modern historical geography as a special subject for the diploma, a field now seen as the application of topographic principles to particular histories, were to be referred to history tutors, at additional cost.29 Two years later, Beazley left Oxford for a professorship in the University of Birmingham. (Miss MacMunn subsequently picked up the work in the history of geography, though in the form of tutorials rather than lectures.) From 1909 onward the Geographical Committee began openly to express reservations about funding lectures primarily directed toward preparation for the examination schools rather than the geography diploma and certificate programs. In any case, geography as a discipline was moving in a less historical, more contemporary direction. The lectureship in ancient geography, which the Committee first tried to get the Board of the School of Literae Humaniores to continue and finance, seemed increasingly anachronistic and was certainly irrelevant to the School’s program. In June 1911 the Committee reappointed Grundy (for the sum of 30 pounds) for 1911–12, but voted to discontinue the lectureship in ancient geography by the end of 1912 unless other financial arrangements could be made for it. Grundy, whose principal responsibilities after 1903 had been as Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History in Corpus Christi College, ceased lecturing through the School of Geography in 1912 and went off on another expedition to Greece, where he had done additional work in

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1905, lecturing en route on Marathon during a cruise for the Hellenic Travellers’ Club.30 The growing pressure to restrict the hitherto successful service function, which in the long run was a counterproductive move in political terms (as Mackinder had cautioned), had presumably also caused hard feelings between the School and Grundy. In 1921 Mackinder had heralded ‘my friend Prof. J. L. Myres as a pioneer in the application of geography’ to research in archaeology, but did not mention Grundy, who had preceded Myres in such efforts. By 1925, according to C. M. Bowra, although he ‘had once done good work on the geography of the battlefields of the Persian Wars in Greece’, Grundy was ‘now past his prime’, and ‘an arrogant, self-satisfied man who paid no attention to what other scholars wrote on his subject and never revised his views in the light of new discoveries’. Bowra was more satisfied with Grundy’s successor as Tutor in Corpus Christi College, Alan Blakeway, who turned out several excellent scholars, in contrast to Grundy, who, according to the acerbic Bowra, ‘had a name for getting second classes for his first-class pupils, whom he encouraged to read no books but his own’.31 As Brian Blouet pointed out, Grundy did not mention his service with the School in his autobiography, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford. In the oft-reprinted 1901 photograph of the School of Geography staff and its first diploma candidates, Grundy is the only staff member missing. On the title pages of the two major works Grundy published during his years with the School, he identified himself solely as lecturer on ancient geography, omitting reference to any affiliation with the School of Geography. On the identifying title page of his atlas (1904), there is no mention of either ancient geography or the School. Such silences speak volumes to any historian of higher education. Since 1900, Grundy had argued for an Oxford diploma course in classical archaeology, and ten years later had seen it come to fruition. After leaving the School, Grundy went on to edit a book of new translations of selections from the Greek Anthology (1913), to write a massive history of Greece and Rome (1926), and to make several studies of place names and boundaries in Roman and Saxon England. The War Office employed him during World War I, putting his detailed knowledge of Greece to work for wartime intelligence needs. He published his memoir, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford: An Unconventional 257

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Autobiography, in 1945. The only mention of Mackinder in it is a sharply critical one. Although Grundy had ended his formal affiliation with Oxford geography more than a third of a century earlier, an unsigned obituary notice in the Geographical Journal referred to him as ‘the notable classical geographer’ and praised ‘the wide range of his interests and his formidable industry which did so much to stimulate the study of classical geography’. The writer singled out for recognition not only the study of Plataea, an RGS publication, but took special notice of The Great Persian War, which the memorialist thought to be ‘remarkable for the way the major battles are related to the topography of their sites’.32

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE: TWENTY-SOMETHING CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHER Grundy had three short-term successors in the School of Geography’s ancient geography lectureship. Maurice Thompson, a Christ Church alumnus and a protégé of Myres, who had been working at the British School in Athens since 1907, was engaged in 1912 to give a single course of eight lectures on ‘The Geography of Ancient Greece’ in the autumn term of 1913 (which ultimately drew only ten students, three of them women) and also to arrange the School’s maps of the Mediterranean world, for a total stipend of 50 pounds. At the British School, Thomson had worked jointly with Alan J. B. Wace on a field study of the topography of ancient Thessaly, and in 1913 published a study of deforestation in ancient Greece.33 Thompson’s temporary appointment enabled him to put more of his Greek research into shape for publication, and to continue a scholar’s career rather than accept a guaranteed salary in his family’s business, which he had been on the verge of doing. (After service in the Great War, Thompson was to become Honorary Secretary for the British School and for the Hellenic Society in London.) It also bought the Geographical Committee time to consider the future of the classical geography lectureship. The committee finally agreed to allocate 20 or 25 pounds for a weekly lecture during one term, and four 258

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pounds per term for private instruction to any geography diploma candidates ‘selecting ancient historical geography as a special subject, should there be any such students’. Under that rather tenuous arrangement, the precocious 24-year-old Arnold J. Toynbee, then tutorial fellow in Greek and Roman history in Balliol College, was appointed as lecturer on ancient geography in the School of Geography during Michaelmas term, 1913–14, at a stipend of 20 pounds, and to give informal instruction in this area.34 Toynbee’s interest in ancient Greece and its geography had been awakened at Winchester College, where his Greek history teacher, Montague Rendall, had made his class come alive with photographs and accounts of his own travels there. An uncle’s gift of a historical atlas stimulated the young Toynbee to begin drawing his own manuscript historical maps. At Oxford, he took coveted Firsts in both ‘Mods’ and ‘Greats’. For the ‘Greats’ examination, in both ancient history and Greek history Toynbee had chosen the classical geography question as one of his three written and oral (‘viva’) examination topics. In the first, he was to ‘illustrate the manner in which ancient historians were affected by the difficulty of obtaining adequate geographical knowledge’. On the second, he was required to ‘trace the history of the Athenian Empire in the Thraceward district, and show what special difficulties confronted Athens there’.35 Toynbee had also written an essay for an undergraduate club, ‘What the Historian Does’, in which one thesis was that ‘So far from geography keeping humanity constant, the face of the earth is changed by human action’, illustrating the point with examples of plant introductions, soil erosion resulting from deforestation, and the possibility of human-induced climate change, to demonstrate that ‘Human action can change the character of a country for better or for worse’.36 Historians of American geography will note that this argument of this lecture, given by an Oxford undergraduate in the academic year 1910–11, was 20 years in advance of the discovery of that theme in George Perkins Marsh’s book Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Transformed by Human Action (1864), by the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. A century later, the theme of what is now called ‘the human dimensions of environmental change’ has once again become a cutting-edge topic for research and teaching. 259

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Two Oxford dons had nurtured Toynbee’s classical geography interests in his years as a Balliol undergraduate. One was Alfred E. Zimmern, whose lectures in Greek history in the summer of 1909 made the ancient world live for Toynbee ‘by taking it for granted that the Greeks had been real people, living in a real world….’ Although Zimmern had not yet been to the Aegean, his lectures were so evocative of place that Toynbee thought he had. Zimmern resigned from Oxford in 1909 to spend a year in Greece. Toynbee urged him to stay connected, writing ‘I should rather like to hear what the places look like when you really see them’. Zimmern revised his Oxford lectures during his stay in Greece, and these formed the core of his 1911 classic work, The Greek Commonwealth, which begins with a lengthy and vivid geographical description of the ancient Greek world. Toynbee later recalled Zimmern’s lectures as ‘the prelude to a lesson I was to finish learning, two and a half years later, in Greece itself’. They remained lifelong friends, and in 1914 Toynbee drew the map of Attica for the second edition of Zimmern’s book, which its author described in his preface as a ‘great addition’ to the work.37

13. Arnold J. Toynbee, Map of Attica, c. 1914

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The second don was Myres, who during Toynbee’s first years at Oxford was teaching at the University of Liverpool. But Toynbee must have become acquainted with Myres soon after the latter’s return to Oxford to fill the Wykeham professorship. It is also probable, given Toynbee’s interests, that he attended Myres inaugural lecture, ‘Greek Lands and the Greek People’, on 11 November 1910. Certainly by the time Toynbee was elected to a Balliol fellowship in 1911, with an initial year of funding so that he could spend the academic year 1911–12 in preparation by traveling to Italy and Greece, he and Myres had become close. In February 1912 Myres wrote Thompson, then still in Athens, ‘Give my love to Wace, Toynbee, and the others’.38 Toynbee accepted the terms of his Balliol appointment with alacrity. ‘I knew at once what I was going to do’, he recalled in old age. ‘I was going to complete my Greek education by spending the Wanderjahr [sic] on seeing with my own eyes, for the first time, the physical landscape of the Greek World that had become my spiritual home.’ He left England on 22 September 1911 and, after a few weeks in Italy, arrived at Piraeus on 20 November. The next day he and Thompson climbed Mt Hymettus, and two days later he was off for the Greek islands. Toynbee was based at the British School and had the use of its extensive library. But he later estimated that he had also walked between two and three thousand miles during his stay in Greece. As he was to write much later, ‘Human beings and human societies cannot be understood apart from their environment, and their geographical environment cannot be apprehended at second hand’.39 Sometimes Toynbee’s excursions were made with Wace or Thompson, and sometimes with his Balliol contemporary, Rob Darbyshire. Yet he was often alone, coping with fatigue, fleas, bad water, dysentery and even an arrest as a putative Turkish spy. In December he set out for Boeotia to check out the identifications Grundy had earlier made at Eleutherae and Plataea. (‘All honour to Grundy’s work’, Toynbee wrote in his diary.) On Christmas Day 1911 he wrote his mother from Nauplia that he and Thompson had walked there from Mycenae that morning, and had spent the evening climbing the 999 steps to the Venetian fortress of Palamidi; ‘Hereafter Rob, Thompson and I plunge wildly into Arkadia’. Another weekend walking trip with Thompson saw Toynbee at Corinth, and in January he and Darby261

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shire headed north to Thessaly and beyond. ‘Toynbee very energetic’, Thompson wrote Myres, ‘in fact, too much so. He is excellent company and most awfully clever’. They, too, were to become lifelong friends.40 Toynbee’s verbal responses, freehand maps, and quick field sketches show that he had the eye of a classic field geographer. ‘Now I have got it all in sharp outline’, Toynbee wrote his mother from Delos, ‘how the actual stones and streets and hills and cisterns supplement the books.’ During a few days respite at the British School, he told her, ‘I am working at topography and military history – much the same thing. I could almost turn specialist in that line.’ And from Lamia, where he and Darbyshire were en route to join Wace at Volo, he wrote ‘The maps speak to one in quite a new way after one has set eyes on the country – even if it is only one glance, and it is not a thing anyone else can impart – one must go and see for oneself. Still, I shall do what I can to make people realize it, when I teach.’41 Returning in August 1912, Toynbee began teaching at Balliol in October. He had published a brief textual note on Herodotus while still an undergraduate. But his first major publication was a two-part essay on ‘The Growth of Sparta’, in 1913. It reflected his experience of exploring the southern Peloponnese in the spring of 1912. His biographer, William H. McNeill, accurately describes it as combining ‘a close criticism of textual evidence with a keen eye for the landscape of Laconia and Messenia….’ Toynbee also gave a series of lantern-slide lectures on Greek historical geography at the Ashmolean Museum by invitation of Percy Gardner, the Professor of Classical Archaeology. Myres also wrote Gilbert Murray, Toynbee’s future father-in-law, urging him to persuade Toynbee to offer an informal course in classical archaeology while Myres was absent from Oxford as the first Sather lecturer at the University of California. In December 1913, at the age of 24, Toynbee was appointed lecturer in classical geography in the Oxford School of Geography for that year. It is likely that both Thompson and Myres had recommended the appointment. Myres, besides being a member of the Committee on Geography, was also a close friend of Andrew Herbertson, then Director of the School.42

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Full manuscripts for Toynbee’s classical geography lectures in the spring of 1914 apparently do not survive. A detailed syllabus for the course and a complete lecture (‘From Isotherms to Minoan Crete’), given for Myres, however, who was lecturing at the University of California in the spring of 1914, survive in Myres’ papers. Myres also notes on the syllabus for his own 1914 lectures that the fifth, ‘The Economic Basis of Society Under Mediterranean Conditions’, was actually ‘delivered by Toynbee in my absence’.43 With these and other materials, such as his letters and diaries during his Greek Wanderjahre and, with care, from his later writings, Toynbee’s contribution to classical geography at Oxford can be reconstructed. Toynbee’s approach was grounded in his assessment of the human significance of the geographical environment. His primary interest was in the human geography of the ancient Mediterranean, even though the title of his second, 1914–15 lecture series for the School sounds deterministic to our ears: ‘The Influence of the Geography of Greece on the Political History of the Ancient World’. His first three lectures dealt with the environmental aspects of ancient Greece, including an assessment of Greece as ‘an easy type of country to adapt to man’s uses’. The other five lecture topics included migration and settlement, ‘synoekismos’ (or the formation of the polis), ‘Greece as an Exploitable Outland’, and ‘Aegean Greece as the Centre of a Mediterranean Trade-System’. As Toynbee wrote Gilbert Murray in July 1914, fresh from his course and now working on the early chapters of Hellenism, which Murray had commissioned for the Home University Library, ‘I want to bring out how much they did with their materials’. His lecture for Myres contains similar statements: ‘Human significance of a geographical area means you can make your living in it by certain obvious definite means’, and ‘Nature is hard on man, but he can conquer her by stages. If he makes a mistake on one path, he can retrieve himself on another.’44 Notes for another set of lectures in the Toynbee papers, ‘The Growth of Greece’, are undated and the venue is uncertain, but these, too, appear to have been given while he was at Oxford. In the first lecture of this series, Toynbee began, ‘with the country, because it is a strong country which moulds its inhabitants. Trace the relation of country and people till the balance shifts to the people, then follow their effect on their own country and the World’. In his second 263

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lecture, ‘Geography’, Toynbee discussed the physical geography of the land, and in successive lectures treated Greek village life, the coming together of the polis, the Greeks as seafarers, traders and colonizers, and ‘The Greek Human Product’. On top of the first page of his lecture notes is a penciled aphorism: ‘Country no use without race, nor race without country.’45 In 1913–14 Toynbee lectured to literae humaniores students on Roman history, especially on the Carthaginian conquest of Rome under Hannibal. These two, he recalled, in addition to his reading, owed something to his ‘seven weeks walking and bicycling round Rome in 1911’. Toynbee had expected to turn these lectures into a book, but the Great War and other responsibilities intervened and he did not take up the subject again until 1957, after his retirement. The resulting two-volume work, Hannibal’s Legacy, devotes a good deal of space to the geographic impact of the Carthaginian invasion.46 Toynbee’s first lectures under the auspices of the School of Geography had apparently proven quite satisfactory to Herbertson, and he was asked to give them again the following year. By that time, however, Britain was deeply immersed in the Great War, and Toynbee, who had used his Greek dysentery as a reason to avoid a combat role, wanted to do his share. So in 1915 he left his Oxford position in the midst of the spring term to join James Bryce on a government inquiry into allegations of Turkish atrocities against the Armenians. Myres finished out Toynbee’s scheduled lectures in the School of Geography. But Myres, too, soon left for three years of war service in the Mediterranean. No further courses of lectures in classical geography were offered through the School’s regular program, though ‘ancient geography’ remained an optional field for its diploma and certificate programs until 1924. Toynbee’s geographical interests were to be reflected in several publications during the war, especially his volume Nationality and the War, published in April 1915. In its preface, Toynbee asserted that ‘the chief course of this book is an ingrained habit of gazing at maps’, and indicates that his own maps in it were compiled in part from German maps and atlases, including a historical atlas.47 In late July, the overworked Herbertson, who had a heart condition, died prematurely. His death severed the connection between the School and the Board of Modern History, on which both Mackinder 264

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and he had been ex-officio members. According to a note from Dorothy Herbertson informing Toynbee of her husband’s death, almost Herbertson’s last words on the morning he died were to express his hope that Toynbee would succeed him as head of the School of Geography.48 Given that Toynbee had just left Oxford for a form of wartime service, however, it is unlikely he would have accepted the position had it been offered. After the war Toynbee was appointed to the newly created Koraes Professorship of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the University of London. Having revisited Greece in the Spring of 1921, he returned to Oxford in Trinity Term 1922 to give another series of eight lectures, on ‘The Historical Geography of Greece’, which he had earlier given at the University of London to an audience of two King’s College students. Although the titles differed from those of his earlier lectures for the School of Geography, probably the content was not greatly changed from the lectures of his Oxford years. In this case, the lectures have survived in full manuscript form in the Toynbee papers. William McNeill has characterized these manuscripts as revealing ‘a sensitivity to patterns of human geography that resembles the mastery of Mediterranean landscapes later exhibited by Fernand Braudel’; high praise, indeed. A set of instructions Toynbee wrote in 1929, concerning his planned Study of History, indicates that he believed the early volumes should draw from both his prewar and his postwar drafts on the historical geography of Greece and of the Mediterranean generally.49 In these classical geography lectures one can see the seeds of Toynbee’s later works on the comparative development of civilizations. The historical geography of Greece was important for three reasons: (1) it provided a case study of the relations of a society’s physical condition to its civilization; (2) it illustrated that great civilizations have localized roots; and (3) Greece ‘with its permanent geographical features’ had left an important legacy to several successor civilizations. Toynbee discussed the specifics in two lectures entitled ‘The Permanent Geographical Features’, including a section on the contrast between mountains and plains. The next pair of lectures stressed the division between mountain and plains cultures through mediaeval Constantinople. Succeeding lectures examined the union of mountain and plain through the polis (including a 265

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section on the unification of Greece from the Revolution of 1821 through 1920), the coordination of land and sea through maritime expansion, and the issue of cooperation among communities, both ancient and modern. In the lectures, Toynbee contended that the environment is not, as some had argued, irrelevant to Greek civilization. On the contrary, he asserted, ‘anyone who has travelled or lived in Greece realises that the country has conditioned not only the economic and military activities of the inhabitants, but their architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, drama, religion, philosophy…’ He was not arguing here for environmental control, however. He went on to say that, ‘All environments that have given birth to civilizations have a common characteristic from the human point of view: they are difficult to make a living in, but once a community has mastered them they reward its effort at compound interest.’ Criticizing the tendency of some historians, in considering the role of the environment, to exaggerate its influence, Toynbee cautioned, ‘the importance of geographical environment is in inverse ratio to the degree of social development’. One masters the physical environment, in Toynbee’s view, through social cooperation, which becomes more important as civilization develops.50

THE DECLINE OF CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE OXFORD SCHOOL Oxford geography in the supposed ‘Golden Age’ of Mackinder and Herbertson was really in a very fragile position. As both Brian Blouet and Paul Coones have concluded, it ‘nearly died with Herbertson in 1915’. The Committee for Geography struggled for a few years to retain a place for classical geography in the School of Geography program after Toynbee’s departure, through various ad hoc arrangements. Initially, a Committee member – Francis Haverfield – tried to fill the gap. He had lectured on ‘Geographic Aspects of Roman Britain’ in the Vacation Course in 1914. Haverfield included lectures on the economic, strategic and political geography of the Roman world in his regular courses, and even gave two public lectures under School spon266

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sorship on the geography and history of Roman Britain. As we have seen, Haverfield was ill during the war and died in 1919. The Minutes of the Committee on Geography show that his colleagues felt the ‘great loss which the School of Geography and geographical studies in Oxford’ had sustained in the death of this stalwart champion of the discipline. In the revised syllabus of 1918, the Committee announced that, though no lectures in classical geography had been offered through the School since 1915, ancient geography would remain an optional examination subject. Students were warned, however, that preparation for this field would cost geography students extra fees, since historians or classicists outside the School would be giving the instruction. The syllabus also indicated that the historical geography of Greek colonization would be emphasized.51 Certainly H. O. Beckit, who ultimately succeeded Herbertson as Reader and Director of the School, was an inappropriate choice, made apparently largely for financial reasons. Mackinder himself had strongly opposed Beckit’s appointment as Director, favoring either D. C. Hogarth, who had lectured on ancient geography at Oxford in the 1890s and had become a specialist on the geography of the ancient Near East, or Grant Robertson, an All Souls historian who had given historical geography lectures through the School. As Mackinder wrote to Douglas Freshfield at the Royal Geographical Society in 1919, ‘No man will make an influential position for himself as a Geographer at Oxford who is not strong on the Humane side…. What we need at this moment is a man with personality and broad ability…’ Beckit had none of the attributes Mackinder, on the basis of long experience, had deemed essential in the Oxford context. He was an able field geomorphologist and a useful compiler of data for others, as well as a conscientious tutor. But he had no ties to either the Schools of Literae Humaniores or Modern History, was a poor administrator, suffered from ill health, published his few papers on physical geography, and was, moreover, a terrible lecturer. While not quite dead (though a number of Oxford voices were calling for its execution, as a non-university subject), the School remained in a state of desuetude. Student numbers declined, and Beckit was unable to avert the cutbacks in the School’s financial support from the University and the RGS during the war, or the complete loss of the Society’ annual subsidy in 1924. Even his colleagues, writing the obligatory obituary no267

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tice for the Geographical Journal, had to acknowledge ‘his immense labours [were] often barren of result’. In short, Beckit was the perfect counter-example to Leonard Cantor’s thesis that early geography in Britain was made possible by ‘gifted and visionary’ geographers, and was probably the worst choice of the available candidates to lead the Oxford School of Geography through the 1920s.52 Although in 1921 an early draft of a proposed geography honours examination syllabus envisioned two papers each in ancient historical geography, modern [i.e., post-Roman] historical geography, and the history of geography, nothing came of that premature plan. In May 1922 the Committee lamented that there was no regular provision anywhere at Oxford for systematic instruction in any variety of historical geography, which it described as ‘one of the earliest activities of the School of Geography and in the opinion of the Committee, an essential part of the work which it should be enabled to perform’. Their appeals for financial support for such provision, however, first to the General Board of Faculties and the University Chest, then to the boards of the Schools of Literae Humaniores and of Modern History, met with no success.53 In 1923 J. N. L. Baker, who had graduated with distinction from the School of Modern History and also the diploma course of the School of Geography, was appointed to the staff, beginning a distinguished career in the [largely post-classical] history of geography, though he devoted a fine chapter on the ancient Mediterranean world in his classic History of Geographical Discovery and Exploration (1931). In March 1924 new regulations for the geography diploma erased the distinction between ancient and modern historical geography as special fields, as had long been the case at Cambridge. The new rules also provided, however, that examinees in historical geography might specialize in either an ancient or a modern region or period. In any case, as we have seen, regular instruction in ancient geography through the School of Geography had effectively ended in 1915. The 1924 regulations in effect ratified the end of the traditional service function for literae humaniores students that had long bolstered School of Geography enrollments. The decision probably can also be seen as recognition that there was no demand among geography students, even those interested in historical geography, for mastery of the historical geography of the 268

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ancient world. The first postwar Handbook to the University of Oxford indicated that all candidates for the examination in the Honour School of Literae Humaniores ‘are expected to show such a knowledge of the general history of Greece and Rome and of classical geography and antiquities [italics mine] as to form a background for the study of the special period and to make its history intelligible’. But persons trained in geography would not be offering such instruction. By the 1960s there is no mention at all of classical geography in the Oxford Handbook and, though Literae Humaniores candidates would have an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge of classical archaeology and coins, they were discouraged even from taking archaeology as a special subject.54 During the 1920s, though there was much talk at Oxford that geography should be closed out entirely, there were other voices, particularly historians and classicists, struggling to secure the recognition that an Honour School would bring to geography. Yet by the time that hope was finally realized, in 1932, many other British universities, beginning between 1917 and 1919 with Honour Schools at Liverpool, Aberystwyth and London, and a new Tripos at Cambridge, had already established them and were draining potential students from Oxford. Three ‘special subjects’ in ancient historical geography had been proposed for the new Oxford Honour School of Geography in 1929; none was adopted. The first Professor of Geography appointed to head the new Honour School, Kenneth Mason, had been a surveyor with the Survey of India and an explorer, with no academic degrees whatever, and an advocate of ‘applied geography’. It must have been disappointing, if not rather more than that, to the historians and classicists who had worked so hard to establish the Honour School that Mason chose ‘The Geography of Current Affairs’ as the focus of his inaugural address. Though Mason was an able administrator, and as such made an important contribution to the rebuilding of the School of Geography, he appears to have published only two professional papers, both on glaciation, during his 21 years as professor.55 W. G. Kendrew, who had originally planned to become a classicist, and who taught classics and French to non-collegiate students, also lectured part-time in the School of Geography from 1912, on meteorology and climatology. The author of two classic texts in climatology, 269

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he became University Lecturer in Climatology in 1935, Director of the Radcliffe Meteorological Station in 1938, and Reader in Climatology in 1940. The historical geographer E. W. Gilbert, a member of the staff since 1936, succeeded Mason as Director and Professor in 1954. In the year of his initial appointment to the School of Geography faculty, Gilbert had published his only work on ancient historical geography, an essay on ‘The Human Geography of Roman Britain’, written while he was still at the University of Reading. But otherwise Gilbert’s interests were largely in modern regional geography, the history of geography, and town planning. His inaugural address as Professor of Geography, ‘Geography as a Humane Study’, cited half a dozen of the ancient and modern historians who had been influential in the growth of the School of Geography, and argued that the Honour School should be tied more closely with history. But his rhetorical attempts to turn the program back toward Mackinder’s era came too late. By the 1960s, geography at Oxford had become something of a backwater, still emphasizing regional geography as it had in Herbertson’s day, at a time when academic geography was entering a period of rapid change.56 Counterfactual propositions are always dicey when one is dealing with the past. But Herbertson’s dying wish that Toynbee succeed him as Director was a brilliant, if belated, flash of insight. Herbertson was primarily a climatologist, who had earned his PhD degree in Germany. During his years as Director, Herbertson had managed to derail plans for an Honour School of Geography by his unrealistic insistence, as late as 1913, that it be part of the Honour School of Natural Science, which had made no examination provision for geography and didn’t want it. In addition, his Vitalist philosophical stance interacted with his physical geography to yield such manifestly absurd statements as his claim that the environment was ‘alive, active, not merely letting man act on it, but vigorously reacting on man’.57 Toynbee would never have made such a bizarre statement. Had he indeed become head of the School of Geography instead of the inept Beckit, he undoubtedly would have reinvigorated the alliance among geography, classics and history that Mackinder had built into a survival strategy, given the nature of the host institution. Indeed, Mackinder’s statement to Freshfield concerning what kind of person 270

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would be needed in the Oxford context seems to fit Toynbee admirably. Toynbee’s youthful energy and intense scholarly commitment, combined with the institutional prestige of Myres and others on the Committee for Geography, might well have brought the professorial chair and honours program in geography into being a decade or more before these events actually occurred. We cannot know whether Toynbee would have been able to prevent the intellectual and institutional decline of the School during the 1920s. But it is not hard to imagine that the strong program in the historical and humanistic aspects of geography that had characterized the School of Geography during Mackinder’s now legendary early years at Oxford would likely have returned under Toynbee. One can well see him both as rebuilding the bridges between the School and the two most prestigious Oxford programs, and as contributing to the development of the famous ‘PPE’ program (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) in the 1920s. It is, unfortunately, one of those ‘might-have-beens’ that are the despair of historians of geography.

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Classical Geography in the NineteenthCentury Classroom

Christopher Stray’s Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 begins with the following statement: ‘In the National Curriculum promulgated in England and Wales in 1988, no reference was made to classics.’ Although in the United States this was an old story, Stray’s assessment of its significance for English and Welsh youth was notable for its bleakness. ‘Nothing shows more clearly’, he writes, ‘just how marginalized a subject has become which once lay at the heart of English high culture’.1 The descending arc of the classical rainbow had finally touched ground, and there was assuredly no pot of gold at the end of it. This chapter moves from the work of high scholarship toward a preliminary and tentative exploration of the rise and fall of classical geography at the school level. Here we consider the place of classical geography in secondary academic programs and as a university admissions subject; the texts and atlases; and, to a limited extent, the consumers of scholarly work, the teachers and students. We are, however, still a long way from understanding the reception of any form of education by the young who are presumed to be the beneficiaries of it. Frederick Rudolph has identified that problem in an essay, ‘The Neglect of Students as a Historical Tradition’. Rudolph was referring to college students, but it is equally important, and even more difficult, to identify not only what was created, or even what was taught by professionals and others, but what was learned in secondary schools. As Stray has succinctly put it, ‘It is notoriously true that

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evidence of what actually happened in classrooms in history is very difficult to find.’2 A century and a quarter earlier, the Harvard historian Henry Adams, reviewing a recent printing of a Harvard student diary of 1786–7, had uttered a similar lament. Adams averred that the historian needs every scrap of such primary material as student diaries and letters ‘which shall deal with education from [the student’s] standpoint’. ‘One wishes to know’, he wrote, ‘what the student, at any given time, thought of himself, of his studies and his instructors….’ Such materials are often destroyed by the student in his later life, or discarded by his heirs. Even to the extent that such materials survive, wrote Adams, it is not an easy matter for the historian to pursue small game of this kind through the forests of manuscript in which it is their custom to hide; and anyone who will undertake the labor, or happens to know the secret places of forgotten and curious facts, has a right to claim the historian’s gratitude, even though the actual result of the sport is not precisely rich.

To the inevitable patchwork of random comments found in student reminiscences and surviving correspondence, in the case of classical geography we must add the limited availability of targeted bibliographical resources for the tools of teaching: classical geography texts, map series, and atlases. John K. Wright put it pungently in 1947: too many librarians and bibliographers ‘have been rather stepmotherly in their treatment of [individual] maps’.3 The bibliographic information we have is scattered. Many inventories of early American geographies, for example, omit classical geography texts. This chapter, then, must necessarily be indicative and suggestive, not comprehensive or definitive. Even more than the others, it is ‘a thing of shreds and patches’.

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN BRITISH SECONDARY CURRICULA Some kind of classical curriculum was basic in preparatory institutions for boys in both the United States and Great Britain. But there 274

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were differences in content and emphasis between the United States and Britain, and, in Britain, between England and Scotland, which had consequences for classical geography. In England, in the traditional public schools (notably so at Winchester and Eton), and in those Victorian grammar schools that imitated them, the classical emphasis, which had begun in the Renaissance with Latin, shifted to Greek studies during the nineteenth century, and returned to Latin toward the end of the century. Throughout, however, the emphasis was on classical languages and literature, with a strong emphasis on grammar, ‘construing’ passages, composing poetry in the language being studied, and translating orally from a limited range of texts. The learning of classical grammar and syntax was too often justified as ‘training the mind’, the ‘mind-as-muscle’ concept of the now discredited ‘faculty psychology’. As Moses Finley wryly put it, it was ‘the castor oil approach to education; the young should suffer an unpleasant education in the expectation of a future benefit’. At the time, however, the benefits were clear. As Thomas Gaisford, Oxford’s early nineteenth-century Professor of Greek and Dean of Christ Church College, is said to have described them, The advantages of a classical education are two-fold – it enables us to look down with contempt on those who have not shared its advantages, and also fits us for places of emolument not only in this world but also in that which is to come.4

As George Davie has pointed out, the Scottish educational system was much more concerned with offering a general education to a broader segment of society than the more densely classical or mathematical English curricular offerings. To the roster of classical subjects, the Scots added major emphasis on philosophy, as well as on geography and the exact sciences. In the universities, as Professor George Jardine of the University of Glasgow testified in 1827, ’We do not in this part of the Kingdom attach to classical learning that high and almost exclusive degree of importance which is ascribed to it elsewhere….’ And, in Jardine’s view, whatever is valuable in ancient learning ‘may, it is thought, be obtained without so great a sacrifice of time and labour’.

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Furthermore, Scottish students entered university at an earlier age than in England, perhaps most commonly around age 15. Many of them thus brought a tenuous grasp of Latin, but little else. A survey of the Scottish schools in 1827 disclosed about 8,500 pupils in Latin classes and nearly 5,400 in geography, but only around 3,000 enrolled in mathematics classes and around 2,000 in Greek. Fifty years later, only 623 students in all of Scotland were studying ancient Greek, and in 1908 new local education regulations forbade the teaching of Greek before the age of 15 or 16.5 It is likely that most secondary and even most university students in Scotland got their classical geography, what there was of it, either from the explanatory notes in classics texts or by commentary from the teacher on the geography associated with the assigned texts. In 1827 Patrick Forbes, Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen, testified before a Royal Commission that the only author he taught in his first class was Horace, apparently primarily for grammar and metre. But, Forbes added, ‘everything relating to History, Geography, and Antiquities… that occurs in the author is particularly explained’ [emphasis mine]. The noted zoologist, D’Arcy W. Thompson, recalled in 1929 that his favorite text in Edinburgh High School was James Pillans’ short book on classical geography. Pillans is credited with improving the teaching of classical geography during his tenure as Rector there, but Thompson also noted that the geography of the ancient Mediterranean ‘was almost all the geography we ever learned at school’. Interest in classical geography had apparently faded by the time of Thompson’s address, however. In 1909 J. L. Myres had addressed the Classical Association of Scotland on ‘The Place of Classical Geography in a Classical Curriculum: A Plea for Correlation of Studies’. Yet in surveying a century of that Association’s history, Ronald Knox noted [sadly?] that classical geography was ‘a subject which we have, I fear, largely neglected since’.6 In 1912 John Harrower, Professor of Greek at Aberdeen, used data collected by the Classical Association of Scotland to show his contempt for recent decisions of the Scottish Education Department by issuing a Map of the Greekless Areas of Scotland. The Association’s recent survey had shown that there were then only 689 secondary students studying Greek, more than half of them at schools in Edin276

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burgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Using the 1912 data, Harrower pointed to the absence of Greek where, he claimed, it had flourished 40 years before ‘in many a glen and many a village’. Unlike the map Thomas Jefferson had created to justify the choice of Charlottesville for his new university, Harrower’s map was a vain protest. Yet R. D. Anderson has pointed out that 35 years earlier, in 1877, of the 623 pupils studying Greek, and even in 1827, when the figure was just above two thousand, almost half were in the same three cities. Anderson contended that Greek ‘had never struck really deep roots in Scotland, and was seriously studied in only a few select schools’. Yet for some, at least, some of it must have stuck. The Scottish historical geographer, W. R. Kermack, on active service in the Near East during World War I, noted that there was a British army quartered near the site of Troy, another in Macedonia, and two others in Mesopotamia and in Egypt and Palestine, respectively. Given the classical and Biblical geography that young Britons had been ‘taught or retaught’, wrote Kermack, the war news ‘must have compelled many a paterfamilias to turn his mind painfully back to schoolboy days…’ as he followed the fortunes and fates of his sons through the theatres of war.7 The situation of classics in England was quite different, particularly in the elite ‘public’ schools, in part a response to the admissions requirement at Oxford and Cambridge. The classical curriculum was, at first, required of all students in the traditional grammar schools, whether or not the boys planned to attend university. Although, in time, parallel ‘English’ courses were established, the academically stronger boys were encouraged to undertake the traditional program. The new public schools established in the Victorian era, and those newer local grammar schools that imitated them, were obliged by their constituencies to follow suit. The classical languages had become a matter of status for the newly expanding upper middle class, a route of mobility for their sons and a marker of class position. Robert Tracy has neatly summed it up with the example of Anthony Trollope’s father, who sent his sons to follow in his footsteps to Winchester and New College, Oxford, ‘not because he particularly admired classical learning but because he knew that such a course – the acquisition of Latin and Greek – certified a man’s status as a gentleman’.8 277

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The biographer of the archaeologist, Arthur Evans, who had attended Harrow, attributed ‘the British obsession for classics’ to the publications of the Society of Dilettanti, which had ‘sparked a popular interest in a subject otherwise restricted to the wealthy noblemen’. Certain classical texts, as Isaac Kandel has pointed out, could also ‘serve as the sources of knowledge in natural science, history, and geography….’ But in nineteenth-century England, what teaching existed in ancient history and geography was the responsibility of the classics masters, who may or may not have given them any importance amidst the core activities of grammar and translation. Another tale is told of a [Shrewsbury?] master who allegedly told his students, ‘Boys, this term you are to have the privilege of reading the Oedipus Colonus of Sophocles, a veritable treasure-house of grammatical peculiarities.’ From the 1870s on, pressures gradually increased to cut the hours devoted to classics in order to allow the introduction of contemporary natural science, modern history and modern geography. This movement was stoutly resisted, however, not only in the prestigious public schools but even by many parents whose sons were attending the new local ‘modern’ schools.9 The curriculum of the leading public schools and their imitators continued to privilege the classical languages throughout the nineteenth century. Within these, however, they adopted a double shift of emphasis, from Latin to Greek and from the poets to prose writers: historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus), orators (Demosthenes and Cicero), Greek and Roman playwrights, Plato and Homer. The late nineteenth-century emphasis on Latin to some extent compensated for the long decline of Greek enrollments, except in those schools preparing for Oxford and Cambridge. After Greek was dropped as an entrance requirement in those institutions, however, a 1921 government survey showed that fewer than 5 per cent of boys in the 612 boys’ schools surveyed were studying Greek, and in 343 girls’ schools only four-tenths of one per cent were doing so. Ancient history had entered the curriculum as a separate subject, though ancient geography, unable to escape its secondary function as training for the memory, by and large did not.10 Samuel Butler, Headmaster of Shrewsbury School from 1798, is one of the first headmasters credited with stimulating mastery of ancient history and geography in an English public school. We have 278

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seen it enter the programs of Rugby under Arnold, and flourish in Toynbee’s time at Winchester. Recalling an earlier day at Winchester, however, the Oxford historian and supporter of geography, Charles Oman, complained that his own classics master at Winchester, Charles Griffith, saw the literature of Greece and Rome simply as ‘a sea of declensional, syntactical, or accentual conundrums’, and recalled that ‘Sophocles and Livy might have been contemporaries, or Athens have stood in Asia Minor for all the geographical or political instruction that we got’. More famously, Charles Darwin, a former student at Shrewsbury, wrote in his autobiography that ‘nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind’ than the curriculum under Butler, ‘as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history’. A student who entered the school under Butler’s successor, Benjamin Kennedy, reported that ancient geography was studied intensively for one week each half-term. As late as 1868 T. H. Huxley criticized the public schools as concentrating too much on classics: ‘the languages, the literature, and the history of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the geography of so much of the world as was known to these two great nations of antiquity’.11 At Eton, the premier public school preparing for Oxford (and, ultimately, the political leadership of Britain) at mid-nineteenth century, according to one of its recent historians, ‘English, History, and Geography were only taught, if they were taught at all, by Classical Masters, though some of these, to be fair, were enthusiastic and communicated their enthusiasms’. George Brodrick, an Eton student at a slightly earlier time, remembered instruction in history and geography as ‘most elementary’. From at least the middle of the eighteenth century, Eton students were getting their classical geography from the texts of certain ancient writers: Pomponius Mela, Cornelius Nepos, and, indirectly, through the Renaissance savant, Cellarius, alongside the ‘modern geography’ of Thomas Salmon. They were also required weekly to draw a map of a part of the ancient world, a custom that evidently lingered into the twentieth century.12 Furthermore, the ‘English vice’, flagellation, seems to have been even more prominent at Eton than at other leading public schools. During the 1830s, we are told, one assistant master did ‘something to improve the manner in which geography was taught’. But he also 279

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regularly birched those geography students (who ‘did not know the location of St Petersburg or Washington’) because they could not remember the modern Turkish names of what nineteenth-century travelers would have called the ‘squalid villages’ on the sites of ancient Greek cities. Since in this period, as R. L. Archer reminds us, ‘Geography [was] not recognized like history as something which may grow out of being a mere memory subject’, we may grant a certain logic to this. But it is not here necessary to dwell on the erotic charge this experience carried for the clerical masters or the adolescent subjects and witnesses on these public occasions to conclude that this stimulus to learning could hardly have increased the student’s love for ancient and modern geography. (Public floggings of naked adolescent male buttocks were only stopped in the upper forms at Eton after 1970.)13

14. ‘Spy’ cartoon of Eton Master (Reverend J. L. Joynes) wielding birch rod

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Francis Galton suggested in his autobiography ‘To say the least of it, a thorough knowledge of the classical lands, such as can be conveyed by first-rate maps, models, and diagrams, must be helpful to classical students’. Yet though the Eton classics classroom may have contained a map of the classical world, the quality of such teaching remained unimaginative, there as elsewhere. An external committee in 1910 found the teaching of history by Eton classics masters ‘careful rather than stimulating’, and, except in one case, the teaching of geography was ‘inadequate’. As late as 1937 two Eton masters argued that it would be a mistake to add geography as a separate subject, since it could be taught as a useful adjunct to history courses; the old ‘eye of history’ trope. Furthermore, they argued, Bicycles and motor-cars teach most boys map-reading, and if, in addition, the habit of looking on a map as the ordinary way of ascertaining the relative position of different places is acquired,

further instruction in geography is superfluous.14 Eton did not appoint a trained geography master until the 1960s, and the first Oxbridge scholarship in geography to be earned by an Eton graduate was awarded only in 1967. Ironically, more recently the heir presumptive to the British throne, Eton student Prince William, elected geography as one of his A-level examinations and, after a brief tour into art history, graduated in geography at the University of St Andrews. But it is not unfair to conclude that, for at least two centuries before the late-twentieth, wealthy parents had been paying enormous sums to have their privileged sons taught meaningless forms of ancient and modern geography in the best secondary institutions in England. I have taken Eton as representative of the nine-member ‘Public Schools Group’, but that substandard instruction in classical geography went well beyond Eton is attested to in many sources. A commentator on a Royal Geographical Society lecture in 1897 complained that ‘the teaching of history lies chiefly in the hands of classical masters, most of whom have a contempt of [sic] geography’ and actively discouraged students from taking geography classes. F. J. Wilkinson, reviewing recent geography examination papers, noted that in January 1901 Cambridge Higher Local Examination, the topic

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of the special subject was ‘the history of ancient geography to the death of Ptolemy’. ‘Surely’, wrote Wilkinson, ‘this is somewhat academic even for Higher Cambridge Locals!’ In 1904 none other than Andrew Herbertson uttered one of the most curious comments, yet one revealing of the British class system of the time to twentyfirst century eyes. In what may have been a sincere attempt at compromise, Herbertson, ‘admitting that the evolution of human endeavor and thought in the Mediterranean basin in Greek and Roman times is the best subject to emphasize in schools for the “upper classes”’, endorsed the teaching of geography in such schools. But rather than the combined physical and cultural forms he advocated elsewhere, geography as taught in these schools should emphasize the human aspects, as having practical relevance for those ‘who will direct the higher administration of public and private affairs’. In 1928 Myres criticized professional classicists for rejecting the Renaissance practice of translating the Latin and Greek classics into the vernacular in favor of ‘pure’ linguistic study. ‘Formal scholarship [that is, philology] became an indispensable prerequisite to study of Mediterranean culture’, Myres contended. ‘History and geography, as interpreters of the meaning of great literatures, gave place to “gerund grinding” and vain “repetitions”.’ In 1953, reflecting on the state of geography at the time the Geographical Association had been formed 60 years earlier, T. C. Warrington recalled that in the public and grammar schools, if any geography was offered, it was generally to those in the lower forms. If it were offered in the upper classes, said Warrington, it ‘was limited to the knowledge required for the understanding of the history of Greece and Rome and the elucidation of references to places in the literature read’.15 The narrowly classical languages-based system appears to have resonated far beyond the great public schools, however. Under the Endowed Schools Act of 1869, the de facto pattern of a class-based secondary education was institutionalized. In those schools patronized by the upper classes, where the school-leaving age was set at 18, both Latin and Greek were a part of the curriculum. In those schools in which the middle classes sent their sons, the school-leaving age was 16, and only Latin was taught in them. And in those schools where the school-leaving age was 14, and thus served the lower middle classes, neither language was to be taught. Although the Act 282

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of 1869 sought to provide advantages to these latter groups by substituting a program of modern subjects for the hours spent on the ‘dead languages’, in consequence the class system received additional re-enforcement. This fundamentally eighteenth-century system of perpetuating an English administrative elite did not begin to erode until after World War I, when, as we shall see, both Cambridge, in 1919, and Oxford, in 1920, dropped the Greek requirement for admission.16 Another factor preserving the system was that many upper- and upper-middle-class parents desired appointments to the civil service and army for their sons. A disproportionate number of points in the examinations for these posts, however, were awarded for proficiency in Latin and Greek. For example, after 1858 the Indian Civil Service Examination could award as many as 750 points each, or a total of 1,500 points, to Greek and Roman languages, literatures and histories, and 1,000 points in the mathematics portion. But for the examinations in Sanskrit and Arabic, which one would think more relevant to ruling the Empire, only a maximum of 375 points each, or 750 points, could be awarded. A first-rate exam in ‘English language, literature and history’ could earn the applicant 1,500 points, but the exam in ‘Natural Sciences’ was worth a maximum of 500 points. The purpose was quite clear: to avoid ‘attracting the ill-bred and illbalanced middle classes into the Indian service’. During the 1890s, geographers (and others) began a long fight, on behalf of their presumptively ill-bred and ill-balanced middle-class students, for expansion of the examinations to place greater stress on the ‘modern’ subjects. Eventually geography became an optional subject in examinations for government positions. By that time, however, geographers had embraced the natural sciences, and the geography examination reflected the newer professional emphases, not classical geography.17

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS The British colonies in what is now the United States, had tended to establish pre-college curricula in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen283

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turies on English models. Study of the classics in the British colonies on the western side of the Atlantic appears to have been, until the late eighteenth century, similar to England in its emphasis on linuistic and grammatical matters, and similar to Scotland in its lesser mastery of them. But after the American Revolution there was a new emphasis on classical models for the new Republic and, with that emphasis, a curriculum that, except for boys bound for college and the ‘learned professions’, would stress the relevance of classical values (initially, at least, the values of Republican Rome), through the study of ancient history and geography. As we have seen (Chapter 2), there were great debates between those who wished to preserve the traditional focus on mastery of classical languages, and those voices for reform advocating a curriculum that would preserve and transmit classical knowledge to those young citizens of the new Republic who did not plan to enter the learned professions. The solution was to incorporate ancient history and geography into the secondary curriculum, especially of the new, privately established local academies springing up everywhere, often in competition with the colleges. Classical or ancient geography, as well as modern geography, began to appear in the early nineteenth century also as a college admissions requirement, the first such subject beyond the traditional Latin, Greek and elementary mathematics. Rather than requiring years of grammatical study, an introduction to the classical world could be provided to these groups through English-language texts, atlases and maps rather than solely through un-translated classical texts. Many texts in ancient geography, at least in the early nineteenth century, included ‘Sacred geography’, or the geography of Bible lands, in addition to Greece and Rome. In part, this was to appease conservative clergy and parents worried that the schools would be teaching ‘profane’ or ‘pagan’ values. Still, access trumped fear in most cases and, as we shall see, texts were developed in ‘Ancient and Modern Geography’, in ‘Ancient Geography’ (which might or might not include the Holy Land), and in ‘Classical Geography’ proper. However titled, such developments ensured that a much wider segment of the American population would be exposed to the geography (and indeed the history) of the ancient Mediterranean world than was true of that of the former ‘mother country’.1

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The ‘grammar schools’ and others preparing young men for the colleges, tended to offer what the colleges demanded for admission, including ancient or ancient and modern geography. Thus the course of study in the ‘Classical Department’ of Phillips Academy at Exeter, NH, included ancient and modern geography in the first year. In the classical schools in Cambridge, MA, as the biographer of Charles Eliot Norton has described them, students ‘endured for eight years or so, gnawing on Latin, Greek, and math, garnished with geography and maybe a soupçon of history or French’, with the history going ‘not at all beyond antiquity’. In 1854 the Cambridge, MA, School Committee visitors to the Cambridge Latin School found that Junior Class students had drawn 116 maps of Alexander’s Empire, Italy or Greece in connection with their ancient history. The Middle Class, which was studying Caesar, had drawn 20 maps of ancient Gaul, and the College Class had drawn three maps of Italy to aid their understanding of the final portions of the Aeneid. As one might expect, the Public Latin School in Boston continued its earlier concentration; indeed, classical Greek is still offered as a part of today’s curriculum, though no longer required of all students.19 Agnew O. Roorbach, in a study of social studies in American secondary schools prior to 1861, found 11 types of geography taught at that time. These included ancient geography, ancient and modern geography and sacred geography. Of these, classical geography was the most popular, with some 77 of the schools he studied offering it, most commonly in the second year. Alexander Inglis, in his Principles of Secondary Education (1918), attempted to determine the years at which various subjects entered the secondary school academic program. According to his findings, ancient geography as a separate course appeared first in 1821, modern geography the same year, and sacred geography two years later. Physical geography and meteorology first appeared in 1852. Assuming that these dates are at least approximately correct, they frame the heyday of ancient geography as a separate secondary school subject.20 In the classical department of the Worcester, MA, Classical and English High School, ancient geography was offered in the fourth term of the first year and the first term of the second. In the Hartford, CT, Grammar School in 1848, ancient history and geography were required of students in the classical course, but apparently might also 285

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be taken by students in the English course in their fourth year. In Salem, MA, Fisk School (the Latin Grammar School), both Joseph Worcester’s ancient geography and ancient history texts were studied. In the new Hartford Public High School, established in 1858, students in the classical department took ancient geography and history throughout their third year. As late as 1867 the Portland, ME, High School required ancient geography of classical students in the first term of their third year.21 Especially noteworthy, however, is the fact that ancient geography was now a part of the curriculum of the new, non-classical (and usually urban) public high schools, of which the first was the English High School in Boston, established in 1821, and also in secondary institutions for, or open to, girls. Boston Public School Committee reports note that at English High, a course in ancient and modern geography, using Worcester’s text, was required in the first and second years of the initial three-year program. When the school was increased to four years in 1852, ancient geography appears as a separate course for the first year, and geology (rather than physical geography, whose apparent first use in a public high school was that same year) in the fourth. This appears to have remained unchanged until 1860, when physical geography was introduced. The earliest report of the Baltimore, MD, High School, in 1851, shows ancient geography offered in the second year.22 When Swedish educational reformer, P. A. Siljestrom, toured the United States at mid-century, he noted that ancient geography, modern geography and map drawing were taught in Boston’s recently established Girls High School, despite the school’s initially being a one-year program. At Hartford High, boys and girls were allowed to study history and geography together, a shocking if noteworthy development. And English-born Frances Trollope, in her Domestic Manners of the Americans, listed the curriculum of the fashionable boarding school for ‘young ladies’, the Brooklyn Collegiate Institute, showing modern geography being taught in the first year of the Junior Department, ancient and sacred geography in the second, and political geography (using Worcester’s text), the use of the globes, and ancient history in the third.23 The new public high schools were justified on the basis that they educated all students and, as such, in the revealing words of the 286

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Lowell, MA, School Committee, were places ‘where the indigent may be excited to emulate the cleanliness, decorum and mental improvement of those in better circumstances’. Universality is not proven by a few examples, but if indeed both the fashionable and the indigent, both boys and girls, clean and unclean, were studying ancient geography together in American secondary schools in any numbers in the early to mid-nineteenth century, it underscores the importance Americans of the time placed on educating all students in the classical tradition using non-linguistic approaches. It also contrasts strikingly with pre-university education in England, where classical studies were used to re-enforce a rigid class system, rather than taught as a part of the common Western heritage, of value to all future citizens.24 In the Middle West, where public high schools were generally established later than they were in the Northeast, ancient geography was in a weaker position. In John Stout’s detailed study of the curricula of 20 (later 40) Midwestern high schools between 1860 and 1918, we find Ann Arbor, MI, seat of the University of Michigan, mentioned as offering ancient geography in 1859. Stout found that of 20 high schools, only six offered ancient geography at any time between 1860 and 1875, after which the subject disappeared from the curriculum. None of the schools offered it for longer than one of the five-year periods into which Stout divides his tables. By contrast, physical geography was being offered in 18 of the 20 in 1860, with commercial geography joining it in the 1890s and rapidly increasing after 1906.25 This is only to state the obvious: that there were differences from time to time, state to state, institution to institution, in the types of instruction offered. When, following the end of slavery, northern philanthropists and religious organizations began schools for the emancipated freedmen, they included ancient history and ancient geography in the curricula. At Atlanta University, these were taught in the first year of the Preparatory Department (high school) when it opened in 1869. When the Collegiate Department opened in 1872, ancient history and geography were required for admission.26 Much detailed, locally focused work needs to be done before we can pin down the extent of such classical geography offerings. Thomas Woody, in his pioneering study of women’s education, tells us that ‘geography was the first science for girls’, that ‘ancient 287

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and modern geography were frequently named specifically after 1820, and correlated with ancient and modern history’, and also that, though physical geography was offered rarely before 1855 or 1860, it appeared ‘with fair regularity’ after that time. The current revival of scholarly interest in the academy movement and in the education of young women is disappointing in that studies published thus far have seldom discriminated among the types of geography being taught.27 But here and there some older scholarship, such as Woody’s 1929 study, gives us tantalizing clues pointing toward broad public interest in the geography of the classical world for both sexes in the period of the Early Republic.

AIDS TO LEARNING: CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY TEXTS Writing in 1935 on the interplay between methodologies and textbooks, Tyler Kepner astutely asserted of textbooks, that whether they lead in developing methods or follow them, ‘it is safe to say that where textbooks go there goes the average teacher’. Avril M. L. Maddrell has more recently vigorously argued for the importance and utility of school texts as a part of a broader integration of the history of geographic education into the historiography of geography. Although we cannot always pin down the actual teaching of classical geography in various institutions, nor its effect on students, it is possible to follow the rise and decline of textbooks wholly or partly in this area in both Britain and the United States. Some texts in both countries were translations of French or German works, or were published by both British and American publishers. Charles R. Dryer’s observation nearly 90 years ago is still relevant: ‘There is no better index of what is being done in any school subject than that furnished by the textbooks used.’ But, Dryer lamented, ‘textbooks seldom appear in bibliographies and seem to be the pariahs of the world of books. It remains for some bookworm to devote months or years to a thorough search… for the scant remains of geographical texts’.28 In Britain, and seemingly also to some degree in the antebellum American South, such geography as was taught in the academies, ‘public’ schools, and (Latin) grammar schools in the nineteenth cen288

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tury continued to be taught by eighteenth-century methods. Geographical matters were often brought up, if at all, only in connection with the classical literature to which they pertained, or as a brief introduction to ‘modern geography’. The role of classical geography (and indeed of ancient history) was thus fairly minor. In this eighteenth-century form, as Robert Mayhew has recently shown, geographical knowledge ‘was conveyed in notes, glosses, and explication of [ancient] texts rather than in independent texts’, would often continue into the nineteenth.29 The first important nineteenth-century text in this area was Samuel Butler’s Geographia Classica; or, the Application of Antient [sic] Geography to the Classics, first issued in 1802 as a part of his program of broadening the study of the classics at Shrewsbury. Butler also published the first edition of a Modern and Antient Geography in 1813, an Ancient Geography in 1822 (reprinted as late as 1907) and an Atlas of Antient Geography in 1832. The 1813 volume went through ten editions until 1872 and, according to Avril Madrell, ‘dominated public school geography’; five of the nine ‘great’ public schools were still using it in 1864. Butler’s texts were also republished in America, based on various London editions, at least six times between 1821 and 1846, and the atlas seven times between 1837 and 1857. According to Austin Allibone, writing in the 1850s, Butler’s geographical works ‘have had a large circulation’. Butler, unlike many authors of ancient geography texts, had actually traveled to Italy, where he ‘visited every spot connected with the most interesting parts of the Roman history….’ In his Ancient Geography, Allibone noted, ‘he endeavored to make a dry catalogue of names interesting and useful, by the application of history, chronology and poetry’.30 In this case, the hoary tradition was reversed: history was one of the ‘two eyes’ of geography. After his return to England from the University of Virginia, George Long, as we have seen (Chapter 3) edited the Quarterly Journal of Education. In it, he published several reviews of works on classical geography, including notices of Butler’s Ancient Atlas and the fifth and ninth editions of Butler’s Sketch of Modern and Ancient Geography, and news of its presence in several schools. Long also wrote an important essay, ‘On the Study of Geography’, and may have written the entry on geography for the Penny Cyclopaedia, which he also edited for the 289

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Society. Leonhard Schmitz, another figure whom we have encountered earlier, issued a series of classical texts for schools during the time he was Principal of the Edinburgh High School. As a part of his endeavors, he published a Manual of Ancient Geography in 1857, with a second edition published in Philadelphia the following year, one of several British texts republished in American editions during the period. Schmitz had also translated and published his lecture notes of Niebuhr’s history of Rome course at the University of Bonn (1844) and translated a German compilation of Niebuhr’s lectures on ancient ethnography and geography, published in 1853. Both British and American publishers also issued versions of the German author Wilhelm Putz’s Manual of Ancient Geography and History, translated originally by Reverend Thomas Keveler Arnold, an Anglican priest and prolific editor of textbooks. University of Berlin Professor of Geography Heinrich Kiepert’s Manual of Ancient Geography was also translated into English, and published in London in 1881.31 Although it was a later, twentieth-century addition to this genre, Marion Newbigin’s Mediterranean Lands (1924) deserves mention, though it is not one of her best books. Miss Newbigin was a prolific writer as well as editor of the well-respected journal, the Scottish Geographical Magazine. As such she was in an excellent position to insert the study of the ancient (and mediaeval) Mediterranean into the context of contemporary scholarship in geography, albeit of the ‘geographic influence’ or ‘response to environment’ school. The book was directed primarily at the upper school forms and to undergraduates needing a review of basic facts, and was (as she subtitled it) ‘An Introductory Study in Human and Historical Geography’. Mediterranean Lands was simultaneously published in Britain by the London publisher Christopher’s and, in New York, by probably the most prestigious American publisher of the time, Alfred A. Knopf. Thus it probably attracted some of the general readership for which she also hoped. Reviews in the professional journals were fairly lukewarm, and K. C. Edwards’ characterization of the Mediterranean book as ‘an outstanding success’ seems excessive, even as reminiscence. The text does not seem to have gone into a second edition, probably reflecting the marked general decline of interest in ancient geography, and indeed of classical study, by the mid-1920s.32

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If we turn to the new United States, we find a somewhat longer story, reflecting the concern of the Founders that young Americans should be exposed to the ‘lessons’ of classical antiquity. The earliest post-Revolutionary geography textbook author, and the most famous, was of course the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, who published his first text, Geography Made Easy, in 1784. Known as the ‘Father of American Geography’, Morse, a conservative Congregationalist minister, had a well-known antipathy to classical, or ‘pagan’, literature and history. It is only when he had semi-retired to the point of having his son, Sidney Edwards Morse, and other younger writers do the main work of preparing the texts that Morse and his son published an ‘ancient and modern’ geography, in 1822 (26th edition, 1828). A complementary copy of the Morses’ ancient and modern text received a flattering acknowledgement from ex-President James Madison, who wrote the senior Morse, among other things, ‘the sketch of “Ancient Geography” forms a useful supplement’ to the modern geography. It is possible that Sidney Morse instigated this version of his father’s work, a compact book designed to serve the growing market for a brief text for students preparing to meet new college entrance requirements, since he also produced an Ancient Atlas under his own name in the same year.33 As Michael Belok has written in his study of early American schoolbooks, early textbook writers would often combine several subjects in a single work. ‘Gradually, however, the school-books became increasingly specialized and “true” spellers, histories, geographies, readers and grammars evolved’.34 Just as Morse’s first works, especially his American Geography (1789 and later editions to 1819), have been seen in the context of American nationalism and a sign of increasing intellectual independence from Britain, so early attempts at American authors writing classical geography texts for young Americans might be seen in the context of events leading to the second war with Britain, which began in 1812. One of these, an 1809 law prohibiting imports from both Britain and France, had effectively cut off classical geography texts and atlases from two countries that had hitherto provided classical materials to an American market. In any event, something of a flowering in this direction occurred in 1813. In Boston, J. A. Cummings published the first edition of his Introduction to Ancient and Modern Geography, which included ‘Eight 291

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Modern and Four Ancient Maps’. Cummings’ book reached its tenth edition by 1825. Also in 1813 a Virginian, Robert Mayo, produced a two-volume View of Ancient Geography and Ancient History, and an atlas of ten maps the following year. It was published in Philadelphia, a center for American publishing throughout the nineteenth century. Mayo followed it up five years later with An Epitome of Ancient Geography and An Epitome of Profane Geography. A Richmond printer, Robert McDermott, and his partner, Daniel D. Arden, produced a Compendium of Ancient Geography (1814), a translation of JeanBaptiste D’Anville’s 1768 Géographie Ancienne Abrégée, in two volumes, well after it had been translated and published in several editions in London. Its subtitle suggests a wider than academic audience: ‘Calculated for Private Libraries, as well as for the Use of Schools’. In 1819 the future lexicographer, Joseph Worcester, entered this diverse market with his Elements of Geography, Ancient and Modern, and his Elements of Ancient, Classical, and Scripture Geography. The latter had an atlas of ten maps and went to nine editions by 1850. Until he published his American edition of Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary of the English language, however, Worcester had less name recognition than Morse, and his ‘ancient and modern’ text had fewer editions than the Morses’ volume. But it was probably more often used by college preparatory students, and certainly had a longer life.35 If we turn to the second generation of American writers of geography texts, the best known are Emma Willard and her collaborator William Woodbridge, both of whom were interested in new approaches to education put forth by Johann Pestalozzi and other European educational reformers. Both were interested in the reform of geography teaching, and their work marks something of a pedagogical shift, from the verbal geographies of Morse and his contemporaries to a more visual instruction that began with the map; in Willard’s words, ‘making the eye the medium of conveying instruction’. Willard and Woodbridge were pioneers in a method of teaching summed up later in the century by B. A. Hinsdale: ‘the student should emancipate himself from the modern map; he must live in the geography of the times that he studies’. Mrs Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary (now the Emma Willard School), the first American institution for the advanced education of women, wrote a number of wellregarded textbooks in various fields. The first of these in geography 292

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was her Ancient Geography, as Connected with Chronology, and Preparatory to the Study of Ancient History (1822), originally a 96-page compilation, accompanied by an atlas. Willard’s Ancient Geography went to nine editions as an independent publication by 1841. It included ‘Sacred Geography’ in its remit. Although Willard was something of a religious traditionalist, following the Irish Archbishop, James Ussher, in claiming that the present division of lands and waters was formed at a single moment of creation in 4004 BC, she was modern enough to write that Jesus had been born four years before the ‘present or vulgar era’. Still, like most Victorian pedagogues, she believed ancient Greece to be ‘the most interesting of all countries’, a region where ‘the human mind appears to have taken its loftiest flight’. In 1835 Willard published two more texts, in these cases combining history with geography, one of them specifically on ancient geography. Wishing to publish a modern geography text, Willard collaborated with Woodbridge, who had picked up the ideas of Pestalozzi and von Humboldt while in Europe, written an introductory Rudiments of Geography text (1821), and contributed a section on problems in the use of the globes to her earlier book. In Willard and Woodbridge’s Universal Geography, Ancient and Modern (1824), the text of Willard’s Ancient Geography was included under her own name, in a separate section. Willard and Woodbridge’s text proved to be one of the most popular geographies of the period between Morse and midcentury, being reissued in 18 editions by 1866.36 Charles Anthon, Professor of Greek at Columbia University, was a prolific producer of school editions of classical texts, particularly those of German scholars. For his 1842 edition of John Lamprière’s Classical Dictionary, Anthon revised and expanded the geographical sections extensively, often lifting material without attribution from J. A. Cramer’s Ancient Greece. In 1850 Anthon published his own System of Ancient and Modern Geography. The acerbic George Templeton Strong, a Columbia alumnus and later a Trustee, said of Anthon, however, ‘he is as fit to lecture on anything above ancient geography as a deaf and dumb man on the genius of Beethoven’, adding that ‘his familiar spirit of scissors and paste’ would find him at a loss with anything more complex, since ‘he would not know what to steal’. The comment reveals Strong’s opinion not only of Anthon but also 293

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of classical geography.37 Four years later G. L. Koeppen published both a text, The World in the Middle Ages: A Historical Geography and a Historical and Geographical Atlas of the Middle Ages. Such works were rare, though Wilhelm Putz’s Hand Book of Mediaeval Geography, translated by R. B. Paul, had been published in New York in 1823 (and reprinted as late as 1850). The last nineteenth-century American to produce a long-lived classical geography text, S[amuel] Augustus Mitchell, was one of the most popular and most prolific publishers of geography texts and other teaching aids from mid-century on. Mitchell’s Ancient Geography (which also initially included sacred geography) was intended for ‘Academies, Schools and Families’. First published in 1845, it had reached 11 editions by 1878, the 1860 version being touted as ‘an entirely new edition’, a New Ancient Geography. Mitchell also produced a Biblical and Sabbath School Geography in 1855 and 1882, suggesting a growing segmentation of audiences still often lumped together in the ‘ancient geography’ texts of this period. Mitchell’s maps were conceded to be of high quality, but the content of his geography books, though extremely popular, was something of a regression to geography as a repository of memorizeable facts, untouched by developments (pedagogical or geographical) in Europe or, indeed, by American educational reformers such as Willard and Woodbridge.38 The next wave of reform, challenging Mitchell’s texts to a degree, began with Arnold Guyot’s geographical series, promised in the 1850s but actually completed (with the assistance of Mary Smith of Oswego Normal School) and issued in the 1860s and early 1870s. But Guyot, although he designed three classical maps, never wrote a classical geography text. Various texts on Biblical geography continued to be issued for a much longer period, but the last classical geographies proper published in the United States for schools, other than the late printings of Willard’s and Mitchell’s texts, appear to be an American republication of Leonhard Schmitz’s Manual of Ancient Geography in 1857 and a Course of Ancient Geography by Henry Immanuel Schmidt, published in New York three years later.39 During the 1850s and 1860s, secondary school offerings in ‘physical geography’, and texts in that area, began to appear, and physical geography was gradually added to the list of acceptable college 294

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admissions requirements. As an emerging community of university geographers began to reinvent geography as a natural science in the 1880s and 1890s, mid-century Humboldtian ‘physical geography’ narrowed to ‘physiography’ (largely today’s geomorphology and climatology). These new professional geographers abandoned geography’s post-Renaissance ties to the humanities, and the ‘new [physical] geography’ began to replace ‘ancient geography’ and ‘modern geography’ as the primary geography admissions requirement. As professional geography gained scientific and disciplinary legitimacy in American colleges and universities, the secondary school geography courses and the textbook publishers serving them also shifted ground, and the market for, and supply of, texts in classical geography declined sharply, never to recover. Roorbach, having established that before 1861 geography had been taught in American secondary schools in 11 different forms, put the shift in stark contrast. In 1876, just 15 years later, he wrote, a Committee of the National Education Association had recommended ‘all fields of geography except physical geography’ should be eliminated from secondary school programs.40

AIDS TO LEARNING: CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARIES, MAPS AND ATLASES Before turning to classical maps and atlases, mention should be made of William Smith and his work as a producer of geographical dictionaries. Smith was a graduate in classics under George Long at University College, London. There he became acquainted with some of the people we have already met who championed both classical geography and larger educational reforms. Soon after his graduation, he was made classics master at the University College School, then under Thomas Hewitt Key’s direction, and contributed articles to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s Penny Cyclopaedia. Smith’s dictionaries of the ancient world would be based on ancient writers and incorporate the latest classical scholarship. They included a two-volume Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1842), a three-volume Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology 295

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and Geography (1845–9), and eventually to his most lasting work, the great Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (two volumes, 1854– 7). Smith attracted the support of a number of prominent scholars, who wrote entries for his geography volumes, including Edward Bunbury, George Long, William Ramsay, and Leonhard Schmitz. The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography was also published in America, and can still be found on the reference shelves of both public and academic libraries. As recently as 1996 the compiler of a survey of aids to classical study, while pointing out that much of its scholarship, being of its time, is now obsolete, still praised the work’s use of classical sources and described it as ‘one of the most comprehensive works in ancient geography and one of the most widely available’. Smith published smaller editions of his dictionaries for school use, and also published a school text in ancient history, Student’s Greece, in 1854 which, as we have seen, was republished in the United States a year later with additions by C. C. Felton.41 Richard J. A. Talbert, in an essay reviewing the major scholarly classical atlases and map series (omitting atlases and map series primarily for educational use) from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onward, covers only a portion of the time period of the present book. Yet his analysis of the limited number of map series he treats is both full and informative. His discussion of three major attempts to produce a scholarly atlas of classical geography in the late nineteenth century includes only one English work, Smith’s atlas of 1872–4, published by John Murray. After finishing his classical dictionaries Smith had turned to Biblical geography, assembling a group of leading clerical scholars who brought to his Dictionary of the Bible Comprising its Antiquities, Biography, Geography and Natural History (three volumes, 1860–3) the same critical scholarship his group of classical scholars had brought to his earlier volumes. In 1875, with the assistance of George Grove, Smith brought out two atlases, an Atlas of the Bible and an Atlas of Ancient Geography, Biblical and Classical. Grove, more famous today for his own Dictionary of Music and Musicians, was also interested in geography. In 1856 he had edited Arthur Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, and in 1876 he published a brief text on geography for Macmillan’s history primers series, which was reprinted in London the following year and published in the United

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States in 1877 and 1878, as well as in a slightly enlarged version in 1883. In the classical section of Smith’s ancient geography atlas, the maps were compiled and executed by Karl Müller, perhaps better known today, if at all, for his two-volume edition of the minor Greek geographers Geographi Graeci Minores (1855–7), for which he had designed 29 pullout maps. Müller’s maps occupy 47 of the 68 map pages of Smith’s atlas. Partly because of its price, however, as well as its size and detail, Smith’s atlas, though a marked advance over earlier classical atlases, did not sell well. Though a second small printing was undertaken in 1875, probably less than 1,500 copies, bound or as separate fascicles, were ever sold. Both Edward Bunbury and Henry Tozer, however, drew on Müller’s maps for their respective works. Bunbury indeed praised the Geographi Graeci Minores as ‘a work which has conferred an inestimable boon upon all students of ancient geography’, and expressed ‘in the strongest manner’ his obligation to Müller’s maps in ‘the valuable “Atlas of Ancient Geography edited by Dr. Smith and Mr. Grove”’. Tozer based his maps of ’The World According to’ various ancient writers, as well as others, both those in Bunbury and ‘in Smith and Grove’s Ancient Atlas’. Smith’s Atlas of Ancient Geography, according to his biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘continued to be used by classicists into the twenty-first century’ – no mean achievement.42 After Smith’s death, Murray asked G. B. Grundy to edit a new edition of the Smith and Grove classical atlas, though initially Grundy demanded, as a condition of taking it on, that altitudes be shown by colour tinting, an expensive process. Murray, unable to find another editor and yet concerned about costs, ultimately decided to accept Grundy’s terms, but to issue the maps and accompanying gazetteers as separate booklets, with one folded map per booklet, except for Italy and Greece, which had two. Eleven such booklets were produced between 1899 and 1905, under the rubric ‘Murray’s Handy Classical Maps’, a classic case of making a virtue of necessity. Little, Brown of Boston published the series in the United States. Francis Haverfield extensively edited the map of Roman Britain, and Grundy himself evidently drafted an entirely new map of Greece, but most maps depended heavily on Müller’s original maps for the Smith atlas.43 297

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If we turn to the classical atlases prepared for school or other nonprofessional use, we find a large number of such works, primarily classical but also sometimes containing maps of the Biblical or even the post-classical world, produced in Britain and America in the long nineteenth century. One of the earliest in Britain was Robert Wilkinson’s Atlas Classica (1797), which also included maps of Saxon England and Charlemagne’s empire. In a later edition Wilkinson added a map of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. His purpose, said Wilkinson, was to provide an atlas for the libraries of ‘the Divine, the Scholar, and the private Gentleman’. A selection only from the nineteenth century includes James Playfair’s 1808 classical atlas to accompany his System of Geography: Ancient and Modern; Smith’s Classical Atlas (1809); The New Classical and Historical Atlas (1829); Jones’ Classical Atlas (1830); William Murphy’s Comprehensive Classical Atlas (1832); Aaron Arrowsmith’s Atlas of Ancient Geography (1842); James T. Head’s First Classical Maps (1845); and the first edition of Alexander Keith Johnston’s School Atlas of Classical Geography (1853). The Philips Atlas of Classical, Historical, and Scriptural History (1855) as well as several ‘ancient and modern’ or ‘physical and historical’ atlases, sometimes used the old ‘comparative method’ of conjoining the ancient with the modern, and even compared maps of the ‘Age of Discovery’ with contemporary maps of European expansion and empire. Leonhard Schmitz published a Library Atlas, With Descriptive Letterpress of Classical Geography in 1875. A number of such atlases were designed for specific schools. As we have seen, Samuel Butler of Shrewsbury had stressed ancient geography; in addition to his text in that field, he also published an Ancient Atlas, later renamed Atlas of Ancient Geography. The firm of Arrowsmith had earlier published an ancient and modern geography in 1828 specifically ‘for the use of Eton School’ and an Atlas of Ancient Geography (1842) for the use of King’s College School. As R. L. Archer has pointed out, although the Eton atlas had modern maps on the page opposite the corresponding classical map, it had no maps of countries outside the Greco-Roman world. (That is, the Eton geography atlas did not recognize the existence of Scotland, Ireland, or Russia.) There was also a Harrow Atlas of Classical Geography (1857), published in both senior and junior versions. William Murphy’s classical atlas saw a school version in 1858, and he also published a 298

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school and college atlas of ancient and modern geography in 1850. Head’s Classical Maps were probably originally designed for the Richmond School, of which he was headmaster. George Butler’s late Public Schools Atlas of Ancient Geography (1877) was specifically designed to supplement the classical authors read in those schools (where the classics still held sway), though it probably grew more particularly out of the academic program of Liverpool College, where he was headmaster from 1866 to 1882. Many of these school atlases ran to several editions.44 The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge also produced classical (and other) maps, with a projected audience beyond divines, classical scholars, gentlemen and public schoolboys. This brings us once again to some old acquaintances, including George Long and Thomas Key. Key, joint headmaster of the University College School, compiled two maps for the Society, one of ancient France and one of the French provinces, and also wrote on ancient geography. Long also contributed maps to the Society’s cartographic project: ancient Asia Minor, Persia, Egypt and the Roman Empire. William Smith provided the maps of ancient Greece and the Greek archipelago, and the maps of Athens were compiled from the work of Society of Dilettanti members, William Martin Leake and C. R. Cockerell. William Hughes, who was to publish an Atlas of Scripture Geography in 1840 and was an experienced engraver, produced the Society’s maps of ancient Syria and of Palestine in the time of Christ, as well as others. These maps were issued largely between 1829 and 1836 and, in 1844, were bound together and sold as two atlas volumes, published by the London firm of Chapman and Hall.45 Long himself edited William Hughes’ classical maps for an Atlas of Classical Geography, published in 1854 in London (2nd edition, 1874), and a smaller Grammar School Atlas of Ancient Geography (1855; 2nd edition, 1882). Hughes’ primary interests were in contemporary geography and geographic education, teaching in a college that trained poor boys to teach in schools for the poor, and later in the Evening Division of King’s College. Although he was well known in his day as a geographic educator, the author of his biographical sketch in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies begins with wording reminiscent of the Ash Wednesday Anglican liturgy: ‘from obscurity Hughes arose and into obscurity he has returned’. 299

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The American edition of the atlas, produced by Long, contained 52 maps. Long added an introductory essay on classical geography, as well making as other contributions. Long also included a new plate showing the growth of geographical knowledge in ancient times, and a number of topographical maps. ‘Sacred geography’ is omitted, and the atlas is directed to the needs of students in American schools and colleges. In his preface Long sets forth his own idea of the best method of teaching geography in the schools: ‘by oral instruction on the Map, followed by examination’. This accords with Long’s earlier pedagogical statements and probably reflects his teaching methods in his Virginia days as well. In 1850 he had written his former student, Henry Tutwiler, ‘I do not know any good textbooks on ancient geography, though there are many. If the boys always use maps, and the teacher were to give them a short lecture now and then, followed by an examination, I think no book would be found necessary’ [including his own?]. This puts Long alongside Emma Willard and other nineteenth-century reformers of geography teaching, who emphasized student self-learning from the map rather than memorizing the facts in the textbooks of the time.46 Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Royal Geographical Society became involved in efforts to advance geography in schools and universities, appointing John Scott Keltie its Inspector of Geographical Education. As such, during 1884–5 Keltie visited seven European countries to collect information and tools for learning, as well as obtaining reports from several other countries, including the United States. The maps, atlases, models and other ‘appliances’ he obtained were then used to mount a popular exhibition, opened in December 1885 and accompanied by a series of public lectures to promote support for geography in education. In his lecture for the series, ‘On Appliances Used in Teaching Geography’, Keltie turned to the problem of maps of classical lands, given that ‘we all know the position of classics in our higher schools’. Having established that British maps in general were inferior to those produced in German-speaking lands, Keltie asserted that British classical maps were even more inferior to German maps than were British modern maps. If any maps were to be found on the walls of the great public schools, they were Heinrich Kiepert’s, not Britishmade. Of the nine classical maps displayed in the exhibition, four 300

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were from the Johnston firm’s series and four more by Kiepert. A series of classical topographic maps produced by the German Archaeological Institute constituted a ninth grouping. Among the classical atlases displayed, nine were British (published respectively by Longman’s, Letts, the Johnstons, and George Philip, the last using Hughes’ maps). These were overshadowed by a large number of German and Austrian atlases, though oddly enough Kiepert’s Atlas Antiquus was listed among the English atlases, since the English edition was used for the display. Among the texts exhibited were both the recent English translation of Kiepert’s Manual and E. A. Freeman’s Historical Geography of Europe (both text and atlas volumes).47 In the new United States, David Macpherson’s atlas of ancient geography appeared in 1806. But American classical atlases only begin to be published in some numbers in 1813, the same year as the first American classical geography texts. Jacob Cummings published an eight-map Ancient and Modern Atlas to accompany his Ancient and Modern Geography of that year. This atlas was reprinted at least nine more times by 1826. Also in 1813, John F. Watson produced a fivemap Atlas of Ancient Geography to accompany Robert Mayo’s text combining ancient geography and history. In 1818 Mayo’s Atlas Classica followed his own 1813 ten-map atlas. Joseph Worcester’s Ancient, Classical, and Scripture Atlas, with ten maps, slightly more than half of them Biblical lands, had five editions between 1839 and 1850. The ninth English edition of Butler’s Atlas of Ancient Geography was published in America in 1831 and was republished at least as late as 1849. Henry S. Tanner, a skilled Philadelphia engraver better known for his American and ‘Universal’ atlases, nevertheless also produced a separate atlas of ancient geography. The first, containing sixteen maps ‘to Elucidate the Writings of the Ancient Works, Both Sacred and Profane’, was issued in 1826. Fourteen years later, in 1840, Tanner published what is probably the largest American-made classical atlas before the Civil War: the Atlas Classica, containing 53 maps. Woodbridge and Willard each produced atlases to accompany their widely used joint text, with Woodbridge publishing eight editions of a modern atlas between 1823 and 1843 and Willard a six-map Ancient Atlas to aid in understanding her section on ancient geography, in six editions between 1827 and 1836. Both also produced additional atlases and wall maps to illustrate their other texts. In addition to his 301

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general and American atlases, Anthony Finley of Philadelphia published an Atlas Classica in 1829.48 Mid-century, in addition to Jesse Olney’s Modern and Ancient Atlas, intended for both schools and families, and published in five editions between 1855 and 1866, and Roswell C. Smith’s Atlas of Modern and Ancient Geography, intended to accompany his Geography for Schools, Academies, and Families, issued from the 1830s to 1854, the 1850s saw classical maps and atlases emerge from two major East Coast publishers. Developments in printing and engraving technologies, as well as the expansion of the market in common schools and in academies, had enabled the production of textbooks and maps more cheaply and in greater quantities. S. Augustus Mitchell’s firm, which had succeeded Tanner’s in Philadelphia and which employed some 250 people, and John H. Colton and Sons in New York, both niche-marketed materials in aid of classical study. Colton seems not to have produced classical geography texts, but did produce a series of classical wall maps and, in 1860, a Historical Atlas that contained both ‘ancient and modern’ maps. The title page repeated what had by then become a cliché: ‘Chronology and Geography are the Two Eyes of History’. Mitchell, in addition to his oft-republished Ancient Geography text, also produced a 12-map Ancient Atlas, first published in 1838 and reprinted in 1844. It was subtitled ‘Classical and Sacred’, and was intended to supplement the descriptions of ancient writers, suggesting that at least at first it was intended for the broadest possible market: schools, libraries, homes, and churches. Mitchell’s business acumen, although most clearly demonstrated in his American atlases, railroad guides, and pocket maps, which had to undergo frequent revisions as the nation expanded, was not lacking in his Ancient Atlas. Though its sales were only a minor part of his reported $400,000 per year in revenue, his Ancient Atlas ran to a total of 15 editions between 1838 and 1893. The last appeared long after Mitchell’s death in 1868, after he had earlier turned over the business to his son. The Mitchell firm’s Ancient Atlas, then, held the American record for longevity in the genre during the nineteenth century. To these we should add what appears to be the only atlas containing maps of the ancient world to be published during the Civil War in a Confederate state, Charles Galusha Colby’s The World in Miniature, published in New Orleans in 1861.49 302

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In the advertisement section of Boston science educator Lucretia Crocker’s widely used handbook, Methods of Teaching Geography, the Boston School Supply Company listed, among other aids to learning, no less than three classical map series. The J. H. Colton Company’s series, consisting of five maps (Roman Empire, ancient Western Europe, ancient Italy, ancient Greece, and ancient Asia Minor), sold for $5.00 each. Johnston’s series also offered five maps, produced by the London and Edinburgh firm of William and Alexander Keith Johnston, at $3.50 per map. Arnold Guyot’s three maps, the Roman Empire, ancient Greece (with an inset map of Athens) and ancient Italy (with a map of Rome), were produced in cooperation with his nephew by marriage, Henry C. Cameron, Professor of Greek at the College of New Jersey, and published by Charles Scribner and Co. of New York. These cost $12.50 for the first two and $10.00 for the third. All were described by the distributor as bold and clear in their execution, nearly uniform in size, and including ‘all names mentioned in text books’.50 It seems significant that most of the ‘American’ classical atlases first printed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century were actually editions or outright republications of English works. The earliest I have found is Alexander Findlay’s Classical Atlas, republished by Harper in New York in 1849. Findlay’s Classical Atlas for Ancient Geography, published by Harper in 1858, was simply a republication of the latest London edition of his Classical Atlas. Long’s American edition of Hughes’ and Long’s Atlas of Classical Geography was reprinted four more times after its first New York publication in 1856, the last in 1871. Leonhard Schmitz’s and Warren Collier’s International Atlas, first republished in New York by Putnam in 1873, contained thirtyfive modern and 30 ‘historical and classical geography’ maps. In the same year, Putnam’s issued a Student’s Atlas of Classical Geography by Schmitz and E. F. Weller, containing 15 maps, apparently the only American edition, though the International Atlas continued to be expanded and republished until around 1890. A late exception, and seemingly the only original classical atlas published in America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was the Boston firm of Ginn and Company’s 36-page Classical Atlas, published three times between 1882 and 1905. But their 1888 (and 1895) Classical Atlas: In Twenty-Three Colored Maps was simply a re303

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publication of Keith Johnston’s School and College Atlas of Ancient Geography. Few publishers in the United States published new and original American classical atlases after the 1850s. The practice of simply reprinting older American classical atlases and importing British ones suggests first, that the American market had diminished earlier than the British, owing to the more rapid decline of classical studies on the western side of the Atlantic. Second, and concurrently, the humanistic aspects of the discipline were being rapidly displaced in the United States in favor of courses and admissions requirements in physical geography, beginning in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and then by more specialized courses and admissions requirements in physiography and meteorology.

15. William Hughes and George Long, An Atlas of Classical Geography

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Another tendency was the gradual market separation of atlases and maps in classical geography proper and scriptural or Biblical geography. Although Philadelphia publisher, Mathew Carey, had published a Scripture Atlas in 1813, it was mid-century before specialized wall maps and atlases termed ‘Sacred Geography’ or ‘Bible Atlases’ began to appear in some numbers. Even among publishers who had continued to bind maps of the two regions into one atlas, however, there was a growing sense that the different groups of maps appealed to different audiences. A review of Findlay’s Classical Atlas in the Baptist-sponsored Christian Review in 1849 makes the point admirably. Praising the work for its reliability and completeness, the anonymous reviewer thought that it had not only covered the topics of interest to the classical scholar, but ‘Biblical Geography’ also had ‘its full share of attention’. The four maps of lands associated with the Bible, claimed the reviewer, ‘will be specially welcome to theological students’.51 It was a sign of the increasing separation of interest that has continued between those interested in the two ‘ancient geographies’ of earlier times, the Greek and Roman world of the classicist and the ancient Near East of the Biblical scholar. This division would become sharper in the later nineteenth century, with the rise of professional specialization in either classical or Biblical archaeology.

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY AS AN ADMISSIONS REQUIREMENT In Britain, admissions requirements for the new nineteenth-century university foundations appear largely to have dispensed with a classical languages admissions requirement for all students. But Oxford and Cambridge clung to the traditional mastery of Latin and Greek for all entering students, regardless of what program they expected to follow. After all, as Oxford’s Public Orator and Fellow of Magdalen College, A. D. Godley, told an American audience in 1913, it was at Oxford ‘that some knowledge of Greek and Latin began to be associated with the status of a gentleman’. Most Oxbridge students had come from either the major traditional public schools or the nine-

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teenth-century foundations that mimicked them. Such schools offered classical geography in a cursory way only. At Oxford and Cambridge, however, debates over the compulsory Greek entrance requirement began around 1870, when the Endowed Schools Commission wrote the Vice-Chancellors urging them to abolish it, since they believed that it discriminated against able students who had not studied it in school. The debates, which divided classicists in both school and university, were given additional impetus as both Oxford and Cambridge developed programs in law, modern history, and sciences, for none of which was Greek an obvious necessity. As Godley pointed out in 1913, although pass men still had to pass a Greek examination after entrance, ‘the honors man [except, presumably, those in the literae humaniores program] need never open a Greek or Latin book during the whole period of his residence’.52 The Classical Association, founded in 1903, held its first general meeting at Oxford the following year. The major address, by J. W. Mackail, was titled ‘On the Place of Greek and Latin in Human Life’, surely seemingly innocuous in that setting. But before it was given, Mackail reported, the President of Magdalen College approached him ‘with tears in his voice’ and ‘implored’ him not even to ‘whisper a certain phrase [compulsory Greek] which at present distracts this University’. Some classicists threatened not to join the Association, depending on whether it supported or opposed the Greek requirement. The result was that the Association took no position on the most burning issue of the day for classicists, on the flimsy pretext that its remit did not include teaching methods.53 Universities abolished the Greek requirement after World War I. Few students were studying Greek in school in any case, and the pendulum had swung to Latin which, in its capacity as an adjunct to the student of law, medicine, mediaeval history and the Romance languages, could still be defended as having a utilitarian as well as a cultural value. As Godley had warned, however, ‘When Greek goes, Latin is apt to go too’. It took 40 years more, but in 1959–60 both universities abolished the Latin entrance requirement.54 In the United States, as we have already seen, broadened entrance requirements after the American Revolution often displaced British geographies and even Morse, to include some form of ‘ancient and modern’ geography, or ancient geography alone. In part this reflected 306

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a broadening of the curriculum at the secondary level beyond Latin and Greek, and in part the efforts of the colleges themselves to push certain subjects down to the secondary school level, in the expectation that their fundamentals would be mastered before the student entered college. At Harvard College, as we have seen earlier, the admissions requirement was similar to that of other institutions: bits of geography attached to various other disciplines, and a textual sequence from Gordon to Guthrie to (in 1793) Morse (‘in the room of Guthrie’s’). Henry Adams frustratingly recounts the only mention of a geography admissions question in the examination of the eighteenth-century student whose diary he reviewed: ‘Mr. R____ asked me what was the figure of the earth, and several other questions, some of which I answered, and others not.’ In 1803 an admissions requirement specified that all entering students must ‘have well studied a Compendium of Geography’. The following year, 1804, a joint committee of the Corporation and the Overseers proposed the preparation of a new textbook that would be used both for admission and for college instruction, entitled ‘A Summary of Ancient and Modern Geography for the Use of Students Before and After Admission into the University in Cambridge’, but nothing came of the project. The Harvard plan of 1804, however, appears to be one of the earliest mentions of ancient geography both as an admissions requirement and a college subject. Late in 1814 the Laws of Harvard College specified that students entering Harvard after 1815 ‘must have well studied ancient and modern geography’.55 The conduct of the entrance examination in ancient and modern geography seems to have been given to whichever tutor or other academic officer was available, though after 1837 it was formally entrusted to the mathematics department. The text over which students were examined was Joseph Worcester’s Ancient and Modern Geography. From student recollections, it seems to have consisted of routine factual questions, such as how Indiana was bounded, the divisions of Palestine, and of what country St Petersburg was the capital, which Tutor Francis Bowen asked of Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1837, or the question a dozen students in a row answered incorrectly during Edward Everett Hale’s examination: whether Amsterdam was or was not north of London. Not surprisingly, many such students were 307

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admitted to Harvard conditionally, contingent on their private study or tutoring from a ‘crammer’ until the geography examination was passed. According to many reminiscences, geography was the usual, and often the only, subject on which students were ‘conditioned’. An unidentified member of the Class of 1859, for example, was conditioned in four subjects, including the geography of [ancient] Greece. Charles Brooks Brown of the Class of 1856 passed ‘a good examination in all studies except Ancient Geography’.56 In 1845 the Overseers took another look at admissions requirements, in the process surveying fields and texts used for admission at Harvard and six other New England institutions. Four of the six required an entrance examination in geography, Brown specifically in ancient geography and Bowdoin specifying texts that included ancient geography: Morse, Worcester and Woodbridge. The following year the geography field was taken away from the mathematics faculty and assigned to the ‘Historical Department’. From this time until 1886, the examination for that department was in ancient geography and ancient history, to be prepared for by mastering Worcester’s or, after 1854, Mitchell’s ancient geography text. In this way students were required to have a minimum pre-college foundation for the work in ancient geography they would encounter in Harvard’s classics and ancient history courses.57 In the eighteenth century, its historian has written, ‘geography had an insignificant place’ in Boston’s Public Latin School, where students’ geographical knowledge was ‘incidentally obtained’ from descriptions of Greece and Rome in other parts of their classical studies. But before the Civil War the Latin School supplied about a quarter of each Harvard entering class, so it and other secondary schools quickly added geography as an independent part of the curriculum as Harvard introduced it as a separate admissions requirement. At Latin, Worcester’s Ancient and Modern Geography was the text, ‘and here’, Benjamin Gould recalled, ‘constant and particular use is made of the maps… and besides getting the text of the book, to answer any question which may arise upon the map of the country whose geography they are studying’. A writer in the North American Review recalled with pleasure how he had discovered that ‘the confused mass of names in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Caesar’s Commentaries, which so stumbled in his undisciplined larynx’, were now clear in his mind as real 308

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places, with locations on the map just like Exeter, Andover and New Haven.58 The transfer of the geography examination to the history department in 1846 had brought no great changes in the level of the entrance examination, however. In June 1872, for example, one of the examination questions was, ‘Give the divisions of the Peloponnese, with their relative positions, and name a place in each.’ In his inaugural address in October 1869 the new Harvard President, Charles W. Eliot, a scientist, announced that among the new entrance requirements would be ‘an acquaintance with physical geography’. This reflected a new realism about the broadening of the public high school curriculum and its new role in sending students to college. Beginning in 1870, Harvard, along with the University of Michigan, made physical geography (‘a knowledge of which is indispensable for the intelligent study of history’) the first of the natural science fields to become a college entrance requirement. This, in a sense, was a reprise of Harvard’s leadership in 1803, when, by requiring mastery of general geography, it had been the first college to use that field to break the monopoly of the traditional trinity (or what Frederick Rudolph has called ‘the traditional lethal doses’) of Latin, Greek and mathematics. In the second semester of 1869–70 Nathaniel Southgate Shaler offered instruction in physical geography to any Sophomore willing to attend without credit. But in the spring term, 1871, a regular semester course in physical geography was offered in the department of natural history, headed by Shaler. By 1885, when William Morris Davis was promoted to assistant professor and given his own two-semester course in physical geography and meteorology, Harvard geography had become redefined as a purely natural science.59 As we have seen, however, custody of the human and cultural elements of geography remained within the history program, as also at Michigan. The history department’s admissions requirement of ancient history and geography remained in place until after Henry Torrey’s retirement and Ephraim Gurney’s death, both in 1886. The elective system at Harvard was by then in full flood, and eight New England college presidents were, as Rudolph has put it, ‘all but down on their knees, imploring, begging the corporation not to allow Eliot to drop Greek as an entrance requirement’. By that time junior mem309

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bers, such as Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart, were slowly shifting the major emphasis of the history department in the direction of American and antecedent British histories (see Chapter 7). Consequently, the history admissions requirement was modified, to offer Harvard applicants a choice between ancient history and its geography and British and American history and geography. After 1898 these requirements were further modified to specify that, in whichever option the students took, they were to be tested on locations using an outline map, and must also submit a portfolio which included ‘historical maps and charts showing explorations, migrations, conquests, territorial changes, or social conditions’. These requirements persisted, with minor further modifications, until in 1915 Harvard joined the College Entrance Examination Board.60 As we have seen in Chapter 2, the admissions requirements at the University of Pennsylvania included ‘Ancient and Modern Geography’ until 1887, 11 years after any form of geography had been discontinued at the college level. Something of the same thing occurred at other eastern colleges. In the revision of its academic program in 1829, Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) required that applicants must offer ‘Geography, ancient and modern’ for admission. They were also to be examined on these and other subjects included in admissions requirements but not offered in the college, four times a year (from 1846, twice a year), but these requirements appear not to have been enforced. At Columbia, none other than the future president of the university, Nicholas Murray Butler, was conditioned in ancient geography for not being able to name (in Latin and English) the capes and rivers between Greece and the Black Sea. The future astronomer and tree-ring specialist, A. E. Douglass, failed five subjects in his first attempt at the Trinity College, CT, entrance examination; these included Greek, Roman history and Ancient Geography. At Brown (then the College of Rhode Island), ‘Ancient and Modern Geography’ had been dropped from the college curriculum under Francis Wayland’s presidency, but Brown nevertheless preserved it as an entrance requirement.61 Such fragmentary offerings of geography as were linked to classics and ancient history, however, in most cases disappeared after mid-century, first at the college level, then from the list of admissions requirements (later options).

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A survey of admissions requirements for a representative selection of colleges and universities of a variety of sizes and types in 1896 showed that classical geography was required only in 15 of them, and that only for the Bachelor of Arts program. The ancient (or ancient and modern) mode of understanding geography’s place in the curriculum lingered for a few years longer in the academies and preparatory schools, but if the colleges no longer required it, it made no sense to include it in the academic program.62 The second influence was the broadening of admissions requirements. The expansion of the public high schools, particularly in the Middle West, which offered a more diverse curriculum than the liberal arts colleges, were supplying their graduates to the colleges in increasing numbers. In consequence, in a period of strong competition for students, the colleges were forced to become more liberal in their admissions criteria. Third was the spreading outward from Harvard of the elective system and the nearly concurrent dropping of Greek as an admissions requirement, in both of which Harvard led among the private institutions, and the University of Michigan among the state institutions. Fourth was the late nineteenth century-professionalization of classics. The initial interest of Friedrich Wolf (who had revived the term ‘philology’ in 1777) and his early nineteenth-century successors, included ‘grammar, criticism, geography, political history, customs, mythology, literature, arts, and ideas of a people’. But late nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ philology became restricted to the analysis of a narrow range of literary texts, in the original languages, as a form of ‘mental discipline’. Gerald Graff wrote that ‘the chief result… was to imbue the student with a life-long hatred of classical languages’. As Louis B. Wright caustically put it, ‘Classical studies in America died only when they passed into the exclusive guardianship of the schoolmasters. … In the early years of the republic, the classics had not yet foundered on the arid shores of pedantry’.63 The most hotly debated issue at the turn of the century among classicists was not how the classics might survive as an important element of liberal education, but the correct pronunciation of Latin. Yet as late as 1976 G. S. Kirk complained that the language problem had not yet been resolved: ‘In Britain we do not even have a unified pronunciation of the two languages’ and that even in their final year 311

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at university ‘most classics students’ in the United States and Britain were ‘able to do little better than crawl through a text, line by agonized line’. Ancient history was in a similarly parlous condition: in 1919, a survey by Arthur Schlesinger Sr showed that, of the diverse array of institutions of higher education he sampled, only four were still offering ancient history as a Freshman course. In 1961, John Higham noted that following World War II there had been ‘a significant decline of scholarly activity’ in ancient history in the United States; in that year, only 15 doctoral students in history were working on dissertations in the field. Only 222 students in American public high schools, and those in only five states, were enrolled in ancient Greek by 1960. Latin had a much larger enrollment in numerical terms (661,563 students), but in percentage terms it had dropped from 50.6 per cent of high school enrollments in 1900 to 7.6 percent in 1960.64 Freed from the requirement of drilling unwilling boys, classicists assumed an increasingly minor role in academic programs, and retreated into purely professional, as opposed to liberal, concerns. Historian Thomas Africa pessimistically expressed the outlook in 1967: ‘Classicists no longer reproduce themselves and will go the way of the Shakers’.65 Thomas Jefferson would not have approved.

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Classical Geography in the New American Universities, 1865–1932

Between 1865 and 1892 a series of historically important research universities was established in the United States. These include The University of California, Berkeley (chartered and opened in 1868), Cornell University (chartered in 1865 and opened in 1868), The Johns Hopkins University (chartered in 1867 and opened in 1876), Clark University and The Catholic University of America (both chartered in 1887 and opened in 1889), The Leland Stanford Junior University (chartered 1885, opened 1891), and The University of Chicago (chartered 1890, opened 1892). Two of them, Clark and Catholic, began as doctoral universities only, Clark in science (including psychology) and Catholic in philosophy, theology and literature. Though each of the two was innovative in its own way, neither became major institutions. Johns Hopkins was primarily a graduate institution, but began a three-year college course at the same time as the graduate school. All the others began, at least in theory, as both undergraduate and graduate institutions, though Chicago, like Hopkins, had a primarily graduate and research focus.1 The new American universities of the late nineteenth century had three things in common. First, none of them had the intellectual baggage of the early nineteenth-century college curriculum, with its strongly classical academic program and evangelical religious bias, to adapt or overcome. As Francesco Cordasco has put it, ‘It was almost historically axiomatic that Eliot and the older foundations had to approach the problem of graduate studies through a college

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corridor’.2 Second, none of them would continue for long, if they did at all, the Renaissance belief that geography was one of the two ‘eyes’ of history and thus a subject closely allied to ancient history and classics. And third, they could be building curricula at a time when geography was moving from a subject that could be (and often was) taught or written by anybody (or, sometimes in more advanced form, by historians or classicists), toward an academic discipline of a very different colouring. The new ‘scientific’ geographers successfully carved out a space in the newer (and indeed many older) institutions in which professional geographers could be produced and reproduced. As a group, the new institutions, and the place (if any) of classical geography in their academic programs, are therefore of interest to the general theme of this book.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA The University of California, first in Oakland and from 1873 in Berkeley, in its early days offered both physical geography and Greek and Roman geography. From 1872 to 1875 its President was Daniel Coit Gilman, who qualifies as the second academic professional geographer (after Arnold Guyot) in the United States. Gilman, an 1852 Yale graduate, had spent a postgraduate year at Harvard, intending to study lexicography. However, during that year Gilman had lived in Guyot’s home in Cambridge, and absorbed a good deal of Guyot’s geographical and historical interests, particularly his admiration for Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, at that time. During a two-year period in Europe (1853–5) accompanied by his friend Andrew D. White (later President of Cornell), Gilman had heard Heinrich Barth’s lectures and made the acquaintance of geographer, Carl Ritter, and historian Georg Heinrich Pertz. Gilman returned to Yale as a librarian, but in 1863 had been named Professor of Physical and Political Geography at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. In this position he had contributed over a hundred geographical notes to the American Journal of Science, most concerned with exploration and discovery; had lectured at the New Britain Normal School; had taught Yale students a Sunday evening course in Biblical 314

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geography; had substituted for the ailing Guyot at Princeton in 1871; and had both lectured at, and served for six months as general secretary of, the American Geographical Society of New York. Gilman was a strong advocate of linking geography with history, both in his lectures and writings and in his service as a School Visitor in New Haven. Gilman’s brief time in California ended when he returned East in 1875 to become the founding President of Johns Hopkins.3 Although his tenure there was short, Gilman, in addition to the significant task of overseeing an institutional move from Oakland to Berkeley, took the lead in establishing geography at the University of California. The University Registers during his tenure indicate that the President himself regularly lectured on physical geography to the freshman classes. He also occasionally lectured to advanced students on ‘Modern European History’ and ‘The Physical Geography of Europe’. In 1873 he gave a single lecture in a series given by university personnel to the Mechanics’ Institute of San Francisco on ‘The Physical Geography of the United States in Reference to Its History’. The following year he gave a special course of lectures to Freshmen on ‘The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean’, and to Seniors on ‘The Origin and Progress of Modern Civilization’. Moreover, the classicists, undoubtedly with Gilman’s encouragement, began to give courses during his term to freshmen on Greek and Roman geography and to Seniors on classical archaeology. Ancient history also became a new responsibility of the classicists at this time. Moreover, a wealthy Oakland citizen was persuaded to fund the purchase of sets of maps of the ancient world for the classics classrooms, as well as photographs and other pictures of ‘ancient life, customs, and architecture’, including W. J. Stillman’s famous photograph of the ruins of the Acropolis. Gilman’s stress on the appropriate role for geography as a companion to history and classics, especially his university’s courses both in physical and in Greek and Roman geography, mark him as a transition figure, a link with the pre-Civil War period of American academic geography.4 By the time the University of California established the first independent department of geography in the United States in 1898, over a decade after Gilman had left its presidency, however, it was a different era for the discipline. The new department was placed within the College of Commerce. The first Professor of Geography, George 315

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Davidson, had spent half a century in his previous career with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey. Two junior staff members, Lincoln Hutchinson (1901) and Ruliff Holway (1904) taught commercial geography and physical geography, respectively. But Davidson’s hopes for instructors in geographic exploration and in the history of geography were never to be realized. Under Holway’s chairmanship (1905–23), the small department emphasized physical geography. Holway established a California Physical Geography Club in 1905 and began summer field courses two years later. California awarded its first master’s degree in geography in 1908. Holway’s publications were on various aspects of the physiography of California. In short, the new department reflected current emphases in geography: dominantly physical, secondarily commercial, with a strong emphasis on local fieldwork, and few links to history, much less classics. To the extent that it reflected contemporary human geography, or ‘anthropogeography’, the program included courses in ‘geographic influences’.5 Holway retired in 1923 and was succeeded by the 33-year-old and rather bumptious Carl Sauer, who began a doctoral program that would eventually put Berkeley geography on the national disciplinary map. Sauer had earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1915 under Rollin Salisbury, a geologist and physical geographer, and had previously served as the sole geographer in a combined geologygeography department at the University of Michigan. What was not generally known until Martin Kenzer began to investigate Sauer’s early life and education was that Sauer had earned two bachelor’s degrees at Central Wesleyan College at the age of 18, one in natural science and the other in classics. During a stay of three years in Calw, Württemberg, young Sauer had attended a school with a strong classical curriculum and had absorbed an early training in classics there. Furthermore, his maternal uncle, Henry Voshall, taught ancient and modern history at Central Wesleyan and his father, who was Professor of French and Music there, was well trained in classical languages and had a strong interest in the relations of history and geography.6 This background emerged at Berkeley in several of his pièces d’occasion, not as a revival of the Greek and Roman geography courses of the 1870s, but as part of Sauer’s advocacy of the importance of the history of geography in the preparation of young professional geog316

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raphers. John Leighly later recalled that, during the 1920s, in Sauer’s seminars on the history of geography ‘we learned to appreciate the antiquity, the continuity, and the dignity of an intellectual concern with the earth’. In this area, Sauer is best known for his interest in the writings of such nineteenth-century German geographers as Alexander von Humboldt, Eduard Hahn, August Meitzen, and Friedrich Ratzel, as well as the American polymath, George Perkins Marsh. But his first graduate seminar at Berkeley, in 1924–5, was described as ‘Geography Among the Ancients, and the Developments in Cosmography and Cartography during the Period of Great Discoveries’.7 In his widely read inaugural public address at California, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, Sauer argued that ‘the historia of the Greeks… represented a far from contemptible start in geography’, defined as the areal interdependence of phenomena, ‘as any reader of Herodotus or Polybius knows’. Then Sauer went on to claim that ‘classical geography in general… gave primary emphasis to areal description’, culminating in a group ‘of which Strabo was chief, [which] was by no means entirely naïve, and rejected vigorously other definitions of geography than as chorology….’ And, he concluded, that by including the works of man as well as nature, a position ‘derived from Herodotus rather than from Thales’, modern geography was simply ‘the modern expression of the most ancient geography’. In a slightly later essay, ‘Recent Developments in Cultural Geography’, Sauer again praised Strabo as having ‘set up a philosophy of geography of realistic character, based on direct observation, anthropocentric, and culminating in the knowledge of regions as the home of man’. Strabo was characterized as one who would be a ‘treasure trove’ for the geography of his time, if not ours. Although Sauer later repudiated much of this analysis, especially its argument for the centrality of chorography in geography, it is significant that he expected his Berkeley geography students to recognize the names of, and even to read, Herodotus, Polybius and Strabo.8 Sauer rarely attended meetings of the Association of American Geographers, but when he was elected President he necessarily assumed the responsibility of giving a Presidential Address. In this 1940 speech, published the next year as ‘Foreword to Historical Geography’, Sauer again praised the Greek geographers: ‘No one is likely to regret…’ he asserted, ‘becoming familiar with Greek thought in 317

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geography, as a background for his own thinking.’ Sauer then criticized contemporary American geographers for thinking ‘that human geography and history were quite different subjects, not different approaches to the same problem’ (as, presumably, a reading of Herodotus and Strabo would have shown them). Sauer went on to praise the work of seventeenth-century geographical writer, Philip Cluverius, for his ‘extraordinarily acute reconstructions of ancient Germany and Italy, skillfully uniting knowledge of the classics and knowledge of the land’. Sauer had used Ellen Churchill Semple’s Influences of Geographic Environment as the basis for his second-semester introductory course at Michigan. Although he had attended her lectures on anthropogeography as a graduate student, admired her talents, and liked her personally, he was transitioning away from her ideas at about the same time he was transitioning to California. ‘Morphology of Landscape’ represents his first rejection of her point of view. In a short biographical sketch in 1934 Sauer criticized Semple’s work for ‘being interested in whatever data could be related to environmental conditioning’, though praised her Mediterranean book as stemming from ‘a broad knowledge of classical literature’ and its full documentation. In a 1966 article he objected to her concentration on the persistence of place conditions, and ignoring change. In a still later essay, ‘The Fourth Dimension of Geography’, he complained that Miss Semple had read history ‘from the recent American past to classical antiquity as persistence of environmental advantage or denial’. Sauer had finished his graduate work at Chicago just after Miss Semple had published her first study on the geography of the ancient Mediterranean. But his comments suggest that Sauer had read her papers in this area, and the resulting book, The Geography of the Mediterranean in Relation to Ancient History, as well.9

CORNELL UNIVERSITY Cornell geography from the beginning was firmly anchored in the natural sciences. As Gary Dunbar has shown, both physical geography and climatology were taught from its opening in 1868. Though 318

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these were listed in the School of Physical Geography, a division of the College of Natural History, they were taught by Reverend William Wilson, Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, a part of the College of Literature and Philosophy. The School of Physical Geography was merged with the Department of Geology in 1871, and during the 1870s Charles Frederick Hartt, Professor of Geology, taught the physical geography course. A brilliant former student of Louis Agassiz at Harvard (who himself was a disciple of Alexander von Humboldt), and the geologist on Agassiz’ famous Thayer expedition to Brazil, Hartt died in 1878 while serving as head of the Brazilian Geological Survey. The first trained geographer, Ralph Stockman Tarr, appointed in 1892 as assistant professor of dynamic geology and physical geography, had been a student at Harvard under Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and William Morris Davis. Tarr, as chairman of the geology department, tried and failed to get the Cornell administration to approve a School of Geology and Geography. A productive scholar and powerful educator, whose textbooks were widely read, Tarr died prematurely in 1912. Two years later, his sub-department of physical geography was folded back into the Department of Geology. His student, O. D. von Engeln, continued as a physical geographer (and sole geographer) within the Department of Geology until his 1949 retirement, the last professional geographer to serve on the Cornell faculty. In 1923 von Engeln published a testy article in the Scientific Monthly, attacking developments in human geography and blaming them for the low academic status of geography.10 If we are to find evidences of interest in the geography of the classical world at early Cornell, therefore, we must turn (as at Harvard) to history and classics. The founding President, historian Andrew Dickson White, thought geography essential to a study of history. He, like Gilman, had been impressed by Carl Ritter on their joint trip to Europe in the 1850s, and in 1859 wrote Gilman that he had followed Thomas Arnold’s dictum ‘that to teach History without Geography is impossible’. As an examiner for admissions to the University of Michigan, White had ‘conditioned’ in geography nine-tenths of his first entering class. (The examination was in ‘modern’ geography, since the field he taught there was modern history.) He then gave his students a six-week lecture course in physical and political geography, 319

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followed by a final examination, to bring them up to speed in a subject to which, he had reasonably supposed, they had been repeatedly exposed at school. In his history courses, White continued to test his students’ knowledge of geography, which ‘lasted and was increased’.11 The first teacher of ancient history at Cornell, William C. Russel, had no formal training in history. Yet he also taught mediaeval history, American history, English history, and southern European languages. In addition, Russel was Vice-President and, during White’s numerous absences, Acting President of Cornell. After Russel’s departure in 1881 it was proposed that ancient history be dropped. Protests from the departments of Latin and Greek temporarily saved it for three years under another historian, after which the classics departments offered an ancient history course until George Lincoln Burr was appointed Professor of Ancient and Medieval History in 1890. Like White, Burr insisted that his graduate students master geography as an essential adjunct to history, and himself taught a course in historical geography. Burr was primarily a mediaevalist, however, and sometimes engaged in debates with geographers over the nature and uses of historical geography. Not until 1902 was a Cornell historian put in charge of ancient history proper, though he had also to teach the elementary course in English history.12 We may assume that, at least at some point, maps of the ancient world appeared on classics and history classroom walls. Early Cornell classicists appear to have concentrated on philological and literary matters. But courses in what might be called para-geographical subjects began in the 1880s. With the appointment of Benjamin Ide Wheeler in 1886, the Cornell Greek program was enlarged to include a course in Greek life and literature, illustrated with lantern slides. Alfred Emerson, Professor of Archaeology and Art from 1891 to 1898, lectured on archaeology and on ‘the topography and archaeology of Athens and Attica, and of Pagan Rome’. J. R. S. Sterrett, appointed in 1901, had made archaeological expeditions to Asia Minor, partly ‘to fix the topography of cities, rivers, and states’. Both German historian Theodor Mommsen’s book on the Roman provinces and the German government’s map of the region were based in part on Sterrett’s topographical work. One of his Cornell courses was on the physical and historical geography of Greece. A colleague gave a course on the Greek periegete and topographer, Pausanias. Although the Latin department 320

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appears to have done less in this direction, Alfred Emerson of the Greek Department gave courses on Roman topography and archaeology and on ‘Roman religious antiquities’.13 Classical archaeologists at Cornell and elsewhere would continue to teach such courses, usually titled ‘Topography and Monuments of [ancient] Athens’ (or of Rome), in American university classics departments well beyond 1901.

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY Edward Shils has called the establishment of Johns Hopkins ‘perhaps the single, most decisive event in the history of learning in the Western hemisphere’. To discover evidences of geography under its founding President, geographer Daniel Coit Gilman, we must look in five places: the President’s Office and the Departments of Psychology, Biology, History and Geology. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall had been asked by Gilman to offer work in pedagogy as well, and in this latter capacity Hall was an advocate for the German method of teaching geography, starting with the home area, a form of education called ‘Heimatkunde’. Hall, however, seems to have had no interest in classical geography, either at Hopkins or subsequently at Clark. Nor did Hopkins’ famous classicist, Basil Gildersleeve, who, it will be recalled, had broken with the Jeffersonian tradition of teaching classical geography as a part of the classics program at the University of Virginia, from which he had been recruited. Gildersleeve’s ‘seminary’ in philology was narrowly directed at future investigators and future teachers ‘in the exegesis and criticism of Greek authors’.14 In 1879 biologist Samuel Clarke was paid an extra $350 for teaching a course in physical geography. An examination in physical geography became required of all entering undergraduates in 1883, for which mastery of both the Physical Geography text by Gilman’s mentor, Arnold Guyot, and Huxley’s newer Physiography text were recommended. Within the college itself, as a result of a curricular overhaul in the same year, a new ‘group system’ of requirements was instituted for all first-year undergraduates (equivalent to a sophomore class), one of which was the so-called P. H. E., or Physical Geography, History, and English. The unwilling teacher was an American historian, 321

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J. Franklin Jameson, who had been retained on the staff after becoming Hopkins’ first PhD in history under Herbert Baxter Adams in 1882.15 Jameson’s remit included the development and maintenance of the so-called Geographical and Statistical Bureau, located within the Department of History and Political Science. Gilman and Adams had sent Jameson to Princeton in May 1883 to speak with Guyot (who at that time was too ill to be interviewed) and to examine the facilities there, in order to get ideas for the new Bureau. This comprehensive collection contained wall and loose maps, atlases, gazetteers, topographical dictionaries, histories of geography, treatises on comparative geography, Ritter’s Erdkunde, Petermann’s Mitteilungen, the writings of Peschel, Guyot, Reclus, Behm, etc.; the journals and bulletins of geographical societies; books of explorations, travels, voyages, etc., as well as reports of various geographically related government surveys, which were made available to all Hopkins faculty and students.16 Jameson, a former teacher of Latin and History at the Worcester, MA, High School, had no prior exposure to physical geography. As a student at Hopkins, he had, however, heard the six lectures on the historical geography of southeastern Europe given at the Peabody Institute by E. A. Freeman, and had borrowed Freeman’s Historical Geography of Europe from the library. It was ultimately Gilman who had proposed the one-hour course, which was not the ‘new’ physical geography of the late nineteenth century, but rather physical geography as related to ancient history. In his Seventh Annual Report Gilman reviewed the efforts recently made in the classical field at Hopkins. They included Gildersleeve’s recent establishment of the American Journal of Philology and his courses in Greek literature (for graduate students), the university’s cooperation in the American School at Athens, and ‘in order that the classical instruction of undergraduates might be carried forward in the most efficient way’, the employment of Charles Morris as Collegiate Professor and an assistant, for undergraduate instruction in Latin and Greek classics. Gilman also announced, ‘Mr. J. F. Jameson, Ph.D., has been recently engaged to give instruction in classical history and geography.’ Since Gilman held that all ‘groups’ should be equal in effort, the classical segment of Hopkins’ program of liberal education was to be satisfied with 322

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ancient history, Greek and Roman literature in translation, and ancient geography.17 Adams had boasted that ‘physical and historical geography were made the basis of instruction in historical and political science’, and Jameson’s course certainly illustrated that, albeit in a way that was becoming obsolete. Jameson’s primary text for the course, which met one hour a week in the second term, was H. F. Tozer’s Classical Geography. Students were required to complete 20 ‘exercises’, presumably map-based. Gilman described the course in his Annual Reports as ‘Lectures on the relations of Physical Geography to History’ (‘with special reference to Greece and Italy’). And Jameson loathed it. His diary and letters constantly complained about it. ‘Oh, those fearful, fearful lectures! They haunt me day and night, especially this first one’, he wrote his father in January 1884. (After 1884, however, Gilman himself normally gave the first lecture.) Also in 1884 Jameson refused Gilman’s request that he give a lecture on the geography of Greece and the Levant in a series on Greek archaeology. When Hall asked Gilman to contribute a chapter on the relations of history and geography for Hall’s proposed volume on Methods of Teaching History, Gilman had been too busy to do it, beyond making a few notes. Hall then turned to Jameson and asked him to write it, based on Gilman’s notes. In the end neither Gilman nor Jameson was satisfied with the four-page essay on ‘Physical Geography and History’, and it was published anonymously. And when, after the death of Professor Morris early in 1886, Jameson was asked to finish out Morris’ course on the Greek historians, Jameson saw it as an opportunity of ‘getting rid of a certain class I don’t like [undoubtedly the physical geography course] in exchange for one I do’. What is somewhat surprising (and in retrospect, consequential) was Gilman’s failure to appoint a young German-trained human geographer, Franz Boas, who had visited him in early 1885 and remained in contact with him over the next two years. The ‘what if’ question again looms large.18 In 1888 Hall was elected President of the recently chartered Clark University, and Jameson at the same time found a new position at Brown University. He was initially unsatisfied with Brown also, and in March 1889 unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Hall to hire him 323

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at Clark (‘Anything to get out of this hole’, he wrote in his diary). A new President changed the situation for him, and he remained at Brown until 1901, when he became chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago. Meanwhile, at Hopkins, a graduate student, the brilliant 18-year-old Charles Homer Haskins, now taught Morris’ course on Herodotus and Thucydides and Jameson’s former course in Greek and Roman history, coordinated the required course in physical geography in the spring of 1889 (for which Gilman again gave the first lecture), and corrected textbook exercises for the class, which numbered 55 students. The titles of the other lectures indicate that the course had no historical topics. It is noteworthy, however, for the fact that Frederick Jackson Turner, then a graduate student, attended it, his only formal course in geography.19 Much later, it will be recalled, as Gurney Professor of History at Harvard, Haskins directed John K. Wright’s award-winning dissertation on mediaeval geographical concepts. The following year, however, the course was turned over to William B. Clark of the geology department, then in an accelerated phase of growth. At that time, ‘for the work in Physical Geography’, Hopkins purchased a number of plaster models and relief maps by Berlin’s Heinrich Kiepert and by Nathaniel S. Shaler and William Morris Davis of Harvard, by which ‘the value of the geographical course would be greatly enhanced’. Instead of Jameson’s program of two hours a week on Greek and Roman history and one on the relation of physical geography to ancient history, under Clark the course became a threehour course in physical geography alone. Eventually Clark was to take charge of the Maryland Geological Survey and the Maryland State Weather Service, as well as hosting the Soil Service of Maryland, and to use them as adjuncts to the development of a graduate program in physical geography and geology. Between 1890 and 1901 the geology department awarded a handful of doctorates in physiography and one in meteorology, before younger and more specialized geologists narrowed the program of what Clark had called ‘the new geology’.20 In addition to the foregoing geographical activity, however, there are indications of continuing interest in historical geography and related fields in other departments. For example, in 1884 a report on archaeology indicated there had been three lectures by W. J. Stillman 324

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on current classical archaeological research, a Fellow in Greek gave a course of six lectures on Olympia, and the report announced the formation of an Archaeological Society, which met monthly to hear, among other topics, reports on ‘recent discoveries and investigations’. In 1890 two members of the German department gave a course of 20 heavily geographical lectures on German geography, history, and culture. In the spring of 1895 Christopher Johnston, Jr, Associate in Semitic Languages in the ‘Oriental Seminary’ lectured once a week to 20 students on the historical geography of Palestine, using George Adam Smith’s recent book, and Paul Haupt, Professor of Semitic Languages, interpreted ‘Extracts from Arab Geographers’ to an audience of 12 students.21 Of course the central figure in all this was the President himself. Gilman made two major contributions of interest to the early Hopkins academic program. The broader one was that at Johns Hopkins he carried over into the new university movement of the late nineteenth century the tradition of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School (founded 1846), which within the same institution had successfully combined the fixed curricular requirements of a somewhat traditional undergraduate program with a more free-form graduate program, culminating in the first American PhDs in 1861. Certainly Gilman was broadly informed of current educational developments, not only in the United States but also in Europe, where he had traveled for several months in 1875–6 after being elected President of the new foundation. The second major contribution was to lead many members of his new faculty to an appreciation for the relevance of geography to their fields, particularly in humanistic studies. To be sure, as Abraham Flexner has said, Gilman ‘made no original contributions to his subject’. Yet Carl Sauer was later to say of him, ‘Gilman missed little of the geographically significant work of his time’. His more than 100 ‘geographical notes’ contributed to the American Journal of Science (which the noted German geographer, August Petermann, had called ‘the best on geography produced in the New World’), his other writings, and his lectures at Hopkins, the American Geographical Society, and elsewhere all entitle him to respect as an advocate for geography, including geographical understanding of Greece, Rome, and other parts of the ancient Mediterranean world. 325

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16. President Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins University, c. 1885

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Gilman’s 1890 lecture course at Hopkins sums up his interest in the Mediterranean world as well as any other single activity. During his 1875 journey in Europe in preparation for assuming the Hopkins presidency he had attended the International Geographical Congress in Paris, being especially interested in the exhibits – ‘maps, charts, books, models, reliefs, antiquities’ – and particularly in European topographical maps. After his exhaustive efforts to set in motion the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Trustees granted him another long leave of absence beginning in 1889, during which he went around the Mediterranean, an itinerary that included North Africa (Morocco, Algiers, and Tunisia, including the sites of Carthage), Malta, Sicily, mainland Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Asia Minor (including Smyrna and Ephesus), the major Aegean islands, and mainland Greece, including Athens, Corinth, Mycenae, Tiryns, Epidaurus and Olympia, reviving the earlier custom of reading classical authors on the sites about which they had written. From Paris, on his return journey, Gilman wrote H. B. Adams giving him permission to announce ‘a course of lectures on the Mediterranean considered with respect to its Geography and History’ the following winter.23 Gilman’s lecture series, comprising 16 topics in ten lectures on ‘The Mediterranean Sea in its Historical and Geographical Aspects’ (or, in other sources, called ‘The Historical Geography of the Mediterranean and its adjacent lands’) began on 1 November 1890. Although the lectures were sponsored by the History and Political Science department, ‘Students and Readers of History’ from all departments were invited to attend, and, we are told, ‘many persons not connected with the department’ were admitted. Gilman evidently wanted to go beyond the travelogue, and stressed that the Mediterranean would be treated as an example of methods of study in geography and history. Having begun with the physical geography of the Mediterranean Basin, its adjacent lands, and the islands, Gilman then discussed how to interpret the remains of the earliest inhabitants. Next he surveyed various advanced cultures, from the Egyptians, Phoenicians and Hebrews through the ancient Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans. The remaining topics included the spread of Christianity and Islam, mediaeval crusaders and merchants, and the strategy of modern warfare. Gilman concluded with a summary of discoveries by excavation in the nineteenth century and a look into the future. 327

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In a sense, in 1890 Gilman put a capstone on his own geographical work: advocacy for the linkage between geography and history, especially in relation to ancient history; field observation by a professional geographer who also read the classics on site; broad coverage; and lectures on subjects that were still of general interest but would, in the next century, become of interest only to academic specialists. Surrounding the series, however, were intimations of the future. Gilman’s lectures are listed in the ensuing President’s Report just ahead of lectures by physiographers, William Morris Davis and Grove K. Gilbert, heralds of the wave of the future in American geography. And in the University Circular announcing them, Gilman’s lecture titles were listed just after the announcement of the acceptance of a Women’s Medical School Fund of $100,000. This was conditioned, however, on women being admitted to the new Medical School (itself innovative in that it would be the first to require a bachelor’s degree before entrance) on an equal basis with men.24 The twentieth century was just around the corner.

EARLY CLARK, CATHOLIC AND STANFORD Clark and Catholic Universities were initially established solely as graduate schools, offering only the doctorate, though both established ‘Collegiate Departments’ after 1900 (Clark in 1902 and Catholic in 1904). It is in the latter division that one would expect to find ancient history and (less likely by this time), classical geography. But after 1900, the chances they would have instituted such courses, even in classics departments, were extremely slim. A ‘modern university’, if it offered geography at all, would probably have offered physical geography or perhaps commercial geography, as Clark did initially. Moreover, as we have seen (Chapter 9) the National Education Association’s Committee on the Secondary Curriculum, the so-called Committee of Ten, had recommended in 1892 that geography in secondary schools should be oriented to the natural sciences, occupying the ninth grade slot later assigned to ‘General Science’. By the time these two ‘Collegiate Departments’ were developing their programs,

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other colleges had been accepting ‘physical geography’ or ‘physiography’ as an admissions subject for upwards of 30 years previously. In combination with university classicists’ increasing specialization in ‘scientific’ philology, these factors tended to marginalize nonliterary and non-linguistic classical studies, including ancient history and classical geography, even further by 1900. The basic undergraduate history course at Clark had copied the Harvard model, which was then a year-long course in mediaeval and modern European history. The introductory science courses did not include physical geography. The general economics course, first offered in 1903, included commercial geography (and economic and industrial history) under the European-trained Frederick Bushee, reflecting the historicist practice to which he had been exposed in Germany. But after Bushee left the faculty five years later, his successor, wholly American-trained, omitted such topics from the course. President G. Stanley Hall taught the only geography in the university proper (i.e., the so-called Graduate Department), in his capacity as Professor of Psychology and Education. Continuing his work at Johns Hopkins, where he had lectured on the pedagogy of school subjects, Hall incorporated discussions of methods of teaching geography into his lectures to graduate students in psychology and education, in Saturday courses for teachers, and in Clark’s two-week summer sessions. He also published extensively on the subject. At least three of Hall’s PhD students demonstrated an interest in the teaching of geography. Two of them did not finish the doctoral program, though one of these, Jefferson Potter, published what appears to be the first American survey of the history of teaching methods in geography. The third, David Gibbs, published the first American dissertation in the teaching of geography, ‘The Pedagogy of Geography’, under Hall’s supervision in 1906. Hall, in his courses or in his voluminous writings on geographic education, nowhere indicates any interest in the geography of ancient Greece and Rome, though both Potter’s and Gibbs’ publications begin with Homeric geography.25 Catholic University appears to have offered no classical geography in the early years of either the graduate school or the college. In the School of Sacred Sciences, it briefly offered a course on ‘Biblical Archaeology, including the geography of the Bible lands’. The 1908–9 catalogue contains the first mention of physical geography, in this 329

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case as an admissions requirement for the undergraduate program in history. In 1938 Catholic created a Department of Geology and Geography and, as many American institutions did after World War II, established an independent department of geography in 1946, but closed it 30 years later.26 In his memoirs, David Starr Jordan, the biologist who was the first President of Stanford, recalled that his first scientific interest was in astronomy, and from there moved into ‘terrestrial geography’, describing it as his ‘main passion in life’. He had loved making and studying maps of all sorts, and at one point he had become so obsessed with his geographical activity that his worried mother had hid his materials. At Stanford, however, perhaps in part owing to its precarious early financial position, any hopes Jordan may have had for institutionalizing his youthful passion were unrealized.27 In Stanford’s opening year, 1891, the history course on nineteenth-century Europe did promise that ‘special attention will be paid to historical geography, and to methods of historical study’, though that phrasing was omitted from the course description two years later. The April 1903 catalog notes a new course on physiography, taught in the geology department by John C. Brannon, head of the department (and Jordan’s successor as President). The following year Professor Henry W. Roper of the Greek Department began a course in classical geography, described as ‘Lectures and exercises on the geography of the Greek world and the geographical ideas of the Greeks from the earliest times’. This was a one-hour course in the second semester, and disappeared by 1910–11. When Albert Perry Brigham published his research on geography in America in 1914, he could find only the physiography course at Stanford. (Much later, Stanford hired Clarktrained geographer, C. Langdon White, who was temporarily assigned to the School of Humanities until an independent Department of Geography could be created in 1950, only to be closed out in 1963.)28

PARA-GEOGRAPHY IN THE NEW UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Frederick Rudolph, in his American College and University, suggested that the founding of the University of Chicago was ‘one of those 330

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events in American history that brought into focus the spirit of an age’. Opened in 1892, the same year as the completion of the Report of the ‘Committee of Ten’, the first stage of the development of geography at Chicago was Rollin Salisbury’s appointment as Professor of Geographic Geology in the Department of Geology, headed by the noted geologist, Thomas C. Chamberlin. Charles T. Conger, a somewhat elusive geographical figure, also made a brief appearance, first as a Fellow in 1892–3. Conger was a University of Minnesota graduate (AB 1890) in history. During 1892–3 he was listed among the nonresident Fellows and as attending Oxford University in 1892. Mackinder had lectured on physical geography in the Summer Term, 1892, but listed only one undergraduate and two or three ‘ladies’ as attendees. It is thus more likely that Conger heard Mackinder lecture for the School of Modern History in the Fall (‘Michaelmas’) Term at Oxford. Conger, while in England, also enjoyed the hospitality of H. R. Mill, then Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, and his wife. The following year (1893–4) Conger was named Docent and enrolled in the Fall Quarter 1893 and the Winter Quarter 1894.29 After Conger returned from England he attended the World’s Columbian Exposition in the summer of 1893, and wrote what appears to be his only geographical article, ‘Geography at the World’s Columbian Exposition’, for the Geographical Journal. It closes with the information that the new University of Chicago ‘has recognized geography as a suitable university subject by establishing two courses in geography’. One of them, described as ‘physiography and landscape geography’, is clearly Salisbury’s. The other, ‘under the head of political geography, treats especially of anthropo-geography and historical geography’. (By this he may have also meant the history of geography, since the two were still somewhat linked.) This was clearly a reference to what Conger himself was doing. In 1893–4 he appears to have given lectures on two of the subjects in human or ‘political’ geography on which Mackinder normally lectured, one on the history of geography and one on the geography of Europe. In a letter to Mill dated 21 February 1894, thanking him for sending three copies of his Columbian article, Conger asked Mill if he would like Conger to submit reports to the Journal similar to those Mackinder and Yule Oldham were submitting for Oxford and Cambridge, respectively, or whether Mill preferred an article on ‘The 331

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Teaching of Geography in the United States’. Conger also told Mill he anticipated having 20 or more students in the Spring Quarter. But he apparently dropped out of the geology department at the end of the Winter Quarter, and the next year (1894–5) appears only as an Assistant in two history courses. He took no Chicago degree, and apparently spent most of his later career as a High School principal and occasional writer on educational subjects. Although the details are murky and Conger’s name never appears in historical studies of geography at Chicago, he should be credited with offering the first human geography courses there. Given their potential scope, at least part of each course may well have been classical geography.30 Also omitted from the standard accounts of the early history of geography in the University of Chicago is any mention of Franklin Jameson, head of the Department of History at the University from 1901 to 1905. Jameson, as we have seen, had been disgusted with his earlier assignment to master and teach the relations of geography to the history of Greece and Rome to undergraduate students while at Johns Hopkins. At Chicago, though, he primarily taught graduate students in American history. In the Autumn Quarter, Jameson regularly offered a graduate seminar on historical method, changing the topic each year. In 1902 the subject was to be the sciences auxiliary to history. Of his planned 40 lectures, the first ten were to be ‘historical geography, or, more broadly, to the use of geography for the benefit of history’. Since George Burr of Cornell was the only person he knew who was teaching a formal course in historical geography, Jameson wrote him asking for suggestions and, if possible, a copy of Burr’s syllabus.31 Burr’s reply is of special interest, not only for its specific suggestions but also as an indicator of the growing separation of what historians needed from geography and geographers’ attempts to establish their discipline through a claim to special expertise in ‘geographic influences’, or the use of the physical environment as a causal explanation of human activity. Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University since 1899, but trained as and for some years self-identified as a geographer, had rejected this approach as early as 1887. But American geographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely embraced it, and the Chicago geographers were not alone in using it as a justification for securing 332

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separate status as a university discipline. J. Paul Goode, while still at the University of Pennsylvania, had argued that this ‘scientific’ approach would change and deepen the study of history. ‘History will cease to be a mere narrative of events’, Goode averred, ‘and under every event we will carefully look for directive causes [italics mine] in the physiographic and economic environment’.32 In an extraordinarily prescient response to Jameson’s request, Burr wrote that he first sent his students to the Encyclopaedia Britannica for brief introductions to the auxiliary sciences. He would caution them about the environmental bias of Clements Markham in geography, though he thought Markham’s EB entry would give them the useful distinction between the history of geography (and geographical discovery) and what Burr called ‘the geology of history’. Burr then revealed his earlier dependence upon (and subsequent rejection of) the ideas of Friedrich Ratzel and the alleged influence of the earth on man, and criticized the determinism of Henry Thomas Buckle, James Bryce, and Goldwyn Smith on that subject, as well as the more muted form of H. B. George, in his then recently published Relations of Geography & History. Instead, Burr sent his students to George Perkins Marsh’s The Earth as Modified by Human Action and Victor Hehn’s book on the migration of domestic plants and animals. This was, of course, well in advance of Berkeley geographer Jan Broek’s 1931 discovery of the first edition of Marsh’s book, Man and Nature (1864) through encountering it in Lewis Mumford’s The Brown Decades (1931).33 Having established the point of view of the course, Burr adopted a regional approach, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the eastern Mediterranean, then on to ‘the three great Mediterranean peninsulas’, the Danube valley, the North European Plain, the Rhine-Rhone corridor and other such topics. Leaving the students to do intensive map study of changing boundaries and related matters, using both Freeman’s Historical Geography of Europe and Auguste Himly’s Histoire de la Formation Territoriale des États de l’Europe Centrale, Burr lectured on each of the regions as ‘man’s environment’, pointing out ‘the deeper changes, whether of natural or human origin’, and stressing, in contrast to Ratzel, ‘the yet more important (even to history), though more neglected, influence of man on the earth’.34

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Another sign of interest in the relations of geography and ancient history at Chicago, again apart from the Department of Geography, was a once-famous series of maps of the ancient world, the BreastedHuth Ancient History Maps series. These were jointly edited by James H. Breasted, the first American Professor of Egyptology, who was also well-informed about the ancient Near East and on Greek and Roman history, and Carl F. Huth Jr, an ancient historian in the Department of History. This wall map series began with a map showing reconstructions of the geographical ideas of Greek writers, and was followed by maps of Egypt and the Near East as well as the more traditional focus on Greece and Rome. These maps also moved beyond brightly colored maps of the traditional political areas (though these were the most prominent) to show topography and major economic activities, such as areas of grain production, or the locations of marble quarries. The Chicago mapping firm Denoyer-Geppert began to publish the series in 1916–17, and accompanied it with a Teacher’s Manual the following year. It was successful enough that Denoyer asked Samuel Harding of the University of Minnesota to extend the ‘B’ series with an ‘H’ series of colorful and clear mediaeval and modern maps. The publisher adapted the Breasted-Huth-Harding series (as it is best known) for a European History Atlas and continued to add black and white political maps as it issued various revisions. In 1951 DenoyerGeppert published a student edition, and also made available copies of individual sheets and outline maps for student use. The whole program was a remarkably long-lived and successful way of incorporating some basic locational geography into the teaching of history students.35

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE CHICAGO DEPARTMENT, 1903–24 In 1903 Chicago organized a fully fledged Department of Geography under Salisbury’s chairmanship that was immediately capable of offering bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees across a number of sub-fields, the first university in America to have the resources and 334

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will to do so.36 The new department was to justify its niche in the university curriculum by offering ‘subjects which are intermediate between Geology and Climatology on the one hand, and History, Political Economy, and Biology on the other’. Its announcement recognized the existence of pre-existing geography courses that would continue to be taught by their respective departments. Salisbury and his former student, Wallace Atwood, would continue to teach physical geography courses under the aegis of the Geology Department. The course in zoogeography would continue in the Department of Zoology, five courses in geographic botany would still be offered in the Botany Department (then under Henry C. Cowles), and the commercial geography course would remain in the Department of Political Economy. Courses in the teaching of geography for elementary school teachers would continue to be offered by the Department of Education. J. Paul Goode, recruited from the University of Pennsylvania, would teach the courses in meteorology and climatology, previously taught in the geology department, as well as three new courses in the economic geography of various parts of the world. (Goode would later become best known for his work in cartography, particularly for his ‘Goode’s Homolosine’ map projection, forerunner of a long line of other interrupted map projections, and for his longlived Goode’s School Atlas.) In 1911 Walter S. Tower, like Goode a Pennsylvania alumnus, was added to the geography staff, teaching courses in political geography and South America.37 The creation of an independent department of geography with the charge of developing new academic fields, however, gave the Chicago geography faculty the opportunity to create curricula not often found in older and smaller geography programs in the United States. One of these was historical geography and, to some extent, the history of geography and exploration. Goode gave two seminar courses in the first year of departmental operations, 1903–4. One of these was ‘The Development of Knowledge of the Earth’, in the Autumn Quarter, 1903; the other was ‘Modern Explorations and Developments’ in the Spring Quarter, 1904. Given Goode’s broad knowledge of the geography of classical Greece and Rome, the first, surely, covered ancient Greek knowledge of the Mediterranean world and its environs. More significantly, Harlan H. Barrows, then only an assistant in the new department, offered a course entitled ‘Influences of Geography 335

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on American History’ in the second half of the Summer Quarter, 1904, repeating it the following summer. This justly famous course, which after 1923 was renamed ‘The Historical Geography of the United States’, became one of Barrows’ signature courses (the other being ‘Conservation of Natural Resources’). It drew undergraduate students from across the university, and eventually led to five advanced courses in the graduate program on the historical geography of various American regions.38 Ellen Churchill Semple, the independent American scholar who had studied with Ratzel, began her long period of intermittent lecturing at Chicago in the summer of 1906 with a course on ‘American History and its Geographic Conditions’, the title of a text she had published three years previously and which Barrows had initially used for his own undergraduate course.39 This gave the Chicago department two historical geographers, a strength not reached by any other American geography department for some years. Miss Semple normally taught a course in anthropogeography during the academic year for most of the time she taught at Chicago. In 1911 she published her second book, Influences of Geographic Environment On the Basis of Ratzel’s System of Anthropo-Geography, and in her early days at Chicago was always ready to defend her view of geography. While at Chicago, Semple had the rank and title of Lecturer, and was paid from a lecture fund assigned to the geography department. Her primary course was ‘Principles of Anthropogeography’, for which, after her return, she used her now internationally recognized Influences of Geographic Environment as the text. Her classes included some of the best-known American geographers of the 1920s and later. In her anthropogeography course of 1914, for example, she had twentyone students, including such luminaries-to-be as Zonia Baber, Charles Colby, Wellington Jones, Almon E. Parkins, Stephen S. Visher, and history student, Derwent Whittlesey, among others. Other students in her courses during the Chicago years included Carl Sauer, Richard Hartshorne, Vernor Finch, Clarence Jones, Robert Platt, and Helen Strong, as well as others who became faculty members in major universities, or occupied important government posts, or wrote longlived geography texts. The course became increasingly focused on Mediterranean examples, and indeed in 1921 was re-titled ‘Anthropogeography of the Mediterranean’.40 336

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During the years she was at Chicago, Semple also visited several other institutions for lectures or temporary appointments. During World War I she was called into war service, lecturing in the Fall 1917 to the officers at Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, on the geography of the Italian front. In December 1917 she joined the staff of the Inquiry, the group of experts assembled at the American Geographical Society’s building in New York to do research and write reports and recommendations for President Wilson and his staff in the anticipated postwar settlement conferences. Semple was one of about 150 scholars drawn into this work. She drafted a paper on the principles to be followed in postwar boundary changes, and then, as a specialist, wrote additional papers on the Mediterranean and on Mesopotamia. Her residence in New York during this period also allowed her to teach in the Columbia University summer session of 1918.41 Earlier in life, during the 1880s and early 1890s, Semple had taught Latin, physical geography and ancient history in her sister’s Semple Collegiate School in her native town, Louisville, KY. Her students remembered her as an exciting teacher of these subjects. ‘She made Greek and Roman history so interesting’, recalled one of her Louisville students, ‘and the whole of the Mediterranean area (its past and its present) so real that I almost made straight for Greece on my first trip to Europe.’ Ratzel, too, had lectured on ‘Mediterranean lands and peoples’ in 1893–4. Although that was between Semple’s two periods of study in Leipzig, she certainly knew of Ratzel’s longstanding interest in the geography of the Mediterranean, and indeed had quoted his views on Greece in a 1904 paper before an international conference of geographers in Washington, DC. Five years before that she had used Greece as a comparison in a paper on the Hanse towns of Germany. Nothing was more natural than that she should choose to write her next book on the Mediterranean region, and to pay an extended exploratory visit to Greece.42 After the completion of her second book, Semple and two women friends took a trip around the world, during which she spent some three months in Japan. On her return, she wrote and later published two articles on Japan, and also gave public lectures on that country. The party returned via Korea, Manchuria and China, where they got as far inland as the boundary of Mongolia. From there they visited 337

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several islands, including the Philippines, Java, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and also India, where they went as far as the Khyber Pass. From there they reached the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and explored the Greek-settled Aegean coast of Asia Minor. After several weeks spent motoring through the primitive road system of Greece, exploring ancient sites from Sparta to the Vale of Tempe, Semple returned to Athens via the route Xerxes and his men had taken (including the site of the battle of Thermopylae, where her driver was less concerned with history than with the possible effects of the hot springs on his tyres). Semple spent considerable time exploring other aspects of the topography and classical sites of Greece. She was treated with great respect, in part because she had hired one of the two automobiles in Greece at the time, and the country folk supposed that it was the one belonging to King George I. From there Semple and her companions moved via the western Balkans to Italy and Switzerland, then north and west to France, Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia.43 Semple then spent several months in Great Britain, where she lectured or gave papers at the Royal Geographical Society, the Herbertsons’ two-week Oxford summer course for geography teachers, and the four branches of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen). In these venues she also met many scholars prominent in British geography, such as John L. Myres and Marion Newbigin. Returning to Louisville in the fall of 1912, and after finishing the Japan papers, she began work on the first of her impressive series of Mediterranean studies.44 The first of her Mediterranean papers was presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in December 1914. It was subsequently published in the Association’s Annals as ‘The Barrier Boundary of the Mediterranean Region and Its Northern Breaches as Factors in History’. George Chisholm of the University of Edinburgh praised it as ‘an altogether admirable illustration of the light geography may be made to show on the history of a particular region’. Semple published five more papers while she was still lecturing at Chicago, one of them on ancient routes in northern Mesopotamia and the other four on pirate coasts in the Mediterranean, Mediterranean forests and the lumber trade, the grain trade and stock raising, as well as a review of Ewald Banse’s work on the regional 338

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geography of Turkey. In December 1920 she was the first woman to be elected President of the Association of American Geographers, the discipline’s premier scholarly organization.45

CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY AT CLARK In 1920 Wallace W. Atwood of Harvard, whom Semple had known in Chicago when he was a member of the geology department there, became President of Clark University. Atwood was also given a mandate to develop a graduate program in geography which, it was to be hoped, would make Clark a leader among American graduate programs in that field, as it had been in psychology under retiring President, G. Stanley Hall, 30 years before. Atwood secured Semple as his first appointee for the new department, first as Lecturer and, from 1923, the year the University of Kentucky awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, as Professor of Anthropogeography. The title, though derided by muckraker Upton Sinclair as a ‘delicious mouthful for schoolmarms to take home to Main Street’, confirmed her scholarship, teaching skills, and international visibility. The first woman to hold faculty rank at Clark, she also became the first woman to hold a full professorship in an American graduate department of geography. Semple began teaching in the Clark Summer School, 1921, before Atwood’s new Graduate School of Geography formally opened. Normally she taught in the Fall semester only, reserving the Spring term for her research and writing, though she occasionally lectured on the history of geography one hour a week in the second semester.46 During the summer of 1921 Semple taught ‘Influences of Geography on American History’ and her Mediterranean course. During the regular academic year she usually taught alternate-year courses in the ‘General Principles of Anthropogeography’ and on the Mediterranean region, and occasionally offered courses in the geography of Europe, and the geography of portions of Asia. These were attended by graduate students and a select few advanced undergraduates. She also offered graduate seminars or research courses in anthropogeography and the history of geography. She directed only two doctoral dissertations, neither of them on the Mediterranean, and one 1923 339

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master’s thesis, Marjorie Shank’s ‘The historic and economic geography of the Island of Rhodes in Ancient and Mediaeval Times’, which was. One of Semple’s two PhD students, W. Elmer Ekblaw, who joined the Clark faculty in 1926, used her Influences as the text in his graduate Human and Cultural Geography course until the late 1940s.47 Semple’s anthropogeography and Ekblaw’s somewhat uncritical continuation of it gave the Clark Graduate School of Geography a reputation as a ‘Citadel of Determinism’. Or, as her former colleague, the late Samuel Van Valkenburg, once colorfully put it to me, the profession at large, being firmly resolved to put Semple’s method of environmental analysis behind it, regarded Clark as ‘the last bastion to be stormed’. ‘At Clark’, wrote her former Chicago colleague, Charles Colby, ‘she came into her full powers as a teacher and as a director of research.’ Semple was heavily involved in a number of additional theses and dissertations, serving as mentor and critic for many other graduate students. Between her teaching at Chicago and Clark, the preponderant departments for geography doctoral students in American universities at the time, she probably taught more members of the second generation of American professional geographers than anyone else. She was also the only American woman to direct doctoral dissertations in geography before 1946. While at Clark she continued to lecture at various institutions and learned societies, including the newly founded New England Geographical Conference (now the New England/St Lawrence Valley Geographical Society), Salem State College, Vassar College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Michigan, where her student, Preston James, was then teaching. In the summer of 1922 she again lectured in the geography Summer School at Oxford. She spent the winter of 1925 teaching at UCLA (then the ‘Southern Branch’ of the University of California), where her doctoral student and later assistant on her Mediterranean book, Ruth Baugh, was on the faculty.48 Semple continued to visit the Mediterranean and also major European libraries for research material. Her published papers continued to be on Mediterranean topics, but aside from two papers on Mediterranean agriculture and water supply, while at Clark she turned to more humanistic aspects of Mediterranean geography. Such papers included ‘Climatic Influences on Some Ancient Mediterranean 340

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Religions’, ‘Templed Promontories of the Mediterranean’ (among her most appealing works), ‘Ancient Mediterranean Pleasure Gardens’ (which J. L. Myres found ‘an essay of fragrant memories’), and ‘Promontory Towns of the Mediterranean’, the latter in Clark’s shortlived venture, the Home Geographic Monthly. She also worked with her colleague and former Chicago student, Clarence Jones, on a revised edition of her American History and its Geographic Conditions, published posthumously in 1933.49

17. Ellen Churchill Semple at Clark, 1920s

In November 1929, midway through her teaching semester, Semple experienced a severe heart attack and could no longer attempt classroom teaching. The Mediterranean book was only a little over half-finished, mostly the parts that she had originally published as articles. On her best days Semple could work only about two hours a day. With the help of Clarence Jones on the maps, and Ruth Baugh, who came east to become Semple’s assistant and the liaison with her publisher, Henry Holt and Company, she managed to add missing elements, including the general geography chapters that form Part I of the book, which were probably revisions of her classroom lectures. The 737-page volume was completed with a preface dated 30 Septem-

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ber 1931, and published in November.50 Her Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History was the last major work on the geography of the classical world to be produced by an American-born geographer. Knowing that she was terminally ill, her former students and colleagues rushed favorable reviews to the geography journals so that she could see them before she died. Distinguished geographers from Britain, Europe and elsewhere sent letters of congratulation and encouragement. On nomination by Colby, a member of the Medals Committee, and with the endorsement of Goode, the committee’s chair, the Board of Directors of the Geographic Society of Chicago unanimously awarded her their rarely given Helen Culver gold medal for ‘distinguished leadership and eminent achievement in geography’. There was general agreement among professional geographers of the time that, in Colby’s words, the Mediterranean volume was ‘her last and greatest work’.51 Yet it sank like a stone. Why is that? Carolyn Baker Lewis’ careful study of the work in its context, ‘The Biography of a Neglected Classic: Ellen Churchill Semple’s The Geography of the Mediterranean Region’, suggested a number of possibilities. One is that, in spite of its less deterministic stance (especially as compared with Influences), Semple had been tarred with the now unacceptable reputation as being a hard-core determinist, and therefore the book was unfairly undervalued. To the extent that the Mediterranean book was intended in part as a regional example of the principles of anthropogeography book published 20 years earlier, there is some substance to that criticism, though less than is commonly thought. Second, by the 1930s almost no geographers, including her former students, were interested in the geography of the ancient Mediterranean as a research field. That has continued, Lewis argued, among most geographers until the present day, and only slightly less so among classicists and ancient historians.52 The determinism of the Mediterranean book, to the extent that it is present, is indeed muted, as Kathy Braden has argued in a more recent study. Braden maintained that there are some elements in Semple’s approach that are in harmony with late twentieth century theories of structuration: ‘place as process; the role of institutions [and] the role of nature; and the individual as agent and victim’. Braden also pointed out that the larger part of the Mediterranean 342

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book, especially Part IV (on vegetation and agriculture) is a series of case studies of how humans have modified the Mediterranean natural environment. ‘For each demonstration of a natural constraint on human affairs’, Braden wrote, ‘she offers an example of how humans overcame it.’ Not only are humans agents of environmental change but it is also impossible to separate space and time in Semple’s regional geography. Her demonstration of ‘place as process’ links her to a central point of the ‘new regional geography’ of the 1980s. ‘For every barrier’, Braden asserted, ‘humans found a breach.’ It is an interesting argument, and may help dissolve some of the older and perhaps too hasty characterizations of Semple as a simple ‘environmental determinist’.53 Semple’s scholarship was not perfect; several non-geographic reviewers suggested that there were some significant gaps in her understanding of contemporary scholarship in classics. Classicists, in their few reviews, were generally favorable. Although he criticized the maps as ‘hardly worthy of their setting’ (which is quite true), Myres concluded that Semple’s ‘geographical experience and keen personal observation contribute many valuable details to this aspect of the ancient world’. And in a review Lewis missed, I. A. Richmond listed a number or omissions, errors and misprints, but called the book ‘noteworthy’, ‘notable for its clarity’, ‘packed with information’, and, he concluded, ‘ancient historians will read it with gratitude and pleasure’. Lewis points to its enthusiastic support from Max Cary, in the preface to his Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History (see Chapter 6), and the classicist and popularizer, Michael Grant, in the first edition of his The Ancient Mediterranean. To these might be added others, such as Geoffrey Rickman, who in his Corn Supply of Ancient Rome calls Semple’s Mediterranean book ‘rich in facts and insights’, though Rickman thought it second in subtlety of analysis to the first volume of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. As late as 1991 a leading American ancient historian, Chester Starr, surveying twentieth-century work in ancient history, wrote that Semple’s book, then six decades old, ‘remains a thought-provoking study’. In the same year, historian of science Harold Dorn claimed that Semple’s ‘learned observations on the geography and culture of ancient lands remain fresh after sixty years’.54 343

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One might persuasively argue, however, that Semple’s last book is essentially an artifact of her study and teaching during the 1880s and 1890s, mediated through the professional understanding of the role of geography in the early twentieth century. Although she presented it as a model regional geography for the 1920s, its roots lie in the concept of ancient geography as an aid to historical study, which, as we have seen, had its modern impetus in the expeditions of the Society of Dilettanti, or even in the older ‘eye of history’ concept that Ortelius and his successors had championed. As Judith Bronson put it in her dissertation on Semple, ‘Coming to geography from history, she considered geography the handmaiden, not the equal companion of history.’ Indeed, Semple had described her Mediterranean course as ‘a geographical interpretation of ancient history in Mediterranean lands… at a time when the Mediterranean constituted most of the known world’.55 Particularly in its more humanistic chapters, and in the topics Semple selects beyond the general and rather routine physical geography of Part I, the Mediterranean book reflects the Greek emphasis of High Victorian classical scholarship – which is no bad thing. Students entering graduate work in geography in the 1910s and 1920s, however – the so-called second generation of American professional geographers – had come into geography from geology or economics, most often from Midwestern land grant and teacher training institutions, where Latin, Greek and humanities courses in general were weakly represented and lightly enrolled. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the heyday of the elective system, and few geography students had elected classical subjects in their undergraduate programs. (Sauer was a striking exception.) And, as we have seen (Chapter 9), most college-bound high school students were no longer required to have a background in classical geography. As George P. Schmidt wryly put it in his history of the American liberal arts college, even in these, by the early twentieth century, ‘Greek and Latin were moribund, and the future lay with the philistines’.56 Once in graduate school, geography students were exposed most often not to historical geography but to contemporary methods: an emphasis on field studies, usually small-scale contemporary land use studies, obligatory courses in physiography, climatology and economic geography, and an insistence that geography was a natural 344

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and not a social science. Moreover, most doctoral programs required two modern languages for the PhD, normally French and German, and certainly not Latin or Greek. Although one can point to significant exceptions countering the predominantly ahistorical practices of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Barrows at Chicago, Sauer at Berkeley, and Semple’s former Chicago student and colleague Derwent Whittlesey at Harvard, the dominant ethos was contemporary, small-scale and functionalist.57 Semple died in Florida on 11 May 1932. Ruth Baugh had taught Semple’s Mediterranean course at Clark in the Fall Semester, 1931, using advance copies of her book. After that, her Mediterranean course was dropped from the Clark geography program. Samuel Van Valkenburg picked up Semple’s Europe course, and Semple’s other PhD, W. Elmer Ekblaw, continued her anthropogeography course, using her Influences text (somewhat dogmatically) for more than 20 years, until illness forced him to retire in the late 1940s.58 Whittlesey who, having received Semple’s blessing and her preliminary notes for her projected next book on political geography, proceeded to write a classic historically based political geography text, The Earth and the State, for Semple’s publisher, Holt. Baugh continued to teach Semple’s Mediterranean course (and her more determinist views) at UCLA until her retirement in 1956. In 1991 Saul Cohen, former Director of the Clark Graduate School of Geography and one of Whittlesey’s last PhDs, was the inaugural speaker at Clark for a new lecture series named after Ellen Churchill Semple.59 But there would be no further attempts to link geography and the classical world in the geography program at Clark for more than 50 years after Semple’s death.

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Epilogue: Where Do We Go From Here?

In the later sections of her informative study of Ellen Churchill Semple’s Geography of the Mediterranean Region, Carolyn Baker Lewis laments the fate of Semple’s last book as an overlooked model of anthropogeographical research. Lewis concedes that, owing to Semple’s illness, ‘the book gives the appearance of an unfinished manuscript, full of potential but requiring refinement before being presented to the world’. True enough. Nevertheless, instead of geographers quietly learning from both its insights and its errors, and getting on with the better working model that Semple herself famously would have welcomed, after the laudatory reviews in geography journals her book ‘was quietly and immediately retired to the discipline’s attic’.1 Although Lewis has kinder words for those classical scholars who have praised it (though seldom drawing upon it as a scholarly resource), the general thrust of Lewis’ lament extends to both geographers and ancient historians. Thus, Lewis wrote, ‘ancient geography is as minor a sub-field of ancient history as it is of geography’. She suggests that ‘ancient geography may be a nearly comatose branch of ancient history and geography’, and argues that ‘ancient geography had become a backwater branch of both geography and ancient history… and was seldom entered after the 1930s’.2 Was this indeed the case in 1979, and has anything changed since? Certainly no ‘big book’ on ancient geography comparable to Semple’s has appeared in the eight decades since its publication, in either British or American geography. Lewis is correct in pointing out that Semple’s work has been cited more often than it has been followed, and that the citations have been included in textbook pref-

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aces or reading recommendations rather than used as a springboard for further research. Ten years after Semple’s book was published, Mima Maxey expressed a hope that geographers might recruit linguistic and historical specialists into geography (or at least made aware of it) in order that some scholars would do for Egypt and the ‘Fertile Crescent’ what Semple had done for classical geography proper.3 This too has not happened. Neither British nor American historians of geography, fixated on Halford Mackinder in Britain and William Morris Davis in the United States as the ‘founding fathers’ of the discipline, have accommodated earlier traditions of geography into their narratives of disciplinary history. Instead, as Robert Mayhew has caustically pointed out, though ‘geography’s identity is a passage of differences’, the ‘intellectual politics’ of recent geographical writing has resulted in the ‘effacement of its early modern textual predecessor by historiographical sleight of hand’. Much the same can be said of the tradition of classical geography.4 Around the time of Semple’s death, both British and American geographers interested in historical topics began to redefine historical geography methodologically by splitting it into two parts: historical geography proper, which largely meant cross-sectional studies of past regional geographies, and ‘geographical history’, studies of processes of change, best left to historians. Its champion in England was H. C. Darby, and in the United States Richard Hartshorne codified the distinction for the next generation in The Nature of Geography. The distinction had an instrumental value: it served as a way of shunting aside those historical studies of ‘geographic influences’ which, ironically enough, had been earlier used by professional geographers to justify their ‘scientific’ status, and thereby earn a place in the new and expanding universities of the late nineteenth century. Its practical effect, however, was to parochialize historical geography: English historical geographers largely wrote about England, Scottish geographers about Scotland, American geographers about earlier states of the ‘historical present’ (Mackinder’s term) in the United States, with a few of each making excursions into nearby countries.5 Semple’s Mediterranean work was clearly on the wrong side of this newly drawn line, as was the work of Myres (who had to re-christen his earlier historical geography work ‘geographical history’) and others we have

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treated in this book. Although Darby and others subsequently retreated from this stance, few have revisited the ancient world, once at the heart of the discipline. In spite of Semple’s book’s (and the subject’s) marginalization during the period of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, a short list of worthwhile studies appeared, some in geography and others in the classical disciplines, and the trend has even been somewhat accelerated in the period since Lewis wrote.

GEOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVES IN CLASSICAL STUDIES Fred Lukermann’s ‘The Concept of Location in Classical Geography’ surveys a number of classical authors who wrote on matters of location, a central theme in modern geography. Lukermann’s purpose is clear: ‘Although primarily concerned with the origin and early development of that concept in ancient geography, it is also concerned with the significance of the concept today.’ The classical chapter of Russian geographer V. A. Anuchin’s Theoretical Problems of Geography received an extended review by Paul Coones, who worked out its significance for contemporary geography. My ‘Squinting back at Strabo’ is both a review of two important new works on the Graeco-Roman geographer and a critique of current developments in the discipline.6 Several geographers have recently attempted to parse the terms used by classical writers, examining their ideas on geography both for their own sakes and to shed light on themes of current interest to geography. Three examples: the chapter on ‘Classical Globes’ in Denis Cosgrove’s study of the Earth in the Western imagination (2001); Michael Curry’s comments on the relevance of Ptolemy’s ideas (2005); and Kenneth Olwig’s thoughtful study of the meanings of choros (2008). A much more extended attempt was Clarence Glacken’s magisterial Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Glacken argued that there is continuity from the ancient Greeks onward, in that Western thinkers ‘from the time of the Greeks to our own’ have asked ‘three questions concerning the habitable earth and [human] relationships to it’. Glacken then traced the answers that have been offered under three headings: ideas of a designed earth, of environmental influence, and of man as a geographic agent.7

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The late Dan Stanislawski was consistently interested in problems of the Mediterranean world (and of Portugal, which for convenience is usually grouped with it). From 1959 to 1970 he published three books on Portugal, one of them heavily historical, and after those a series of journal articles on the ancient Mediterranean world that stand as an exception to the few one-off classical studies of most post-Semple American geographers. Although he had visited the Mediterranean several times, Stanislawski’s articles are largely based in the study rather than the field. His method was to exploit both ancient and modern writers into a synthesis highlighting interests of contemporary geographers. Such essays as ‘Culture Zones of the Ancient Aegean Area’, ‘Dark Age Contributions to the Mediterranean Way of Life’, the spread of wine westward in relation to Greek religious cults and commerce, and the Etruscan precursors of the culture of Tuscany, remain valuable and interesting reading. But, like Semple, he seems to have had no followers along these paths.8 Three important books in classical geography by British scholars were published after Semple’s death. Max Cary’s Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History (1949) and John L. Myres’ earlier papers collected and published as Geographical History in Greek Lands (1954), of which only two essays were first published after 1929, have already been discussed. The third, J. Oliver Thompson’s History of Ancient Geography, completed before World War II but published only in 1948, partially departs from the standard Bunbury and Tozer method of organization of discussing the individual geographical writers in sequence, in favor of an organization that includes some chapters characterized by region or the use of theory. But, though still valuable in their own right, these volumes represent an older tradition of geography.9

GEOGRAPHERS AND THE ‘NEW ARCHAEOLOGY’ Are we then left with what Lewis called a ‘nearly comatose branch’ of both classics and geography, with classicists and geographers merely passing each other as shades in Hades? With geographers lacking the knowledge and critical understanding of recent classical literature, 350

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and classicists failing to follow through on contemporary developments in geography? Or, as in classical mythology, are there small signs of hope, even among the evils loosed on the world by the opening of Pandora’s box? There are several recent field-oriented studies in which geographers and classicists have worked cooperatively on common problems, theoretical and practical. I cite a handful of examples, primarily dealing with the Greek world. First is the Minnesota Messenia expedition, a 10-year multidisciplinary study of the Bronze Age regional environment of the section of the Peloponnese known in ancient times as Nestor’s Kingdom of Pylos. Of the 17 scholars involved in the project, two were geographers, William Loy of the University of Oregon and Fred Lukermann of the University of Minnesota. Others were drawn from the fields of archaeology, ancient history, classical language, agricultural economics, geology, even chemistry, as well as surveying and photogrammetry. Loy primarily displayed his skills in air photo interpretation and his ability to describe the physical setting clearly and accurately. Lukermann, who was a member of the project from its beginning, contributed a remarkable essay on ‘Settlement and Circulation: Patterns and Systems.’ In this chapter Lukermann applied current settlement location theory in geography to the available data. These yielded, in part using methods of retrodiction, a series of five schematic maps of regional settlement and circulation patterns from 1800 backwards to the late Bronze Age. In so doing, he hoped that these maps would help to explain the Mycenaean period in southwestern Greece, but also demonstrate that existing literary and archaeological data, once mapped (a traditional geographic tool), could be used as a kind of visual hypothesis, which could be tested through future exploration and excavations. Such a useful tool could then be used either to prove or to disprove his ‘assumptions of nodality, hierarchy, and spatial interaction’. These are all concepts familiar to modern geographers, and might aid future discussions of ancient settlement patterns.10 The second such study, this time from Britain, was the Melos project. Here a geographer, Malcolm Wagstaff of the University of Southampton, has played an equal part with the distinguished archaeological theorist, Colin Renfrew, in untangling ‘the intricate interplay of ecological, technical, and social factors’ in the emergence 351

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of complex societies in the early Aegean world. The team included four geographers (and two geologists) among the 15 contributors. Wagstaff teamed with a classicist, John Cherry, on the chapter on ‘Settlement and Resources’. Their essay is a particularly interesting contribution in that it was informed by current developments in central place theory. Wagstaff either authored or co-authored eight of the 20 chapters of the book. Taken as a whole, the Melos study is a model regional historical geography. Wagstaff has published many other studies of the geography and ecology of the ancient Mediterranean world, and has also undertaken to write a biography of the spiritual father of the scientific study of Greek landscapes, Colonel William Martin Leake of the Society of Dilettanti.11 These projects, and others such as the Strouza Project or the Bradford-Boeotia project, owe much to what has become known as the ‘new archaeology’ (though also it might be called the ‘new human ecology’) of the last half-century. The ‘new archaeology’ privileges broad survey techniques and mapping large areas over the traditional mode in classical archaeology of excavating to establish the histories of particular sites, it shows a deep concern with processes (including landscape processes) and theory, and it emphasizes both spatial and environmental approaches to earlier human cultures. Particularly in Britain and on the continent, the ‘new archaeology’ was influenced by developments in geography in the late 1950s and early 1960s: statistical analyses of spatial patterns, the application of settlement and ecological models, and the use of analogical reasoning, as well as the more traditional geographic kit-bag of mapping physical and cultural phenomena and a sensitivity to the regional context.12 This section would not be complete without mentioning several recent classical studies of a highly geographical nature. Classical archaeologist John Bintliff’s published dissertation, Natural Environment and Human Settlement in Prehistoric Greece (1976), has been cited by nearly everyone working in this area. Bintliff has followed it with a series of essays in various publications on the early geography of the Greek world. In one of them, entitled ‘New approaches to human geography’, he announced his purpose as ‘to demonstrate how the techniques of modern geography and an interdisciplinary approach’,

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applied to materials uncovered by the archaeologists, can help us understand the economic and social life of pre-literate communities. More recently, in his survey of transformative developments in Greek history, John K. Davies has pointed to both the recent surveys and to Fernand Braudel’s work on later Mediterranean history. As Davies put it, there has been a shift on the scholarly agenda of ancient historians to go beyond their traditional concerns with ‘politico-military narratives and institutions’ to ‘perhaps above all, with land- and seascapes, with the people who populated it, and with the ways they made their living from it within the constraints of available technologies’. If Davies is correct, a new era of cooperation between geographers and ancient historians is obviously desirable.13 A number of useful books published by classicists in the last 30 years or so seems to have much to offer the would-be classical geographer. Donald Engels’ Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley, CA, 1978) pays careful attention to the contextual details of climate, topography, food supply and transportation routes. His subsequent book, Roman Corinth (Chicago, IL, 1980), both commends the methodology of contemporary urban geography to ancient historians and archaeologists, and makes what is apparently the first attempt to apply central place theory to a city in mainland Greece. Sarah C. Humphreys’ Anthropology and the Greeks (London, 1978) has interesting material on urban and economic geography. Nancy H. Demand’s Urban Relocation in Archaic and Classical Greece (Norman, OK, 1990) does not explicitly reference work in contemporary geography, but in pointing to the recent research interest among ancient historians to the relations of the polis to its territory, or chora, has much in it to interest geographers. Robert Sallares’ massive The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (London, 1991) is another work of interest to geographers. Susan Alcock’s Graecia Capta (Cambridge, UK, 1993) is organized around the geographic concepts of the cultural landscape and spatial organization. James Romm’s The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration and Fiction (Princeton, NJ, 1992) and Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (2nd edn, New York, 2002) are of obvious interest, as is Claude Nicolet’s Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, MI, 1991). The list is far from comprehensive. 353

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CARTOGRAPHIC AIDS FOR THE CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHER In 1986 the University of Chicago Press published the first of an ongoing series of massive volumes from a project based at the University of Wisconsin. This is the History of Cartography series, the first volume of which contains valuable chapters on Greek and Roman cartography. In 2000, Princeton University Press published a major research atlas of the Greek and Roman worlds. Richard J. A. Talbert, the editorial director, had earlier prepared a black and white atlas of Greece and Rome (Atlas of Classical History, 1985) directed at college students. Though one reviewer largely praised it, he also suggested it was weak on classical topography. This has been remedied in spades by the new Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, published in 2000 after 11 years of hard work by Talbert, as director; the late Barbara Bartz Petchenik (who had also worked on the early volumes of the History of Cartography) as the cartographic specialist at Donnelly Cartographic Services, and an international array of specialists: ten regional coordinators, 73 compilers, and 95 other scholars who served as reviewers. The total cost was estimated at 4.5 million US dollars. Two distinctive characteristics of the new atlas deserve mention. First, it fulfilled Thomas Arnold’s dream of a set of classical maps that would depict the physical landscape as it had existed in ancient times, not today. Second, in striking contrast to nineteenth-century maps and atlases, there are no city plans, maps of battlefields, or idealized sketches of how Greek and Roman writers imagined their worlds (pace Müller, Gladstone, Bunbury, Tozer, and the BreastedHuth wall maps!). The venture has also spawned an Ancient World Mapping Center, a permanent research facility at the University of North Carolina. The Center has a number of ongoing projects to increase the preparation and diffusion of high-quality maps that will increase cartographical and geographical knowledge among students of the ancient world. The combination of all these advances is a major step forward in the visual representation of the geographies of the Greek and Roman worlds in ancient times.14

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THE CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHERS THEMSELVES There is currently a renewed interest among classicists in the ancient Greek geographical writers themselves, shedding new light on the subjects highlighted in the works of Bunbury and Tozer. An Englishlanguage survey of classical geographers, by a mid-twentieth century professional geographer, is still of inestimable value. This is the Dutch geographer Christiaan Van Paassen’s 1957 published dissertation, The Classical Tradition of Geography.15 His book, little known and rarely cited, is nevertheless full of insights concerning the geographical writings of the ancient authors he discusses. Pausanias and Strabo are two ancient geographical writers currently stirring up a good deal of research. Historians of geography looking for material on Pausanias, the second-century ‘Periegete, have long had access to Peter Levi’s excellent introduction and notes to, and translation of, Pausanias’ Guide to Greece, originally published in 1971 and revised a few years later. Recent studies useful to historians of geography are Christian Habicht’s Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (1985; 2nd edition, 1999), Alcock, Cherry and Elsner’s edited volume, Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Ancient Greece (Oxford, UK, 2001), William Hutton’s Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias (Cambridge, UK, 2005) and Maria Pretzler’s Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece (London, 2007).16 The full bibliographies, of course, lead the interested reader to earlier works. A second recent flowering of studies, on Strabo, has attracted an international coterie of younger scholars. Among its recent products are Katherine Clarke’s Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (Oxford, UK, 1999), which is informed by her reading in contemporary geography with John Langton at Oxford. Only the latter half of her book is devoted to Strabo, however. The earlier chapters are devoted to a discussion of modern geographical and historiographical traditions (including Grundy, Cary, Myres, and Wright, among others discussed in this book), followed by chapters on Strabo’s predecessors Polybius and Posidonius. Clarke stresses throughout how closely linked geography and history are in the accounts these authors give us. Clarke’s discussion of Herodotus is quite brief, but Rosalind Thomas’ Herodotus in Context: Ethnography,

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Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge, UK, 2000) is a good introduction to Herodotus’ geographic method. The second of three major recent studies of this author appeared the following year: Daniela Dueck’s Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome (London and New York, 2000). Among other things, Dueck discusses how Strabo reworked the earlier study of geography. Completing the trio of important recent work on Strabo is a symposium volume, edited by Dueck, Hugh Lindsay, and Sarah Pothecary. This is Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia (Cambridge, UK, 2005), which brings together the ideas and approaches of Strabonic scholars in several countries, some reporting their research in English for the first time. The book also contains a useful bibliography. In addition, a new 10-volume critical edition of Strabo’s Geography, with commentaries, is currently under way at the University of Groningen, to replace the inadequately sourced and incomplete editions of Strabo currently available. A geographer is a member of the team producing it. Unfortunately the translation facing the Greek text, and the four volumes of commentary, will be in German, which limits its usefulness to most Anglophone geographers, few of whom are fluent in either German or classical Greek.17 There have been recent editions in translation of the Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton, NJ, 1989), of Pomponius Mela’s De Chorographia (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998) and of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Princeton, NJ, 2000). In 2010 a text of the geographical fragments of Eratosthenes, who first used the term ‘geography’ in a book title, appeared (Princeton, NJ, 2010). This was the first collection of his surviving texts in 120 years, and the first to translate them into English.

TEACHING CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY This chapter would not be complete without at least some discussion of possibilities for the teaching of classical geography. In 1953 historian W. Stull Holt, surveying American historical scholarship at mid-century, deplored the decline of courses in Greek and Roman history, and feared ‘that scholarly knowledge of those momentous 356

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periods may atrophy or become the sterile possession of a few learned anchorites’. In 1989 an entire book of essays by various classical scholars was published under the title Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? Karl Galinsky, long-time chair at the University of Texas, the largest classics department in the United States, strongly dissented. In essays both before and after the book appeared, he made a number of positive suggestions, many of which had been put into practice in his thriving department. These included new methods and techniques of teaching, such as self-paced learning of the languages and other computer-assisted instruction. He also suggested new as well as reshaped traditional courses, which had attracted large numbers of non-majors to his department’s offerings. Galinsky also advocated outreach to schools and community colleges, adult education, summer institutes for teachers, and courses in the classical tradition in modern times.18 Galinsky’s suggestions are still worth pondering. Yet in the Texas course syllabi that he published (including his own survey courses), there was not a single session in any course devoted to the historical geography of the classical lands, still less of the larger Mediterranean world. Yet Texas, his own institution, has a well-regarded department of geography, also with PhD programs, and a long tradition of historical-cultural geographers on its staff. Would it have been all that difficult to encourage a historical geographer to work with a classical archaeologist on a joint course on the geography of the ancient Mediterranean world? Or asked to give at least one lecture on Greek geography in ancient history courses? Molly Levine, also a classicist, made a more daring proposal for teaching about the ancient world. In a paper delivered in 1991 to the Washington Classical Society, Levine proposed that instruction in classics could well be enhanced by teaching the history of Greece and Rome in a full Mediterranean context. In an ideal world, Levine would advocate a full-throated effort: the abolition of classics departments entirely, and their replacement by departments of ancient Mediterranean studies, which would include ‘classicists, Egyptologists, Indo-Europeanists, and Semitists; linguists, litterateurs, historians, and archaeologists’. The program would begin with a teamtaught, year-long introductory survey course on the ancient Mediterranean, following which the students would begin to specialize 357

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in an area of their interest, accompanied by study of the relevant ancient Mediterranean languages. The course would emphasize interchange, mutual influence, and parallel development – in short, multiculturalism in antiquity.19 Although Levine does not mention classical geography, her proposal is cast in terms that would be second nature to cultural-historical geographers, whether or not competent in the classical disciplines. Each institution is different, and as Galinsky reminds is, the survival of classics (and of geography?) requires ‘practitioners who are in touch with the special character and clientele of their particular institutions’.20 But it should also be possible, particularly in smaller liberal arts colleges, where there is normally more interdepartmental interaction than one finds in the silo departments of large institutions, to combine forces and courses in joint programs. One would take advantage of diverse talents and interests, without necessarily striving for comprehensiveness. Here I offer my own experience. In 1987 at Clark University I returned to full-time teaching after 15 years of founding and directing a University Archives and writing a history of Clark for its Centennial. I had earlier developed a new undergraduate course, initially called ‘Themes in Classical Geographic Thought’, cross-listed in geography and history. In 1983 I had visited Athens and the Greek islands, and a year later surveyed Greek sites in Sicily and southern Italy. After the second of these I served as Visiting Professor at the University of Trier, the first Roman capital north of the Alps, which was then celebrating its 2000th year as a city. I have subsequently made half a dozen cruises in the Mediterranean as a lecturer for the American Geographical Society’s Program of Educational Travel. This has allowed me to share my reading and on-site findings with a mature, interested (and captive) audience. I continued to read, sat in on the course of our classical archaeologist, and spent several weeks at the University of Arizona in an National Endowment for the Humanities institute on Periklean Athens, designed for non-classically trained college teachers of classical subjects. In the meantime my primary research interest had turned to the history of classical geography itself. I became a charter member and gave a paper at the first meeting of the International Society for the Classical Tradition, in Boston in March 1991. By that 358

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time, Clark had established a Program in Ancient Civilization, directed by a core committee from classical archaeology and art, ancient philosophy, classical languages, and Jewish studies. In 1987 I split the ‘Themes’ course in two. ‘Greeks and Barbarians in the Ancient Ecumene’ was a lower division course in how Greek and Roman knowledge of the world began and expanded, largely using primary sources. I also created an advanced geography course on the theme of ‘Nature and Culture in the Ancient World’. Both were cross-listed for credit in the Program in Ancient Civilization. Both courses were unquestionably classical geography, albeit in two different forms, and a better balance between Greece and Rome in the second. As such, they probably made the Clark Program in Ancient Civilization unique in America at the time. During my time with the program we produced one double major in geography and ancient civilization. I also supervised an independent study course that included travel to Greece and Ionia. At another student’s request, I offered an individual readings tutorial on topics in fifthcentury Athens, beginning with a joint rereading of Thucydides. (The student had read it in high school, and I during my military service about 40 years before.) The satisfaction I and apparently most students experienced, whether they were budding geographers, historians, classicists, or the largest group, ‘undecided’ (largely in the course on ‘Greeks and Barbarians’), persuades me that while ancient geography may be minor, it need not be comatose. To plunge into the classical literature, primary and secondary, is not only enjoyable but a powerful stimulus to the imagination. For geographers of a humanistic bent to participate in this way in the liberal education of historians, classicists, art history majors, and the undecided-but-open students one attracts in these kinds of courses and programs, is good for the disciplines, good for the instructor’s mental health (‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing to excess’), and good for undergraduate education. Yes, ‘the past is another country’. But sometimes one can learn something by visiting it, even if one does not wish to live there.

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NOTA BENE The reader of this book may well conclude that its author, like Shakespeare’s Autolycus, is merely ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. ‘Unconsidered’ they may have been; ‘trifles’, perhaps not. What have we learned from these excursions into and these vignettes from this nearly forgotten area of academic inquiry? Certainly we lack the confidence of J. F. Unstead, who in a paper published in the first decade of the twentieth century was still able to assert: ‘It is obvious that classical geography is a special case of historical geography.’ In the first decades of the twenty-first, it is not so obvious, at least if we were to look at the practices of the vast majority of selfdefined historical geographers. Yet, as Clarence Glacken has wisely written, ‘A historian of geographic ideas…who stays within the limits of his discipline sips a thin gruel’.21 We need always to keep in mind Horacio Capel’s caution that ‘despite the antiquity of the term “geography,” the geography of the twentieth century has little to do with that of the nineteenth’.22 Nevertheless, since the 1960s in Britain, and to a lesser extent in the United States, some geographers and classical archaeologists have cooperated as partners in newer understandings of the ancient world. Both in Britain and the United States, some classicists have reached out into the geographic literature to illuminate their own field in a number of ways. The role of geography in the teaching of classical subjects in the twenty-first century will never equal its standing in the nineteenth. But neither is it ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. There are still opportunities, in the changing and broadening role of classics, for individual historical geographers to make a positive contribution to liberal education through cooperative interdisciplinary work in ancient Mediterranean studies. No one can be more conscious than its author of the shortcomings of this book. Anyone who ventures to explore the area in which classics, ancient history, and historical geography meet modern British and American academic history risks incurring not only the wrath of specialist reviewers but even the wrath of God, who famously demanded of Job ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?’ The standard academic apologetic, ‘further research is needed’, has been ever before me. Yet in the end I 360

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retain the conviction, formed more than half a century ago, that geography, history, and classics are all of vital importance to liberal education. As Walter Goffart put it in the opening sentence of his superb book on the history of historical atlases, ‘Geography and history are not strangers to each other.’23 Nor should they be. It remains a delight to have studied and taught classical contributions and practices across the corridors of time, and a privilege to undertake this first extended exploration of some of the areas where geography, ancient history, classical literature, and classical archaeology have historically intersected.

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ABBREVIATIONS ALLIBONE ALLIBONE SUPP. ANB CHAL CHEL DAB DBC DNB DVB EB EHCA HARRIS NCAB ODNB OED SHORTER OED SPEAKE

S. Austin Allibone, Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, 3 vols (1858–71). John Foster Kirk, Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors, 2 vols (1891). American National Biography, 24 vols (1999). Cambridge Dictionary of American Literature, 4 vols (1921). Cambridge Dictionary of English Literature, 14 vols (1964). Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols (1928–37). Supplement 10 vols (1944–96). Dictionary of British Classicists, 3 vols (2004). Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols (1885–1901). Supplements, 10 vols (1901–90). Dictionary of Virginia Biography, 3 vols, continuing (1998– ). Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition (1879–89) and 11th edition (1910–11). Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology, 2 vols (1996). British Architectural Books and Writers, 1556–1785 (1990). National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 63 vols (1888–1984). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 61 vols (2004). Oxford English Dictionary, 12 vols (1933). Supplements, 4 vols (1972–86). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols (6th edition, 2002). Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia, 3 vols (2003).

PREFACE 1 2

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Godlewska, Anne Marie Claire, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science From Cassini to Humboldt, p. 278 (Chicago, 1999). See, for example, Koelsch, William A., ‘Squinting back at Strabo’. Geographical Review, xciv/4 (2004), pp. 503–18; Koelsch, review of D. Dueck, H. Lindsay and S. Pothecary (eds), Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia, Geographical Review, xcvi/3 (2006), pp. 514–15; and S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner (eds), Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece (Oxford, UK, 2001). See also other references in the Epilogue at the end of this volume. Butlin, Robin A., Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time, pp. 7–12 (London, 1993); Mayhew, Robert J., Enlightenment Geography: The Political

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4

5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13

Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850 (New York, 2000), esp. portions of the chapter on James Rennell; Baker, Alan R. H., Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, UK, 2003); Koelsch, review of Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide, Journal of Regional Science, xliv/4 (2002), pp. 798–9. Johnston, Ron and Michael Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography, pp. 3–4, 72, 81 (Oxford, UK, 2003). See also the major Darby obituaries, listed in Koelsch, ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer: a “missing person” in historical geography?’ Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, vol. 72 (2010), pp. 118–27. Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 1 (1903–4), p. xvii lists the original Fellows as well as those elected in 1903 and 1904. M[ason], K[enneth], ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954’, Geographical Journal, cxx/4 (1954), pp. 541–2; Darby, ‘On the writing of historical geography, 1918–1945’, in Robert W. Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918–1945, p. 129 (Cambridge, UK, 1987); Koelsch, ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954’, in G. J. Martin (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 16 (1995), p. 61 (London, 1995). For the confusion of father and son, and the loss of Myres’ portrait, see Williams, Michael, ‘The creation of humanized landscapes’, in A Century of British Geography, p. 169 and note; also Index, p. 662. Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford, UK, 1998); Winterer, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, MD, 2002); Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, NY, 2007). Dyson, Stephen L., Ancient Marbles to American Shores: Classical Archaeology in the United States (Philadelphia, PA, 1998); Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: A History of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New Haven, CT, 2006); Richard, Carl J., The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Renault, Mary, The Mask of Apollo, p. 232 (New York, 1966). Richard’s earlier book, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994) is helpful in understanding those Founders who were also college founders: Franklin, Rush and Jefferson. Godlewska, Geography Unbound, p. 278. Capel, Horacio, The History of Science and the History of the Scientific Disciplines. GeoCritica, no. 84, pp. 8–9, 12, English Parallel Series, no. 1 (Barcelona, Spain, 1969); Aay, Henry, ‘Textbook chronicles: disciplinary history and the growth of geographical knowledge’, in B. W. Blouet (ed.), The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States, pp. 291–301 (Hamden, CT, 1981). See Aiken, Edwin James, Scriptural Geography: Portraying the Holy Land (London, 2010). Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, p. 88 (London, 1962). Fischer, David Hackett, Champlain’s Dream, p. 11 (New York, 2008); Lucian, of Samosata, ‘How to study history’, in Lucian: Selected Dialogues, p. 197, trans. and ed. Desmond Costa (New York, 2005).

INTRODUCTION 1 2

Magris, Claudio, Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, Chap. 1. Patrick Creagh (trans) (London, 1999). Suess, Eduard, ‘The Danube’, Geographical Journal, xxxvii/6 (1911), pp. 642–5. See also ‘The underground connection between the upper Danube and the Rhine’, Geographical Journal, xxxi/4 (1908), p. 410.

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Tollias, George, ‘Maps in Renaissance libraries and collections’, in D. Woodward et al. (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, Pts. 1 and 2. (Pt. 1, pp. 637–60), 2 vols (Chicago, IL, 2007). (Quote p. 659). Koeman, C., The History of Abraham Ortelius and his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (New York, 1964). Black, Jeremy, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past, pp. 9–21 (New Haven, CT, 1997). See Walter Goffart’s invaluable Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570–1870 and references (Chicago, 2003), especially Chap. 1. See also Goffart, ‘Breaking the Ortelian pattern: historical atlases with a new program’, in Joan Winearls (ed.), Editing Early and Historical Atlases, pp. 49–61 (Toronto, 1993). Snow, Edward, A Study of Vermeer, pp. 162–3 has excellent reproductions of these two paintings (rev. ed., Berkeley, CA, 1994). For a brief discussion of the Ptolemaic and Strabonic traditions in geography, see Koelsch, William A., ‘Squinting back at Strabo’, Geographical Review, xciv/4 (2004), pp. 502–18. Ashmole, Bernard, ‘Cyriac of Ancona’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 45 (1959), pp. 25–41; David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, Chap. 1 (Cambridge, UK, 1984). Suess, ‘The Danube’, p. 645.

CHAPTER 1 1 2 3

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Butlin, Robin A., Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time (London, 1993), pp. 2–7. Merz, J. Theodore, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, p. 294, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1904–12). Curtius, Ernst, Alterthum und Gegenwart, 3 vols (Berlin, 1882–9), vol. 2, p. 227, quoted in Merz, History of European Thought, vol. 1, p. 295. For Curtius, see also Merz, vol. 3, pp. 152–61 and Sandys, John Edwin, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1903–8. Reprint: New York, 1964 and London and New York, 2011), vol. 3, pp. 228–9, where Curtius is likened to geographers Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter. Kelly, Jason M., The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. xv, xvii; Scott, Jonathan, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven, CT, 2003), p. 278; Redford, Bruce, ‘The measure of ruins: Dilettanti in the Levant, 1750–1770’, Harvard Library Bulletin, NS xiii/1 (2002), pp. 5–36 (term used on pp. 7, 12, 31). The broader context is treated in Dolan, Brian, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment (Basingstoke, UK and New York, 2000). In the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, we find both archaeology and archaeography defined broadly as ‘the systematic study of antiquities’, but ‘archaeology’ is qualified by the words ‘esp. as revealed by excavation’. If we turn to its more comprehensive elder sister, the multi-volume OED, we find that the first English use of ‘archaeography’ dates from 1804, and there is an 1836 suggestion that the term had been proposed for ‘the science which treats of them’ (i.e., ‘classical antiquities’). On the other hand, the first English use of ‘archaeology’ is in a text by William Whewell in 1837, in connection with prehistoric artifacts, not Greek classical buildings. The term ‘archaeologist’ dates from 1824, eight years after Kelly’s book ends. Its variants, ‘archaeologian’ and ‘archaeologer’ date from 1839 and 1851, respectively. See Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, A-M, p. 111; Oxford English Dictionary and Supplement, vol. 1, s.v. ‘Ancient’, ‘Archaeography’, ‘Archaeologer’, ‘Archaeologian’, ‘Archaeologist’, ‘Archaeology’.

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15 16

17

James Wood to Joseph Spence, 25 September 1749. Reprinted in Kelly, Society of Dilettanti, p. 123; Extract from Chandler, Richard, Travels in Asia Minor (Oxford 1775), quoted in Kelly, Society of Dilettanti, p. 182. Daniel, Glyn, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology, pp. 44–5 (New York, 1968); Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology, pp. 21, 28–9 (Cambridge, MA, 1976); Taylor, Brian, ‘Amateurs, professionals and the knowledge of archaeology’, p. 499 and references, British Journal of Sociology, xlvi/3 (1995), pp. 499–508. For the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt, see Godlewska, Anne, ‘The Napoleonic survey of Egypt: a masterpiece of cartographic compilation and early nineteenth-century fieldwork’, Cartographica, xxv/1 & 2 (1988). For the attribution to Jacob Spon, see Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Ulrich von, History of Classical Scholarship, A. Harris (trans.) and H. Lloyd-Jones (ed.) (Baltimore, MD, 1982), pp. 61–2 and Pfeiffer, Rudolph, History of Classical Scholarship From 1300 to 1850, p. 133 (Oxford, UK, 1976). Osborn, James, ‘Travel literature and the rise of neo-Hellenism in England’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, lxvii/5 (1963), pp. 279–300 (quotes are on pp. 280–1, 291 and note, 298). The historian of archaeology, Bruce Trigger, appears to agree. While mentioning the Society of Dilettanti and LeRoy in passing, Trigger contends ‘serious archaeological work did not begin in Greece… until after that country’s independence from Turkey in the early nineteenth century’, Trigger, Bruce G., A History of Archaeological Thought, pp. 60–1 (2nd edn, Cambridge, UK, 2006). Edward Kaufman, ‘Architecture and travel in the age of British eclecticism’, in E. Blau and E. Kaufman (eds), Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation, pp. 58–85 (Montreal, 1989). Eisner, Robert, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece, p. 75 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1991). West, Robert C., Carl Sauer’s Fieldwork in Latin America, p. 16 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), cited in Mathewson, Kent, ‘Alexander von Humboldt and the origins of landscape archaeology’, Journal of Geography lxxxv/2 (1986), p. 51. Everett, Nigel, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven, CT, 1994), and Daniels, Stephen, Humphrey Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1999). Curtius, Alterthum, vol. 2, p. 229, quoted in Merz, History of European Thought, vol. 1, p. 295. For earlier travelers to Greece, see the bibliographies in Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land and Constantine, David, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, UK, 1984). For a fine concise introduction, see Constantine, ‘Grand Tour’, in Speake, pp. 499–501. Stoneman, Richard, Land of Lost Gods: The Search for Classical Greece, p. 120 (Norman, OK, 1987). For a discussion of British architects and artists in Rome in the period (which also includes those who also worked in Greek lands), see Salmon, Frank, ‘The impact of the archaeology of Rome on British architects and their work, c. 1750–1840’, in Clare Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond, pp. 219–43 (London, 2000) and Salmon, Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome in English Architecture (Aldershot, UK, 2000). The date of founding has been much disputed. Some authorities place the founding two years later, probably taking the date from the erroneous preface to the first volume of The Antiquities of Ionia (1769). Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, UK, 1882), p. 65 note 158, gives a probable date of December 1733. Michaelis repeats the year in his A Century of Archeological Discovery, p. 10 (London, 1908). This date is followed by Sandys and a number of more recent authors.

366

NOTES

18

19

20 21 22

23

Lionel Cust (see next note) believes that ‘the first meeting of the Society was held in December, probably on December 5 or 12, 1732’ (p. 5). See also Bernard H. Stern, The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in England, 1732–1786, pp. 18–19, note 4 (Menasha, WI, 1940); Kemp, Betty, Sir Francis Dashwood: An Eighteenth-Century Independent, pp. 9, 101 (London and New York, 1967); Wiebenson, Dora, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture, p. 25 (University Park, PA, 1969); Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, from 1300 to 1850, p. 161; and Waterhouse, Helen, The British School at Athens: The First Hundred Years (London, 1986), p. 5. I find the claims of the latter group (and others who agree with the validity of the 1732 date, such as Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land, p. 71 and Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity, p. 87), to be more persuasive than the alternatives. Kelly, in his dissertation and subsequent book, also begins with the 1732 date: see Kelly, Polite Sociability and Levantine Archaeology in the British Enlightenment: The Society of Dilettanti, 1732–1786, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004 and Kelly, Society of Dilettanti. Cust, Lionel, History of the Society of Dilettanti, pp. 5, 111. Sidney Colvin (ed.). (London, 1898. 2nd edn, London and New York, 1914). See also the comment of Sir Sidney Colvin in his Memories & Notes of Persons & Places, 1852–1912, p. 216 (New York, 1921); and Demata, Massimiliano, ‘Society of Dilettanti’, in Speake, pp. 1, 101–3. Now there are two splendidly illustrated early histories of the Society, one by an art historian, Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles, CA, 2008) and Kelly’s fuller, though equally splendidly illustrated, volume. (Redford accepts at face value the founding date of 1734 given in Ionian Antiquities, though oddly enough the Fall 2008 Getty Publications catalogue, p. 9, advertising his book for sale, gave the founding date as 1732.) Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, 14 April 1743, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, W. S. Lewis (ed.), vol. 18 (1954), p. 211, 18 vols (New Haven, CT, 1937–83); [Milnes, R. M.], ‘The Dilettanti Society’, Edinburgh Review, cv/2 (1857), p. 499; Crook, J. Mordaunt, The Greek Revival: Neo-Classical Attitudes in British Architecture, 1760–1870, p. 62 (London, 1972). For Monckton Milnes’ book collection, see Pope-Hennessey, James, Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Years, 1851–1885, pp. 113–22 (New York, 1951). John Brewer, in his The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1997) allots generous space to the Dilettanti, discussing both their more scandalous activities and their serious connoisseurs’ influence on English high culture during the period he treats. Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti, passim; also Redford, Dilettanti and Kelly, Society of Dilettanti for background, expeditions, and most recent bibliography. Waterhouse, British School at Athens, p. 5; Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, p. 211; Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, p. 120. Kruse quoted in Milnes, ‘Dilettanti Society’, p. 502 (omitting the words ‘and topographic’); Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti, pp. 169–70; Redford, Dilettanti, p. 82. Crook, in The Greek Revival, p. 6, calls Kruse’s chronology ‘by no means absurd’. The original quotation is found in Friedrich C.-H. Kruse, Hellas, oder geographisch-antiquarische Darstellung des altern Griechenlands und seiner Colonien, vol. 1, pp. 102–3 (Leipzig, 1825). Kelly also re-translates the statement in Society of Dilettanti, p. 266 and lists Kruse’s preceding periods, p. 317, note 111. For biographical information on Stuart and Revett, in addition to the standard DNB and ODNB entries, see Harris, pp. 439–50, especially important for publication histories. For Stuart, Revett, and other Dilettanti, see also EHCA and DBC. Longer treatments include Lawrence, Lesley, ‘Stuart and Revett: their literary and architectural careers’, Journal of the Warburg Institute ii (1938–9), pp. 128–46; the

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24

25

26 27 28

29

30

more critical Landy, Jacob, ‘Stuart and Revett: pioneer archaeologists’, Archaeology, ix/4 (1956), pp. 252–9, and most books on Greek travelers and on English neoclassical architecture. For Stuart, also see Watkin, David, Athenian Stuart: Pioneer of the Greek Revival (London, 1982), esp. ch. 1, and the splendidly illustrated anthology of essays by Susan Weber Soros, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, 1713–1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity (New Haven, CT, 2007) and references. For Desgodetz, see Harris, pp. 180–2 and Redford, Dilettanti, pp. 45–9. Desgodetz’ Les Edifices Antiques de Rome was translated into English and published in London in 1771. Webb, Timothy, English Romantic Hellenism, 1700–1824, pp. 89–95 (Manchester, UK, 1982), has an abbreviated version of the 1751 ‘Proposals’; Webb also reprints brief selections from other Dilettanti expedition reports. The full version may be found in Stuart’s preface to the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens (1762. Reprint: New York, 2008), Preface, pp. v–vi, note a. Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture, Appendix 1, lists the various proposals between 1748 and 1755. Bibliographical information on the various early printings of the volumes may be found in Harris, pp. 448–50. For William Newton and Willey Reveley, see DNB and ODNB. Stafford, Barbara M., Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840, pp. 425–6 (Cambridge, MA, 1984). Spencer, Terence [T.J.B.], Fair Greece! Sad Relic! Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron, pp. 160–1 (London, 1954. Reprint: New York, 1973). Paradoxically, Stuart nominated Cook for membership in the Royal Society in 1775, describing him as ‘the successful conductor of two important voyages for the discovery of unknown countries, by which geography and natural history have been greatly advantaged and improved’. Stuart was involved in the planning of Cook’s first two voyages and, on behalf of the Dilettanti, suggested Thomas Jones as the topographical artist for Cook’s last voyage. See Soros (ed.), James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, p. 92, note 182 and pp. 181–2. Cook named one of his ‘discoveries’, the Hawaiian Islands, for the Earl of Sandwich, a Dilettante, as was Joseph Banks, whom Stuart had nominated a year ahead of Cook. The fact that Banks was elected both to the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries in the same year (1766) shows the nexus of scientific and humanistic currents of thought in the British Enlightenment. Banks was noted for patronizing artists ‘whose works are notable for their precision of draughtsmanship [sic] and the rendering of visual statements without resort to adornments of style’, Smith, Bernard W., European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, p. 13 (Oxford, UK, 1960); also DNB, ODNB and references. Hutton, C. A., ‘The travels of “Palmyra” Wood in 1750–1751’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xlvii (1927), p. 103. The Hutton paper is basic here, as is Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, ch. 3, and Spencer, ‘Robert Wood and the problem of Troy in the eighteenth century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xx (1957), pp. 75–105. For brief but incisive comment on Wood and Dawkins, in addition to the DNB and ODNB and other standard sources cited earlier, see Harris, pp. 491–5. Harris, p. 492. For the outfitting of Dawkins’ ship, see Spencer, Fair Greece! Sad Relic!, p. 162. The ship as an aspect of scientific survey is described in Sorrenson, Richard, ‘The ship as a scientific instrument in the eighteenth century’, Osiris, 2nd Ser., xi (1996), pp. 221–36. Sorrenson also (p. 221) raises the important point that the language of geography ‘routinely pervaded the language of all the sciences…’ and, I would add, much of the humanities as well. Wood statement from The Ruins of Palmyra (London, 1753), Preface, quoted in Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, p. 67.

368

NOTES

31 32

33

34

35

36

37 38

39

Butterworth, J. A., ‘The Wood Collection’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, cvi (1986), p. 198. Wood, Preface to Ionian Antiquities, quoted in Harris, p. 491. A number of engravings from Wood’s Palmyra book are reprinted in Iain Browning, Palmyra (Park Ridge, NJ, 1979). The painting of Wood and Dawkins is reproduced in Browning, Palmyra, p. 90; Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, p. 90, and Kaufman, ‘Architecture and Travel’, p. 58, among others. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 6, note on p. 275, 8 vols (London, 1983–90); Harris, p. 491, drawing on the reviews in Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture, pp. 92–102. Myres, John L., Homer and His Critics, p. 59 (London, 1958); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Abbe Conti, 31 July [1718], in Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, vol. I, p. 420, R. Halsband (ed.), 3 vols (Oxford, UK, 1965–7); Spencer, Fair Greece! Sad Relic!, pp. 146–50; Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land, p. 66. In addition to his maps, Pope included extensive notes, many of them geographical. The notes are conveniently available in Homer, The Iliad of Homer, Alexander Pope (trans.) and Steven Shankman (ed.) (London and New York, 1996). Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, ‘To the Reader’, p. 5 (Washington, DC, 1973). See also Cook, J. M., The Troad: An Archaeological and Topographical Study, pp. 20–1 (Oxford, UK, 1973); Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land, pp. 72–3; Spencer, Fair Greece! Sad Relic!, p. 162; Webb, English Romantic Hellenism, p. 133; Clarke, M. L., Greek Studies in England, 1700–1830, p. 133 (Cambridge, UK, 1945); Davison, J. A., ‘The Homeric question’, p. 245, in A. J. B. Wace and F. H. Stubbings (eds), A Companion to Homer, pp. 234–66 (London and New York, 1962); and Spencer, ‘Robert Wood and the problem of Troy’, p. 82. Myres, Homer and His Critics, pp. 59–67 has some useful comments on Wood in this regard. See also two recent studies of the topographical aspect of Homer’s works: Luce, J. V., Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven, CT, 1998) and Bittlestone, Robert, Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca (Cambridge, UK, 2005). See DNB, ODNB, and references mentioned earlier, including Harris, s.v. ‘Society of Dilettanti’, pp. 431–7 and ‘Wood, Robert’, pp. 491–5; also Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, ch. 9. For its early publication history, see Harris, pp. 431–7; also Milnes, ‘Dilettanti’, p. 503. Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor and Greece (3rd edn, London, 1817), pp. xiii, p. 272. An abridged version of one of Chandler’s books is Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor, 1764–1765, Edith Clay (ed.) (London, 1971). A biographical sketch of the now deceased Pars was included in Volume 2 of Ionian Antiquities (1797). Andrew Wilton wrote an appreciation of Pars for the 1971 Chandler volume, pp. xxi– xxxvi, plus a list of his Asia Minor drawings; the text reproduces several of these. Pars is also treated in Wilton’s British Watercolours, 1750 to 1850 (Oxford, UK, 1977). Chandler’s comment on ancient geography in Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, p. 134; Gibbon’s comment in Decline and Fall, vol. I, note on p. 70. Gibbon’s interest in Roman topography and ‘the ancient geography of Italy’ is noted in Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, p. 436. Gibbon’s competence in both classical and modern geography is attested to by his contemporaries, notably his friend James Rennell; see Baker, J. N. L., ‘Geography and its history’, in Baker, The History of Geography: Papers by J. N. L. Baker, pp. 93–4 (New York, 1963). For an excellent recent study of this aspect of Gibbon, see Abbattista, Guido, ‘Establishing “the order of time and place”: “rational geography”, French erudition, and

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40 41

42

43 44

45

46

47

48

49

the emplacement of history in Gibbon’s mind’, in D. Womersley (ed.), Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 45–72 (Oxford, UK, 1997). Society of Dilettanti, Antiquities of Ionia, Part the Second (London, 1797); Redford, ‘Measure of ruins’, p. 30; Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, pp. 188, 194. Constantine, ‘The question of authority in some early accounts of Greece’, in G. W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, p. 20 (Cambridge, UK, 1998). David Stoddart, On Geography, p. 33 (Oxford, 1986); G. R. Crone, Modern Geographers: An Outline of Progress in Geography Since AD 1800, p. 10 ([1951, 1960] rev. and enlarged edn, London, 1970); Jefferson’s ‘Instructions to Captain Lewis’ (1803), in Jefferson, Thomas, Writings, pp. 1,126–32, M. Peterson (ed.) (New York, 1984); Redford, ‘Measure of ruins’, pp. 5–36, quote at p. 12; Redford, Dilettanti, ch. 2; R. W. Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas, 1660–1732, chs 1, 2 (Lincoln, NB, 1934. Reprint: New York, 1964); Roy Porter, ‘The terraqueous globe’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds), The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, pp. 295–6 (Cambridge, U.K, 1980). For the role of precision in this period, see Marie-Noelle Bourguet, ‘Landscape with numbers: natural history, travel, and instruments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, in M.-N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe and H. O. Silbum (eds), Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, pp. 96–125 (London and New York, 2002). Osborn, ‘Rise of Neo-Hellenism, p. 281; Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, p. 147. [Fredericksen, Martin], Introduction to Gell, Sir William Gell in Italy: Letters to the Society of Dilettanti, 1831–1835, p. 34, E. Clay and M. Fredericksen (eds) (London, 1976); Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, pp. 139, 143. Standard biographical details on Gell, Gandy (later Deering), Dodwell and Craven in DNB and ODNB. See also Ridgway, David, ‘Gell, Sir William’, in Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archeology, pp. 483–4; Bruce, M. R., ‘A tourist in Athens, 1801’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xcii (1972), pp. 173–5; Society of Dilettanti, The Unedited Antiquities of Attica (London, 1817). Recent studies of Gell include Plouviez, Charles, ‘Straddling the Aegean: William Gell 1811–1813’, in S. Searight and M. Wagstaff (eds), Travellers in the Levant: Voyages and Visionaries, pp. 43–56 (Durham, UK, 2001) and Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew, ‘Roman topography and the prism of Sir William Gell’, in L. Haselburger and J. Hughes (eds), Imaging Ancient Rome: Documentation – Visualization – Imagination, pp. 285–96 (Portsmouth, RI, 2006). Gell’s letters from Italy and other valuable information, including bibliographical and biographical material, as well as numerous references to his map of the Roman countryside, are contained in Sir William Gell in Italy (note 44 above). Clay, ‘Rhodes: Sir William to Sir Walter’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxxiii (1970), note at p. 337; Spencer, Fair Greece! Sad Relic!, p. 208; Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, p. 150; Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Roman Topography’, pp. 285, 296. George Ticknor, The Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor, vol. I, p. 175, 2 vols (Boston, MA, 1876); Byron, ‘Review of Gell’s geography of Ithaca, and itinerary of Greece’, Monthly Review, August 1811. Reprinted in George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, vol. 1, Appendix 3, pp. 350–65, 6 vols, R. Prothero (ed.) (2nd impression, London and New York, 1902). See Bittlestone, Odysseus Unbound for a different identification of Ithaca, based in part on modern geophysical methods. Biographical material on Leake in DNB, ODNB and EHCA, p. 666. Curtius’ appraisal of Leake is taken from his essay in his Alturthum, vol. 2, p. 312, quoted in

370

NOTES

50 51

52

53

54 55

56 57 58 59

60

Merz, History of European Thought, vol. I, p. 296. Wilamowitz’s appraisal is in his History of Classical Scholarship, p. 125; Spencer’s in Fair Greece! Sad Relic!, p. 207. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 3, p. 442. William Martin Leake, Researches in Greece, Preface, pp. i, v (London, 1814). Leake, Journal of a Tour of Asia Minor: With Comparative Remarks on the Ancient and Modern Geography of that Country, title page (London, 1824). His Travels in Northern Greece, for example, has numerous examples of this, 4 vols ([London, 1835]. Reprint: Amsterdam, Neth, 1967). See also Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land, p. 104. J. M. Wagstaff, ‘Pausanias and the topographers: the case of Colonel Leake’, in S. E. Alcock, J. F. Cherry, and J. Elsner (eds), Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, pp. 204–5 (Oxford, 2001). Wagstaff is writing a biography of Leake. Among his preliminary studies are ‘Colonel Leake and the classical topography of Asia Minor’, Anatolian Studies xxxvii (1987), pp. 23–35; ‘Colonel Leake in Laconia’, in J. M. Sanders (ed.), Lakonian Studies in Honour of Hector Catling, pp. 277–83 (London, 1992) and ‘Colonel Leake: Traveller and Scholar’, in Travellers in the Levant, pp. 3–15. (See also essays on Leake by Hugh C. S. Ferguson and Davina Huxley in the same volume.) Wagstaff also discusses Leake in his The Contribution of Early Travel Narratives to the Historical Geography of Greece, Twenty-Second J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture, 2003 (Oxford, UK, 2004). De Grey and Ripon, Henry George, 3rd Earl, ‘Address to the Royal Geographical Society, London, delivered at the Anniversary Meeting on 28 May 1860’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society xxx (1860), pp. cxiii–cxvi; Michaelis, Die Archaologischen Entdeckungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, p. 29 (Leipzig, 1906). Quoted in Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 3, p. 442. Leake’s methods are described in Wagstaff, ‘Case of Colonel Leake’. Levi, Peter, The Hill of Kronos, pp. 115–18 (New York, 1981); Pausanias, Guide to Greece, passim and vol. 1, p. 508, trans. and ed. Levi, 2 vols (Harmondsworth, UK, 1971); Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, pp. 155–8; Wagstaff, ‘Case of Colonel Leake’, pp. 205–6. Spencer, Fair Greece! Sad Relic!, p. 205. Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, vol. 1, Preface, p. vi; Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods, p. 164. Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, History of Classical Scholarship, p. 82; Pfeifer, History of Classical Scholarship From 1300 to 1850, pp. 161–2. Ogilvie, R. M., Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics in English Life From 1600 to 1918, p. 128 (London, 1964); Cust, Society of Dilettanti, pp. 200–1. For a recent survey of the later Dilettanti expeditions, see Cook, B. F., ‘British archaeologists in the Aegean’, in V. Brand (ed.), The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age, pp. 139–54 (Oxford, UK, 1998). Ogilvie, Latin and Greek, p. 127. For Woods and Cockerell, see DNB and ODNB. David Watkin’s biography of Cockerell says nothing about his compilation of, or work on, the ‘Supplementary Volume’. He does point out the importance of Cockerell’s Grecian discoveries at Bassae and Aegina. The story of Cockerell’s run at Troy is from Watkin, The Life and Works of C. R. Cockerell, p. 7 (London, 1974). See also Watkin, ‘C. R. Cockerell and the role of archaeology in modern classical architecture’, The Classicist, ii (1996), pp. 16–24, and Hutton, ‘A collection of sketches by C. R. Cockerell, R.A.’, Journal of Hellenic Studies xxix (1909) pp. 33–9. Woods’ volume is Antiquities of Athens, vol. 4, J. Woods (ed.) (London, 1816). For Cockerell’s Dilettanti-sponsored studies, see The Antiquities of Athens, and Other Places in Greece, Sicily, etc., Supplementary to the Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart… and Nicholas Revett…, vol. 5, W. Kinnaird (ed.) (London, 1830). For the eighteenth-century rediscovery of ancient Greek monuments in Sicily and south Italy, see Lang, S., ‘The early publications of the temples at Paestum’, Journal of the

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61

62

63

64

65 66 67 68

69

70

71

Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xiii (1950), pp. 48–64, and Momigliano, Arnaldo, ‘The rediscovery of Greek Sicily in the eighteenth century’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, vol. 9 (1979), pp. 167–87. Constantine, Early Greek Travellers, p. 214; Wilkins in DNB and ODNB; see also Liscombe, R. W., William Wilkins, 1778–1839, esp. ch. 7 (Cambridge, UK, 1980). Wilkins and Cockerell are also discussed in Clarke, Greek Studies in England, ch. 14. For Newton, see DNB and ODNB, as well as [Jebb, Sir Richard], ‘Sir C. T. Newton’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xiv (1894), pp. xlix–liv; Green, Peter, ‘Novelists and travellers’, Cornhill Magazine, clxviii/1003 (1955), p. 48; Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, p. 278. For Pullan, see DNB and ODNB, as well as Stephen L. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts: Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, pp. 116–17 (New Haven, CT, 2006). See also Pullan’s Dilettanti volumes, Antiquities of Ionia, vol. 4 (London, 1881) and vol. 5 (London, 1915). For Penrose, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Waterhouse, The British School at Athens, p. 5, Watkin, ‘Cockerell and Archaeology’, p. 20, and Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 3, pp. 445–6. C. C. Felton (see Chapter 7 of this volume) acknowledged Penrose’s work in a footnote (pp. 160–3) in his American edition of Lord Carlisle’s diary: see Carlisle, George W. F. H., 7th Earl, Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters, C. C. Felton (ed.) (Boston, MA, 1855). For Freshfield’s election, see Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti, p. 313. Osborn, ‘Travel literature’, pp. 281, 298. Kelly, Society of Dilettanti, p. 266. See Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, passim; Constantine, Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton (London, 2001); G. S. Rousseau, ‘The sorrows of Priapus: anticlericalism, homosocial desire, and Richard Payne Knight’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, pp. 101–53 (reference to Thomas Wright book on p. 142, note 1) (Manchester, UK, 1987); Kelly, ‘Riots, revelries, and rumor: libertinism and masculine association in Enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies, xciv/4 (2006), pp. 759–95. For Knight, see also Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque (Cambridge, UK, 1997). Redford, Dilettanti, places the end of the Society’s influence on English taste as beginning in 1816 as a result of the controversy over the Elgin marbles; Kelly, Society of Dilettanti, disagrees with that explanation, but also ends his book in 1816. The point here, however, is that the Society continued to send out expeditions and issue publications reporting on them, though they become more archaeological and less topographical and cartographic as the nineteenth century wears on. Kaufman’s essay has been of great value here, though his concern is with the history of architecture, not the history of geography. For a brief recent survey of historical geography that does include some discussion of classical geography in Britain, see Butlin, Historical Geography, pp. 7–12. For its early development in France, see Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt, ch. 8 (Chicago, IL, 1999). Earlier, Andrew Clark cited a number of early works in the geography of the ancient world in his survey article, ‘Historical Geography’, in P. E. James and C. F. Jones (eds), American Geography: Inventory and Prospect, pp. 70–105, especially at p. 74, note C and p. 79, note K (Syracuse, NY, 1954). Crook, The Greek Revival, p. 7.

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CHAPTER 2 1

2

3

4

5

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 17 April 1826, in Adams, John and Thomas Jefferson, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, vol. 2, p. 614, L. J. Cappon (ed.), 2 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, 1959). Adams was also interested in geography as a subject for serious study, expressed most notably in a letter to Abigail Adams in August 1776, in which he declared geography ‘absolutely necessary’ for anyone in public service (civil and military), for merchants, and for ‘Us and our children’, Adams to Abigail Adams, 13 August 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, L. H. Butterfield et al. (eds), vol. 2, June 1776–March 1778, p. 90 (Cambridge, MA, 1963). More famously, in a 1780 letter from Paris, Adams asserted he must study politics and war so that his sons might study other subjects, including geography, Adams to Abigail Adams, c. 12 May 1780, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 3, April 1778–September 1780, p. 342 (Cambridge, MA, 1973). Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818, in [Adams], The Works of John Adams, vol. 10 (1856), p. 282, C. F. Adams (ed.), 10 vols (Boston, MA, 1850–6); Adams to Benjamin Rush, 18 January 1811; Rush to Adams, 4 February 1811, in Adams, John and Benjamin Rush, The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813, pp. 178–9, J. A. Shultz and D. Adair (eds) (San Marino, CA, 1966). See also Robathan, Dorothy M., ‘John Adams and the classics’, New England Quarterly xxxix/1 (1946), pp. 91–8. See, for example, Richard, Carl J., The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1994). Richard also provides a useful recent bibliography in his Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers (Lanham, MD, 2008). See also Shalev, Eran, Rome Reborn on the Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2009). There is a large literature on the topic, omitted here. For the development of ‘useful knowledge’ (which included geography) in this period, see Reinhold, Meyer, ‘The quest for useful knowledge in eighteenthcentury America’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, xix/2 (1975), pp. 108–32. Reprint: Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States, pp. 50–93 (Detroit, MI, 1987). The notion of classics as useful knowledge is also found in Wiesen, David S., ‘Ancient history and early American education’, in S. F. Wiltshire (ed.), The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 53–69 (n.p., [1977]). For the problems inherent in establishing ‘republican citizens’, see Tyack, David, ‘Forming the national character: paradox in the educational thought of the revolutionary generation’, Harvard Educational Review, lxvi/1 (1966), pp. 29–41. Miller, Samuel, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2, pp. 492–506, 2 vols (New York, 1803. Reprint: New York, 1970); Warntz, William, Geography Now and Then: Some Notes on the History of Academic Geography in the United States (New York, 1964); Hornberger, Theodore, Scientific Thought in the American Colleges, 1638–1800 (Austin, TX, 1945. Reprint: New York, 1968); Louis Franklin Snow, The College Curriculum in the United States (New York, 1907). For Varenius, see Baker, J. N. L., ‘The geography of Bernhard Varenius’, Institute of British Geographers: Transactions and Papers, xxi/21 (1955), pp. 51–60. Reprinted in Baker, The History of Geography: Papers by J. N. L. Baker, pp. 105–18 (Oxford, UK and New York, 1963); Warntz, ‘Varenius’ geography’, Geography Now and Then, ch. 8; Warntz, ‘Geographia Generalis and the earliest development of American academic geography’, in B. W. Blouet (ed.), The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States, pp. 245–63 (Hamden, CT, 1981); Warntz, ‘Newton, the Newtonians, and the Geographia Generalis Varenii’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxxix/2 (1989), pp. 165–91. Margarita Bowen, in addition to discussing

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6

7

8

9 10

Varenius, translates his introduction, which lays out the distinction between ‘general’ and ‘special’ geography. See Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt, pp. 77–90 and Appendix 1, pp. 276–83 (Cambridge, UK, 1981). But see the cautions in Mayhew, Robert J., ‘Printing posterity: editing Varenius and the constitution of geography’s history’, in M. Ogborn and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of the Book, pp. 157–87 (Farnham, UK, 2010). Warntz, Geography Now and Then, chs 2, 11; Hornberger, Scientific Thought, pp. 24, 28; Snow, College Curriculum, passim. For more details on British geography texts used in the United States in the colonial period, see East, W. Gordon, ‘An eighteenth-century geographer: William Guthrie of Brechin’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, lxxii/1 (1956), pp. 32–7; Wright, John K., ‘Some British “grandfathers” of American geography’, in R. Miller and J. W. Watson (eds), Geographical Essays in Memory of Alan G. Ogilvie, pp. 144–65 (London, 1959); Downes, Alan, ‘The bibliographic dinosaurs of Georgian geography (1714–1830)’, Geographical Journal, cxxxvii/3 (1971), pp. 379–87; Lester J. Cappon, ‘Geographers and map-makers, British and American, from about 1750 to 1789’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, cxxxi/2 (1971), pp. 243–71; Mayhew, ‘The character of English geography, c. 1660–1800: a textual approach’, Journal of Historical Geography, xxiv/4 (1998), pp. 385–412; Mayhew, ‘William Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar, the Scottish Enlightenment and the politics of British geography’, Scottish Geographical Journal, cxv/1 (1999), pp. 19–34; Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, c.1650–1850, ch. 9 (Basingstoke, UK and New York, 2000); Mayhew, ‘Geography books and the character of Georgian politics’, in M. Ogbrn and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 192–211 (Manchester, UK, 2004); Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason, ch. 8 (Chicago, IL, 2007). Two studies of the early nineteenth-century geographer John Pinkerton, also read in the United States, are Wilcock, A. A., ‘The “English Strabo”: the geographical publications of John Pinkerton’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, lxi/2 (1974), pp. 35–45 and Sitwell, O. F. G., ‘John Pinkerton: an armchair geographer of the early nineteenth century’, Geographical Journal, cxxxviii/4 (1972), pp. 470–9. Publishing data for early geographies may be found in Sitwell, Four Centuries of Special Geography (Vancouver, BC, 1993). For Yale, see Warntz, Geography Now and Then, ch. 3 and Hornberger, Scientific Thought, p. 27; Stiles, Ezra, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, Franklin B. Dexter (ed.), vol. 1, p. 85, entry for 21 January 1771 (New York, 1901); Stiles to John Lewis, 15 February 1775, quoted in Morgan, Edmund S., The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1722–1795, p. 393 (New Haven, CT, 1962); also Snow, College Curriculum, pp. 46–7 note 1. Warntz, Geography Now and Then, chs 5, 9–10; Snow, College Curriculum, pp. 39 note 1, and pp. 118–19 note 1; [Witherspoon, John], ‘John Witherspoon’s Account of the College of New Jersey, 1772’, in R. Hofstadter and W. Smith (eds), American Higher Education: A Documentary History, vol. I, pp. 137–46, 2 vols (Chicago, IL, 1961). See also Broderick, Francis L., ‘Pulpit, physics, and politics: the curriculum of the College of New Jersey, 1746–1794’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vi/1 (1949), pp. 42–68; Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the College of New Jersey for the Academical Year 1854–5, pp. 4, 18, 19, 22 (Princeton, NJ, 1855). Warntz, Geography Now and Then, ch. 6; Hornberger, Scientific Thought, pp. 9, 30. Smith, Ben A. and James W. Vining (comps), American Geographers, 1784–1812: A Biobibliographical Guide, pp. 80–1, 112–14 (Westport, CT, 2003). [Franklin], The Ingenious Dr. Franklin: Selected Scientific Letters of Benjamin Franklin, Nathan G.

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13

14

15

Goodman (ed.) (Philadelphia, PA, [1931] 2000), includes several letters on geographical topics. See also Aldridge, Alfred Owen, ‘Franklin as demographer’, Journal of Economic History, ix/1 (1949), pp. 25–44. [Rush, Benjamin], ‘Extracts from the Papers of Dr. Benjamin Rush’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography xxix/1 (1905), p. 27, dated 12 June 1789; Franklin, ‘A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge’, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Labaree, L. et al. (eds), vol. 2, January 1, 1735–December 1, 1744), pp. 378–83 (New Haven, CT, 1960); Franklin to Cadwallader Colden, 5 April 1744, ibid., pp. 405–7; Lemay, J. A. Leo, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1: Journalist, 1706–1730, pp. 37, 162–3, 417, 491–9 (Philadelphia, PA, 2006); Franklin, ‘A Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books, Consisting of More than 600 Volumes in Most Faculties and Sciences,… To be Sold by Benjamin Franklin for Ready Money Only on Wednesday, the 11th of April 1744….’ [Advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 29 March 1744], in Franklin, Papers, vol. 2, January 1, 1735 – December 31, 1744, p. 450 (New Haven, CT, 1960). Catalogue published (Philadelphia, PA, 1744; facsimile reprint, Philadelphia, PA, 1948). Also Early American Imprints, First Series, #5396. Franklin to Jared Eliot, 16 July 1747 and 13 February 1749/50, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, January 1745–June 1750, pp. 149, 463–5 (New Haven, CT, 1961); Lemay, Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2: Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747, pp. 481– 5 (Philadelphia, PA, 2006); Lingelbach, William E., ‘Franklin and the Lewis Evans map of 1742’, Year Book of the American Philosophical Society, 1945, pp. 63–73 (Philadelphia, PA, 1946); Abbe, Cleveland, ‘Benjamin Franklin as meteorologist’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, xlv/183 (1906), pp. 117–28; Davis, William Morris, ‘Was Lewis Evans or Benjamin Franklin the first to recognize that our Northeast storms come from the Southwest?’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, xlv/183 (1906), pp. 129–30. Franklin, ‘A Letter from Dr. Benjamin Franklin to Mr. Alphonsus le Roy, Member of Several Academies, at Paris. Containing Sundry Maritime Observations’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, ii/2 (1786), pp. 294–324; Marmer, H. A., ‘The Gulf Stream and its problems’, Geographical Review, xix/3 (1929), pp. 457–78 (Franklin map on p. 459); Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, pp. 59–61; Withers, ‘Where was the Atlantic Enlightenment?: questions of geography’, in S. Manning and F. D. Cogliano (eds), The Atlantic Enlightenment, pp. 37–60 (Aldershot, UK, 2008). Chaplin, Joyce E., The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), traces the stages of Franklin’s attempts to understand the Gulf Stream and includes the three maps of it he published over the years. For the Library Company of Philadelphia, see Korty, Margaret Barton, ‘Benjamin Franklin and eighteenth-century American libraries’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N. S. lv/5, Part 9 (1965), pp. 5–21; Gray, Austin K., Benjamin Franklin’s Library (New York, 1937); Wolf, Edwin, 2nd, ‘The first books and printed catalogues of the Library Company of Philadelphia’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, lxxviii/1 (1954), pp. 45–70; Wolf, ‘Franklin and his friends choose their books’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, lxxx/1 (1956), pp. 11–36. Reprint: An American Library History Reader, pp. 17–44, J. D. Marshall (ed.) (Hamden, CT, 1961); Wolf and Kevin J. Hayes, The Library of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, PA, 2006). Stuart, James and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens, vol. 1, ‘The Subscribers to the Antiquities of Athens’, s.v. ‘Colleges and Libraries’ (unpaginated); Kemp, Betty, Sir Francis Dashwood: An Eighteenth-Century Independent (London and New York, 1967), ch. 5 and Appendix III; Van Doren, Carl, Benjamin Franklin, p. 438 (New York, 1938. Reprint: Westport, CT, 1973).

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16

17

18

19 20

21

22

23

Silence Dogood letter #4, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1, January 6, 1706 – December 31, 1734, pp. 14–18 (New Haven, CT, 1959); Rush, ‘Extracts’, p. 27. For Franklin’s ideas on education, see the brief account in Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, pp. 371–8 (New York, 1970). Also see Messerli, Jonathan, ‘Benjamin Franklin: colonial and cosmopolitan educator’, British Journal of Educational Studies, xvi/1 (1968), pp. 43–59; Wechsler, Louis K., Benjamin Franklin: American and World Educator (Boston, MA, 1976) and Pangle, Lorraine Smith and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders, ch. 4, pp. 75–90 (Lawrence, KS, 1993). Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings, p. 573, J. A. L. Lemay (ed.) (New York, 1997). Franklin’s interest in the classics is discussed in Gummere, Richard M., ‘Socrates at the printing press: Benjamin Franklin and the classics’, Classical Weekly, xxvi/8 (1932), pp. 57–9; Gummere, The American Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture, pp. 125–31 (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Conner, Paul W., Poor Richard’s Politics: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order, pp. 179ff. (New York, 1965); and Richard, The Founders and the Classics, pp. 196 ff., as well as the standard biographies. For the emergence of ancient history in this period and the views of Franklin and others on it, see Wiesen, ‘Ancient history and early American education’, pp. 53–69. Korty, ‘Franklin and libraries’, p. 31; Franklin, ‘Proposals relating to the education of youth in Pennsylvania’, in Franklin, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, January 1, 1745–June 30, 1750, pp. 392–421 (Locke p. 405, geography pp. 410–11) and ‘Constitutions of the Academy of Philadelphia’, pp. 421–9 (New Haven, CT, 1961); Franklin, ‘Idea of the English School’, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, July 1, 1750–June 30, 1753, pp. 101–8 (New Haven, CT, 1961). The best recent discussion of the founding and early years is LeMay, Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3: Soldier, Scientist, and Politician, 1748–1757, ch. 5, pp. 176–216 and notes (Philadelphia, PA, 2008). Korty, ‘Franklin and libraries’, pp. 33, 35. For Franklin’s relations with Smith, see Ketcham, Ralph L., ‘Benjamin Franklin and William Smith: new light on an old Philadelphia quarrel’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, lxxxviii/2 (1964), pp. 142–63. For Franklin’s discontent with developments in the Academy, see his ‘Observations relative to the intentions of the original founders of the Academy in Philadelphia, June 1789’, in F. N. Thorpe (ed.), Benjamin Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania, pp. 39–51, US Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, no. 2, 1892 (Washington, DC, 1893). For basic biographical material on Smith and Alison, see DAB, ANB, and ODNB and references, as well as Sprague, W. B., Annals of the American Pulpit, 9 vols (New York, 1857–77). Smith is found in vol. 5 (1869), pp. 158–63 and Alison in vol. 3 (1868), pp. 73–6. See also Lawson-Peebles, Robert, ‘The problem of William Smith: an Aberdonian in revolutionary America’, in J. J. Carter and J. H. Pitock (eds), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment, pp. 52–60 and refs (Aberdeen, UK, 1987). Smith, A General Idea of the College of Mirania (1753) (facsimile edn, New York, 1969), pp. 18, 30. See also Hornberger, ‘A note on the probable source of Provost Smith’s famous curriculum for the College of Philadelphia’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, lviii/4 (1934), pp. 370–7; Sack, Saul, History of Higher Education In Pennsylvania, vol. 1, pp. 271–4 (Harrisburg, PA, 1963); Warntz, Geography Now and Then, p. 67. Dryer, Charles Redway, ‘A century of geographic education in the United States’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xiv/ 3 (1924), pp. 117–49, ref. on p. 143. For Gros and Kemp, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Humphrey, David,

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25

26

27

28

29

30

From King’s College to Columbia, 1746–1800, pp. 298–301 (New York, 1976) and McCaughey, Elizabeth P., From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson, pp. 246–51 (New York, 1980). Carrell, William D., ‘Biographical list of American college professors to 1800’, History of Education Quarterly, viii/3 (1968), p. 359. Alison’s biographical sketches in Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. 3, p. 74 and in NCAB, vol. 1, p. 346, list him as Vice-Provost and Professor of Moral Philosophy only. Lawrence Cremin, however, quoting from the Trustees’ minutes, identifies Alison as ‘professor of the higher classics, logic, metaphysics, and geography’ as well as ‘any other of the arts and sciences… as the philosophy schools may require’, a comprehensive mandate indeed. See Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, p. 515 and note. Sloan, Douglas, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal, ch. 3, pp. 73–102 (New York, 1971). Franklin described him in 1755 as ‘a Person of great Ingenuity and Learning, a catholic Divine, and what is more, an Honest Man’, Franklin to Joshua Babcock, 1 September 1755, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, April 1, 1755 – September 30, 1756 (New Haven, CT, 1963), p. 124. Ezra Stiles of Yale called Alison ‘a great Literary Character’ in ethics, history, and literature, and ‘the greatest Classical Scholar in America, especially in Greek’, Stiles, Literary Diary, vol. 2, p. 338, quoted in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 4, 1 July 1750–30 June 1753, p. 470, note 1. Goffart, Walter, Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, p. 13 (Chicago, IL, 2003); Baker, J. N. L.,‘The history of geography at Oxford’, in Baker, The History of Geography, p. 120; Priestley, Joseph, Lectures on History and General Policy (rev. edn, London, 1826), p. 130 (originally delivered c. 1788). See Cheyney, Edward Potts, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740–1940 (Philadelphia, PA, 1940) and Thorpe, Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania. Cremin quotes a 1756 curriculum from the Pennsylvania Gazette of 12 April 1756 in American Education: The Colonial Experience, pp. 382–3, referred to also in Wiesen, ‘Ancient history and American education’, p. 58. Temple Franklin’s letter quoted in Warntz, Geography Now and Then, p. 68, citing Nolan, J. Bennett, ‘The only Franklin in Franklin’s college’, General Magazine and Historical Chronicle (October 1939), pp. 3–17. Sarah (Franklin) Bache reported to her father in 1778 that her husband would not permit their son William to attend the Academy, since ‘the Trustees are almost all Tories’, Bache to Franklin, 22 October 1778, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 27, July 1 to October 31, 1778, pp. 602–5 (New Haven, CT, 1988). Sack, History of Higher Education in Pennsylvania, pp. 281–8; Hindle, Brooke, David Rittenhouse, pp. 221–2 (Princeton, NJ, 1964). The legal history is traced in Pennypacker, Samuel W., ‘The University of Pennsylvania in its relation to the state of Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, xv/1 (1891), pp. 88–100. George B. Wood, Early History of the University of Pennsylvania, passim (3rd edn, Philadelphia, PA, 1896); Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, pp. 133– 4, 161; Ewing, John, James Davidson, John Conner, and Robert Davidson, ‘Memorandum to the Trustees’, dated 8 September 1780, University of Pennsylvania Archives, #443a. Meyerson, Martin and Pegler Winegrad, Dylis, Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach: Franklin and his Heirs at the University of Pennsylvania, 1740–1976, pp. 31–3 (Philadelphia, PA, 1978); Sack, History of Higher Education in Pennsylvania, p. 289; ‘Draft By-Laws for the Latin and Greek School, 13 December 1792’, University of Pennsylvania Archives, #1211; Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, pp. 161, 168–9.

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31

32 33

34

35

36

37

38

39

See Warntz, Geography Now and Then, pp. 68–73; Snow, College Curriculum, pp. 136 note 1, pp. 139–41; also Catalogues of the Trustees, Officers, and Students of the University of Pennsylvania for the period, University of Pennsylvania Archives. Warntz, Geography Now and Then, pp. 91–4; Snow, College Curriculum, p. 136, note 1. Snow, College Curriculum, pp. 92 note 2, 93, and 94 note 1; Seligman, E. R. A., ‘The early teaching of economics in the United States’, in J. H. Hollander (ed.), Essays in Honor of John Bates Clark, p. 290 (New York, 1927); Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, pp. 158, 166–8. Humphrey also discusses Gros’ moral philosophy, pp. 299–301. See DNB, ANB, Herbert Baxter Adams, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, p. 60, US Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, no. 2, 1887 (Washington, DC, 1887); Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, p. 298; Warntz, Geography Now and Then, p. 91; Hornberger, Scientific Thought, p. 31; Carrell, ‘Biographical List’ (Gros is on p. 363; Kemp on pp. 364–5). The NCAB (vol. 6, p. 28) says that Kemp was ‘transferred to the professorship of geography, history, and chronology’. Other sources suggest that the obligation to teach what Gros had taught was simply added to Kemp’s existing responsibilities. See Miller, Brief Retrospect, vol. 2, pp. 498–9. Warntz, Geography Now and Then, pp. 91–3; Miller, Brief Retrospect, vol. 2, p. 499; Siljestrom, P. A., The Educational Institutions of the United States, p. 330 (London, 1853. Reprint: New York, 1969); George P. Schmidt, ‘Intellectual cross-currents in American colleges, 1825–1855’, American Historical Review, xlii/1 (1936), p. 66. For historical geography at Columbia during the 1880s, see John W. Burgess, ‘The methods of historical study and research at Columbia College’, p. 216, in G. S. Hall (ed.), Methods of Teaching History, pp. 215–21 (2nd edn, Boston, MA, 1884). Rush quotes from Donald J. D’Elia, ‘Benjamin Rush: philosopher of the American revolution’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. lxiv/5 (1974), p. 80. In addition to DAB and ANB, there are several book-length biographies of Rush. For his ideas on education and the classics, see also Rush, ‘The Bible as a school book’, in Rush, Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, pp. 117–30 (quote p. 119), D. D. Runes (ed.) (New York, 1947); Butterfield, ‘Benjamin Rush as a promoter of useful knowledge’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society xcii/1 (1948), pp. 26– 5; Gummere, ‘Benjamin Rush: a classical doctor’s dilemma’, in Gummere, Seven Wise Men of Colonial America, pp. 64–80 (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Kuritz, Hyman, ‘Benjamin Rush: his theory of republican education’, History of Education Quarterly, vii/4 (1967), pp. 432–51; D’Elia, ‘Jefferson, Rush, and the limits of philosophical friendship’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxv/5 (1973), pp. 333– 43; and Reinhold, ‘Opponents of classical learning during the revolutionary period’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxii/4 (1968), pp. 221–34. Reprint: Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States, pp. 116–41 (Detroit, MI, 1984). Kuritz, ‘Benjamin Rush’, p. 441; Rush, ‘Observations upon the study of the Latin and Greek languages [etc.]’ (1791), in Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral & Philosophical, pp. 21–50 (quotes on pp. 47–8) (Philadelphia, PA, 1798); Rush to John Adams, 24 February 1790, in Rush, Letters of Benjamin Rush, vol. 1, 1776–1792, p. 535, L. H. Butterfield (ed.), 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1951). Rush, ‘Thoughts upon female education [etc.]’, in F. Rudolph (ed.), Essays on Education in the Early Republic, p. 29 (Cambridge, MA, 1965); Gordon, Ann D., ‘The Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia’, in C. R. Berkin and M. B. Norton (eds), Women of America: A History, pp. 68–91 (Boston, MA, 1979); Eschbach, Elizabeth Seymour, The Higher Education of Women in England and America, 1865–1920, pp.

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42

43

44

12–14 (New York, 1983); Nash, Margaret A., ‘Rethinking republican motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia’, Journal of the Early Republic, xvii/2 (1997), pp.171–91. Miller, Brief Retrospect, vol. 2, pp. 278 ff., asserts that one of the remarkable advances in education during the eighteenth century was ‘the change of opinion… respecting the importance, capacity, and dignity of the Female Sex, and the consequent changes in the objects, mode and extent of their instruction’. Adams [somewhat ruefully?] reported to Rush in 1810 that Abigail Adams agreed with Rush’s opposition to classical language teaching, since ‘it will destroy the foundation of all the pretensions of the gentlemen to superiority over the ladies and restore liberty, equality and fraternity between the sexes’, Adams to Rush, 13 October 1810, in The Spur of Fame, p. 170. Rush to James Muir, 24 August 1791, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, vol. 1, p. 605. Rush, ‘Plan for the establishment of public schools and education in Pennsylvania [etc.]’ (1786), in C. S. Hyneman and D. S. Lutz (eds), American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1760–1805, vol. I, pp. 675–92, 2 vols (Indianapolis, IN, 1983); Rush, ‘To friends of the federal government: A plan for a federal university’ [29 October 1788], in Rush, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 491–5. See also Madsen, David, The National University: Enduring Dream of the U.S.A. (Detroit, MI, 1966). For Rush as educator and early Dickinson College, see Sloan, The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College, ch. 6; Smylie, James H., ‘Charles Nisbet: some thoughts on a revolutionary generation’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, xcviii/2 (1974), pp. 189–205; Morgan, James H., Dickinson College: The History of One Hundred and Fifty Years, 1783–1933 (Carlisle, PA 1933); Sellers, Charles Coleman, Dickinson College: A History (Middletown, CT, 1973); Sack, History of Education in Pennsylvania, vol. 1, pp. 44–67; Robson, Daniel W., Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1775–1800, ch. 6 (Westport, CT, 1985); Hawke, David Freeman, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly, pp. 285, 316 (Indianapolis, IN, 1971); and Brodsky, Alyn, Benjamin Rush: Patriot and Physician, pp. 280–9 (New York, 2004). For early Franklin College, see Dubbs, Joseph H., History of Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA, 1903); Sack, History of Education in Pennsylvania, vol. 1, pp. 112–20; and Hawke, Benjamin Rush, pp. 316–19. For Davidson, see DAB and Davidson, Reverend Robert, ‘Robert Davidson, D.D.’, in Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. 3 (1868), pp. 322–6, as well as Carrell, ‘Biographical List’, p. 361 and various letters in Rush, Letters, vol. 1, especially Rush to William Linn, 4 May 1784. Publishing history for Geography Epitomized is taken from Sitwell, Four Centuries of Special Geography, pp. 180–1; ‘Davidson, Robert (1750–1812)’, in Smith and Vining (comps), American Geographers, 1784–1812, pp. 49–50; and Clifford K. Shipton and James E. Mooney (comps), National Index of American Imprints Through 1800: The Short-Title Evans, vol. 1: A-M, p. 205, 2 vols (Worcester, MA, 1969). For ‘rhyming geographies’, an offshoot of the familiar catechism form, see Bruckner, Martin, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, pp. 149–51 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). Contemporary comment on Davidson and his book in Reverend R. Davidson, ‘Robert Davidson’, p. 323; Taney, Roger B., ms. autobiography, in Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, Ll.D., pp. 41–3 (Baltimore, MD, 1872. Reprint: New York, 1970); Buchanan, James, ‘Autobiographical Sketch, 1791–1828’, in Works of James Buchanan, John Bassett Moore (ed.), vol. 12: Biographical, pp. 291–3, 12 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1908–11. Reprint, New York, 1960). See also Klein, Philip Shriver, President James Buchanan: A Biography, pp. 8–12 (University Park, PA, 1962) and Sellers, Dickinson College, p. 133. The 1892 biographical sketch of Davidson in NCAB (vol. 6, p. 462) also records that students ‘committed to memory and recited’ Davidson’s geographical

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45 46

47

48

pamphlet. Carl Brent Swisher, Roger B. Taney, p. 19, wrote diplomatically that Taney ‘liked most of his teachers, though in common with many of his fellows he was disgusted with the obvious narrowness and egotism of one’ – a clear reference to Davidson (New York, 1935). Harry G. Good, Benjamin Rush and His Services to American Education, p. 44 (Berne, IN, 1918); Taney, ms. autobiography, in Tyler, Memoir, p. 42. Taney, in Tyler, Memoir, p. 42; Sellers, Dickinson College, pp. 94–5; Eisner, Robert, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece, pp. 73–4 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1991). Sections from Davidson’s work, in order, from Walters, William D. Jr, ‘Voices for reform in early American geographical education’, Journal of Geography, lxxxvi/4 (1987), p. 157; Antonelli, Michael F., ‘Nationalism in early American geographies: 1784–1845’, Journal of Geography, lxix/5 (1970), p. 303. Bruckner, Geographic Revolution, p. 150, also quotes from Davidson’s work. Greek portion of Davidson’s poem is quoted from an original copy in the US Library of Congress. The work is also available on micro-card in the ‘Early American Imprints’ series. The 1786 London printing is available on the Internet through Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

CHAPTER 3 1

2

3

For a discussion of Jefferson’s broader geographical interests, see Koelsch, William A., ‘Thomas Jefferson, American geographers, and the uses of geography’, Geographical Review, xcviii/2 (2008), pp. 260–79, and references cited therein. Smith, Ben and James Vining (comps), American Geographers, 1784–1812: A Bibliographical Guide, pp. 112–14, list the various editions of Notes on the State of Virginia, but little else of what may be considered Jefferson’s geographical work (Westport, CT, 2003). Koelsch, ‘Thomas Jefferson’, pp. 273–4. The standard history of the university of Virginia is Bruce, Philip Alexander, History of the University of Virginia, 1819–1919: The Lengthened Shadow of One Man, 5 vols (New York, 1920–2). The older Herbert Baxter Adams et al., Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, US Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, no. 1 (1888), pp. 1–225 is still useful (Washington, DC, 1888). See also books dealing with Jefferson and education generally, principally the pioneering work of Honeywell, Roy, The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, MA, 1931); Hellenbrand, Harold, The Unfinished Revolution: Education and Politics in the Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Newark, DE, 1990); and Adiss, Cameron, Jefferson’s Vision for Education, 1760–1845 (New York, 2003) and references. Kett, Joseph, ‘Education’, in M. D. Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, pp. 233–51 and notes (New York, 1986) is a fine general summary. Wagoner, Jennings L., Jr, Jefferson and Education ([Charlottesville, VA], 2004) is an accessible book written for a general readership. Jefferson’s draft bill of 1817 is enclosed with a letter to Joseph Cabell dated 9 September 1817. See Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 13, pp. 430–1 and 436, Lipscomb, A. A. and A. E. Bergh (eds), 20 vols (Washington, DC, 1905). The political maneuverings over education in 1816–17 in the Virginia legislature are nicely clarified in Egerton, Douglas R., ‘“To the tombs of the Capulets”: Charles Fenton Mercer and public education in Virginia, 1816–1817’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, xciii/2 (1985), pp. 155–74. Jefferson to John Adams, 10 June 1815, in Adams, John and Thomas Jefferson, The Adams-Jefferson Letters, vol. 2, p. 443, L. J. Cappon (ed.), 2 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, 1959). See also LaMontagne, Leo E., American Library Classification: With Special Reference to the Library of Congress, ch. 2 (Hamden, CT, 1961); Sanford,

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5

6

7

8

9

Charles B., Thomas Jefferson and his Library (Hamden, CT, 1977); Hayes, Kevin J., The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson, passim (Oxford, UK and New York, 2008). For Jefferson and the classics, see Reinhold, Meyer, ‘The classical world’, in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, pp. 135–56 and references. For Jefferson and geography, see Jackson, Donald, Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello, ch. 5 (Urbana, IL, 1981). Howard, Hugh, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson: Rediscovering the Founding Fathers of American Architecture, pp. 62–4 (New York, 2006); Jefferson to Madam de Tessé, 20 March 1787, in Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, J. P. Boyd et al. (eds), vol. 11, 1 January to 6 April 1787, p. 226 (Princeton, NJ, 1955); Jefferson to George Wythe, 16 September 1787, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 12, 7 August 1787–31 March 1788, p. 127 (Princeton, NJ, 1955); William Short to Jefferson, 23 December 1788, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 14, 8 October 1788–26 March 1789, pp. 377–83 (Princeton, NJ, 1958). See also Jefferson, Travels: Selected Writings, 1784–1789, A. Brandt (ed.) (Washington, DC, 2006). General surveys of Jefferson’s libraries: Peden, William, ‘Some notes concerning Thomas Jefferson’s libraries’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., i/3 (1944), pp. 265–72; Ladenson, Alex, ‘“I cannot live without books”’, Wilson Library Bulletin, lii/8 (1978), pp. 624–31; and Wilson, Douglas L., ‘Jefferson’s Library’, in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography, pp. 157–79. (Wilson omits the first University of Virginia Library.) Allen, John Logan, ‘Imagining the West: the view from Monticello’, in J. P. Ronda (ed.), Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West, pp. 3–23 (Albuquerque, NM, 1997) suggests the role of Jefferson’s father and his teacher Maury in forming Jefferson’s interest in the West. See also Malone, Dumas, Jefferson the Virginian, p. 401 (vol. 1 of Jefferson and His Time) (Boston, MA, 1948). For Peter Jefferson’s library, see ‘Books in colonial Virginia’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 1st Ser., x/4 (1903), p. 391. For Library of Congress collection, see Sowerby, E. Millicent, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols (Washington, DC, 1952–9. Reprint: Charlottesville, VA, 1983), esp. vol. 4, pp. 85–356 (Geography) and elsewhere. Hayes, Road to Monticello, ch. 37, discusses that transfer. Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809, p. 139, mentions Wythe’s bequest, but notes that Wythe’s nephew had sold some books as well as a terrestrial globe (Boston, MA, 1974). Jefferson’s reading of ancient historians and moralists is discussed by Colburn, H. Trevor, ‘Thomas Jefferson’s uses of the past’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., xv/1 (1958), pp. 56–70. Catalogue of President Jefferson’s Library, to be Sold at Auction Feb. 1829 (Washington, DC, 1829). See also Peden, ‘Notes’, pp. 267–8; Hayes, Road to Monticello, ch. 38 (ref. to Sloan’s volume, p. 574). Catalogue of the Library of the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA, 1828); 1828 Catalogue of the Library of the University of Virginia, W. Peden (ed.) (Charlottesville, VA, 1945); Cometti, Elizabeth (ed.), Jefferson’s Idea of a University Library (Charlottesville, VA, 1950); Clemons, Harry, The University of Virginia Library: The Story of a Jefferson Foundation, ch. 1 (Charlottesville, VA, 1954. Reprint: Boston, MA, 1972); Sanford, Thomas Jefferson and His Library; O’Neil, William Bainter, Jefferson’s Fine Arts Library: His Selection for the University of Virginia Together With His Own Architectural Books, passim (Charlottesville, VA, 1976); Jefferson to James Madison, 20 September 1785, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 8, 25 February–31 October 1785, p. 535 (Princeton, NJ, 1953). Also found in Jefferson, Thomas and James Madison, The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, vol. 1, 1776–1780, p. 385, J. M. Smith (ed.), 3 vols (New York, 1995). Jefferson to Lucy Ludwell Paradise, 6 April 1789, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 15, 27 March 1789–30 November 1789, p. 35 (Princeton, NJ, 1958). Hayes, Road to Monti-

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10

11

12

13

cello, pp. 373–5 discusses Jefferson’s interest in the Pinelli auction sale. The Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries Project is currently attempting an inventory of all of Jefferson’s books, 74 of which have been only recently discovered in the library of Washington University, St. Louis. American Heritage, lxi/1 (2011), pp. 11–12. Jefferson, ‘Hints on European Travel, 1788’, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 13, 13 March to 7 October 1788, p. 268 (Princeton, NJ, 1956) and Cometti, Elizabeth (ed.), ‘Mr. Jefferson prepares an itinerary’, Journal of Southern History, xii/1 (1946), pp. 89–106; Jefferson, ‘Course of reading for William C. Munford’ [5 December 1798], in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 30, 1 January 1798–31 July 1799, p. 594 (Princeton, NJ, 2004); ‘A Course of Reading for Joseph C. Cabell’ [Sept. 1800], in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 32, 1 June 1800–16 February 1801, p. 180 (Princeton, NJ, 2005). Jefferson to John Wyche, 19 May 1809 and 4 October 1809, in Jefferson, Papers: Retirement Series, Looney, J. J. et al. (eds), vol. 1, 4 March 1809–15 November 1809, pp. 206, 581 (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 17 August 1811 and Jefferson to Caspar Wister, 11 October 1811, in Jefferson, Papers: Retirement Series, vol. 4, 18 June 1811 to 30 April 1812, pp. 83, 191 (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Jefferson to Martha Jefferson, 5 May 1787, Thomas Jefferson Randolph to Jefferson, 24 February 1803, Jefferson to Anne Carey Randolph, 26 February 1803, and Ellen Wayles Randolph to Jefferson, 29 January 1809, in Betts, E. M. and J. A. Bear, Jr (eds), The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 35, 243, and 324 (Columbia, MO, 1966) and Boykin, Edwin (ed.), To the Girls and Boys: Being the Delightful, Little-Known Letters to and from Thomas Jefferson’s Children and Grandchildren, pp. 35, 130, 171 (New York, 1964). Jefferson to Martha Jefferson, 3 May 1787, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 11, 1 January to 6 August 1787, pp. 348–9 (Princeton, NJ, 1955) and Jefferson to Mary Jefferson, 8 May and 26 June 1791, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 20, 1 April to 4 August 1791, pp. 380, 383 (Princeton, NJ, 1982). Jefferson, ‘Autobiography’, in Jefferson, Writings, pp. 42–5, M. Peterson (ed.), vol. 1 (New York, 1984); Ganter, Herbert L., ‘William Small, Jefferson’s beloved teacher’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., iv/4 (1947), pp. 505–11; Jefferson to Louis Girardin, 15 January 1815, in Jefferson, Writings, vol. 14, p. 231; Jefferson, ‘A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge’ and ‘A Bill for Amending the Constitution of the College of William and Mary [etc.]’, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 2, 1777–18 June 1779, pp. 526–43 (Princeton, NJ, 1950); Warntz, William, Geography Now and Then: Some Notes on the History of Academic Geography in the United States, p. 100 (New York, 1964); Thomson, Robert Polk, ‘The reform of the College of William and Mary, 1763–1780’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxv/3 (1971), pp. 187–213 (note on globes, p. 202). Warntz, Geography Now and Then, p. 101; Thomson, ‘Reform’, pp. 204–6. For geography at the College of New Jersey, see previous chapter. For Girardin, see ‘Louis H. Girardin’, Richmond Enquirer, 2 April 1805. Reprint: Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, ii (1920–1), pp. 280–1; ‘L. H. Girardin’, William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd Ser., iii/1 (1923), pp. 50–1; ‘Teaching of natural history in William and Mary College’, William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd Ser., iii/4 (1923), pp. 239–40; Davis, Richard Beale, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, 1790–1830, pp. 188, 263 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964); Malone, The Sage of Monticello, pp. 10–11, 218–23 (Boston, MA, 1981); Jefferson to Louis H. Girardin, 31 October 1809, in Jefferson, Papers: Retirement Series, vol. 1, 4 March–15 November 1809, pp. 633–4 (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Godson, Susan H. et al., The College of William and Mary: A History, vol. 1: 1693–1888, p. 175 and notes, 2 vols (Williamsburg, VA, 1993); Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ‘Early courses and professors at William and Mary College’, William and Mary Quarterly, 1st Ser., xiv/2 (1905), p. 81. Apparently no description of Girardin’s geography lectures survives.

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16

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18

For Quesnay’s project, see Alexandre-Marie Quesnay de Beaurepaire, ‘Memoir Concerning the Academy of Arts and Sciences of the United States of America at Richmond, Virginia’, Rosewell Page (trans.) (Richmond, VA, 1922). (Originally from Report of the Virginia State Library for 1920–1.) Also Gaines, Richard Heyward, ‘Richmond’s first academy, projected by M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire’, Collections of the Virginia Historical Society, N.S., xi (1892), pp. 167–75; Herbert Baxter Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia, pp. 21–30; Thwing, Charles F., A History of Higher Education in America, pp. 197–9 (New York, 1906); Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 1, pp. 55–60; Honeywell, Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 56–8; ‘Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire’s Academy of Arts and Sciences in Richmond, Virginia’, in E. W. Knight and C. L. Hull (eds), Readings in American Educational History, pp. 127–32 (New York, 1951); Shawen, Neil McDowell, ‘Thomas Jefferson and a “national university”: the hidden agenda for Virginia’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, xcii/3 (1984), pp. 313–15. On the Geneva project, see Adams, Herbert Baxter, The College of William and Mary, pp. 40–7, US Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, no. 1 (1887) (Washington, DC, 1887); Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 1, pp. 60–3; and Hans, Nicholas, ‘The project of transferring the University of Geneva to America’, History of Education Quarterly, viii/2 (1968), pp. 246–51. On Jefferson’s involvement with the national university project, see Shawen, ‘Thomas Jefferson and a “national university”’, pp. 309–35, passim. Correspondence relating to this project is found in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 28, 1 January 1794–29 February 1796, especially Jefferson’s letter to Washington, 23 February 1795 and Washington’s reply, 15 March 1795. (D’Ivernois had laid out his academic plan in a letter to Jefferson dated 23 September 1794.) For the Swiss context, see Taylor, Samuel S. B., ‘The Enlightenment in Switzerland’, in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context, pp. 72–89 and notes (Cambridge, UK, 1981). Jefferson to Priestley, 18 January 1800, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 31, 1 February 1799–31 May 1800, p. 320 (Princeton, NJ, 2004). See also Honeywell, Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson, p. 172 and Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy, new edn, pp. 130, 542–3 (London, 1826). As President, Jefferson also corresponded with Georges Pictet of the University of Geneva faculty on ‘how many professors there are, and what branches of science are attached to each professor….’ Jefferson to M. Pictet, 5 February 1803, in Jefferson, Writings, vol. 10, p. 355. Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, 12 April 1800, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 31, 1 February 1799–31 May 1800, pp. 495–6 (Princeton, NJ, 2004); Du Pont to Jefferson, 15 June and 24 August 1800, in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 32, 1 June 1800–16 February 1801, pp. 19–20 and 113–14 (Princeton, NJ, 2005); Du Pont, Sur l’Éducation Nationale dans l’États-Unis d’Amérique, 2nd edn (Paris, 1812); Du Pont, National Education in the United States of America, p. 78, Bessie G. Du Pont (trans.) (Newark, DE, 1923); Priestley, ‘Thoughts on education’ [8 May 1800], in Jefferson, Papers, vol. 31, 1 February 1799–30 May 1800, pp. 568–70 (Princeton, NJ, 2004). Extracts from Du Pont’s correspondence with Jefferson and from his treatise can be found in Knight, E. W. (ed.), Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860, vol. 2, pp. 260–96, 5 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, 1949–53). See also Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, pp. 447–51 (Boston, MA, 1962) and Hansen, Allen Oscar, Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century, ch. 6 (New York, 1926. Reprint: New York, 1965, 1977). Adams to Jefferson, 16 July 1814, Adams-Jefferson Letters, vol. 2, p. 439; Jefferson, ‘Report of the Committee for the University of Virginia, August 4, 1818’ (‘Rockfish Gap Report’), in Jefferson, Writings, Peterson (ed.), pp. 457–73 (Geography placement, p. 463). The final volume of Dumas Malone’s great biography, The Sage of

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19 20

21

22

23

24

Monticello, remains useful. The retirement series of Jefferson’s papers is now approaching the period of planning for the University of Virginia. See Jefferson, Papers: Retirement Series, vol. 7, 28 November 1813 to September 1814 (Princeton, NJ, 2011). Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 1, pp. 218–21; Malone, The Sage of Monticello, pp. 286–7; Koelsch, ‘Thomas Jefferson’, pp. 264–5. On this point, see ‘Minutes of the Visitors’, in Jefferson, Writings, vol. 19, pp. 365–7. Extracts are also accessible in Knight (ed.), Documentary History, vol. 3, The Rise of the State University (Chapel Hill, NC, 1952), pp. 139–40. For Knox, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Steiner, Bernard C., ‘Rev. Samuel Knox’, in Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1898–99, vol. 1, pp. 576–604 (Washington, DC, 1900); Steiner, ‘Early classical scholars in Maryland’, Classical Weekly, xiv/4 (1921), pp. 185–90; Foster, Ashley, ‘Samuel Knox, Maryland educator’, Maryland Historical Magazine, l/3 (1955), pp. 173–94; Knox, ‘An essay on the best system of liberal education [etc.]’ (Philadelphia, 1799), reprinted in F. Rudolph (ed.), Essays on Education in the Early Republic, pp. 271–372 (Cambridge, MA, 1965). See also Johanningmeier, Erwin V., ‘The use of Antiquity in the works of two theorists of the early American republic: Samuel Knox and Samuel Harrison Smith’, in F.-P. Hager et al. (eds), Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education, pp. 101–7 (Hildesheim, DE, 1992). Gilbert, Felix, ‘European and American History’, p. 324, in J. Higham et al., History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965); Rollin, Charles, The Method of Teaching the Belles-Lettres, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London, 1737), vol. 3, p. 186 and vol. 4, p. 437; Le Rond d’Alembert, Jean, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, p. 35, R. N. Schwab (trans.) (Indianapolis, IN, 1963). For Rollin’s influence in the United States, see Gribbin, William, ‘Rollin’s histories and American republicanism’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., xxix/4 (1972), pp. 611–22 and Pangle, Lorraine Smith and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders, pp. 51–3 (Lawrence, KS, 1993). Charles F. Thwing has termed the time leading to the University of Virginia as ‘The French Period’ of American higher education and learning. For this context, see Thwing, History of Higher Education in America, ch. 8; Lavelle, Cecil F. and Paul Monroe, ‘French influences on American education’, in P. Monroe (ed.), Cyclopedia of Education, vol. 2, pp. 708–10, 5 vols (New York, 1911); and Paulston, Roland G., ‘French influence in American institutions of higher learning, 1784– 1825’, History of Education Quarterly, viii/2 (1968), pp. 229–45. De Lafitte du Corteil, Amable-Louis-Rose, ‘Proposal to demonstrate the necessity of a National Institution in the United States of America’ (Philadelphia, 1797), in Rudolph (ed.), Essays on Education, pp. 225–70; Malone, The Sage of Monticello, pp. 9–11, 218–24. During the same period, Jefferson was corresponding with the Portuguese botanist, the Abbe Joseph Correa de Serra, often his guest at Monticello. See Davis, R. B. (ed.), ‘The Abbe Correa in America, 1812–1820’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. xlv/2 (1955), pp. 87–197 and Malone, The Sage of Monticello, pp. 163–4, 292. For Girardin’s new Albemarle academy, see Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 18 April 1813, in Jefferson, Papers: Retirement Series, vol. 6, 11 March to 27 November 1813, p. 73 (Princeton, NJ, 2009). For Everett, in addition to DAB and ANB entries, see Reinhold, Meyer, ‘A “New Morning”: Edward Everett’s contribution to classical learning’, Classical Quarterly, lix/2 (1981–2), pp. 37–41. His study abroad is detailed in Long, Orie William, Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture, ch. 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1935. Reprint: New York, 1963); also Larrabee, Stephen A., Hellas Observed: The American Experience of Greece, 1775–1865, ch. 2 (New York, 1957). For the

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‘Panorama of Athens’, see McNeal, R. A., ‘Athens and nineteenth-century panoramic art’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, i/3 (1995), pp. 80–97 and Winterer, Caroline, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910, pp. 66–8 (Baltimore, MD, 2002). For Everett’s review of the Rockfish Gap report, see ‘University of Virginia’, North American Review, x/1 (issue #26) (1820), pp. 115–37. The quote, on p. 124 of the original, is not included in the excerpts in R. Hofstadter and W. Smith (eds), American Higher Education: A Documentary History, vol. 1, pp. 199–202, 2 vols (Chicago, IL, 1961). For Jefferson’s connection with West Point and early geography there, see Wagoner, Jennings L., Jr and Christine Coalwell McDonald, ‘Mr. Jefferson’s academy: an educational interpretation’, in R. M. S. McDonald (ed.), Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point, pp. 118–53 (Charlottesville, VA, 2004) and Crackel, Theodore J., West Point: A Bicentennial History, pp. 163, 285–6 (Lawrence, KS, 2002). Minutes taken from Jefferson, Writings, vol. 19, p. 434; also Knight (ed.), Documentary History, vol. 3, p. 149. On Jefferson and Anglo-Saxon, see his own ‘An essay toward facilitating instruction in Anglo-Saxon [etc.]’, in Jefferson, Writings, vol. 18, pp. 359–411; also Thompson, C. R., ‘The study of Anglo-Saxon in America’, English Studies, xviii/6 (1936), pp. 241–53; Baugh, Albert C., ‘Thomas Jefferson, linguistic liberal’, pp. 88–108, in Caffee, N. M. and T. A. Kirby (eds), Studies for William A. Read: A Miscellany by Some of His Colleagues and Friends (Baton Rouge, LA, 1940. Reprint: Freeport, NY, 1968); and Hauer, Stanley R., ‘Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon language’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xcvii/5 (1983), pp. 879–98. See also Jefferson to Hon. J. Evelyn Denison, MP, 9 November 1825, in Jefferson, Writings, vol. 16, pp. 129–35. For the faculty recruitment process, in addition to sources such as Honeywell and Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 1, pp. 344–76, see Trent, William Peterfield, English Culture in Virginia, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 7th Ser., nos 5–6 (Baltimore, MD, 1889); Davis, Francis Walker Gilmer: Life and Learning in Jefferson’s Virginia (Richmond, VA, 1949); Davis, ‘A postscript on Thomas Jefferson and his university professors’, Journal of Southern History, xii/3 (1946), pp. 422–32; Jefferson, Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and Francis Walker Gilmer, Davis (ed.) (Columbia, SC, 1946), and Malone’s sketch of Gilmer in DAB. Jefferson’s correspondence with Madison respecting plans for the university is conveniently found in The Republic of Letters, vol. 3, 1804–1826. A major primary source is Early History of the University of Virginia as Contained in the Letters of Thomas Jefferson and Joseph C. Cabell. [N. F. Cabell (ed.)] (Richmond, VA, 1856). For Blaettermann, see Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 2, pp. 89–95 and elsewhere; Head, Ronald B., ‘The declension of George W. Blaettermann: first Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Virginia’, Virginia Cavalcade, xxxi/4 (1982), pp. 182–91 and Tarter, Brent, ‘Blaettermann, George Wilhelm, 4 April 1782–1 January 1850’, Dictionary of Virginia Biography, vol. 1 (1998), pp. 533–4. See also comments in [Minor, Benjamin Blake], ‘University of Virginia’, Southern Literary Messenger, viii/1 (1842), pp. 50–4. Ticknor’s recommendation of Blaettermann: O. W. Long, Literary Pioneers, p. 38. For Long in Virginia, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 2, pp. 81–9; Trent, English Culture in Virginia, pp. 94–100, 103–5; and Matthews, H. J., ‘Long, George’, EB, 9th edn, vol. 14, pp. 856–7. Gilmer to Long, 21 August 1824 is in T. Fitzhugh (ed.), Letters of George Long, p. 12 (Charlottesville, VA, 1917) and, slightly misquoted (‘literature’ is written as ‘liberties’), in Herbert Baxter Adams, Jefferson and the University of Virginia, p. 115. Board of Visitors’ censure of Blaettermann is recorded in their Minutes, vol. 2, p. 236 (typescript, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University

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31

32

33

34

35

of Virginia); also in Head, ‘Declension’, p. 190. For later developments, see Bruce, University of Virginia, vols 2 and 3, passim; University of Virginia, Catalogues of Officers and Students (not individually referenced). See Davis, Gilmer, p. 219, annual reports of the Rector, September 1826 (Jefferson) and 1826 (Madison), and Stark, Burwell, ‘Reminiscences’, Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia, i/1 (1894), p. 1. Long’s comment on the value of ancient geography is from Lecture 1 (marked 1826) of his original manuscript lectures in the Library of Brighton College, UK; microfilm copy in the Small Special Collections Library. See also Long and Robley Dunglison, An Introduction to the Study of Grecian and Roman Geography (Charlottesville, VA, 1829). The Butler book to which Long refers is Samuel Butler, Sketch of Modern and Ancient Geography (London, 1812; 7th edn, 1825); see also Chapter 9 in this volume. Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s work and influence is discussed in Godlewska, Anne, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago, IL, 1999). Characterization of Long’s teaching at Virginia from Quinn, Arthur Hobson, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, p. 99 (New York, 1941). Among the Poe scholars who have commented on Long and his influence on Poe’s later writing are Allen, Hervey, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 143 (New York, 1934); Harrison, James A., Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1, pp. 38, 54–5, 2 vols (New York, 1902–3); and Phillips, Mary E., Edgar Allan Poe: The Man, vol. 1, pp. 238, 244, 2 vols (Chicago, IL, 1926). For Poe at Virginia, see Thomas, D. and D. K. Jackson (comps), The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (Boston, MA, 1987); Kent, Charles W., ‘Poe’s student days at the University of Virginia’, The Bookman (New York), xliv/1 (1917), pp. 517–25; Stovall, Floyd, ‘Edgar Poe and the University of Virginia’, Virginia Quarterly Review, xliii/ 2 (1967), pp. 297–317; and Norman, Emma Katherine, ‘Poe’s knowledge of Latin’, American Literature, vi/1 (1934), pp. 72–7. Poe’s reading while at Virginia is analyzed in Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word, pp. 8–16 (Cambridge, UK, 2000). Humboldt reference is in Pope-Hennessey, Una, Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849: A Critical Biography, p. 47 (London, 1934. Reprint: New York, 1971). Meyers, Jeffrey, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, ch. 3, pp. 21–31 is an excellent account of Poe’s experience and achievements as a student, as well as containing a brief summary of Long’s scholarship (New York, 1992). Poe’s presence at Jefferson’s interment: Crawford, Allen Pell, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, p. 245 (New York, 2008). Poe’s comments on Jefferson may be conveniently found in Poe, Essays and Reviews, pp. 505, 1,134, and 1,246, G. T. Thompson (ed.) (New York, 1984). On the ‘academical village’, see Jefferson’s own appraisal in Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 30 January 1820, in ‘Some family letters of Thomas Jefferson’, Scribner’s Magazine, xxxvi/5 (1904), p. 582. Hellenbrand, Unfinished Revolution, pp. 143–6, briefly discusses its origins. Howard, Hugh and Roger Strauss III, Thomas Jefferson, Architect: The Built Legacy of Our Third President (New York, 2003) has excellent color photographs. See also Wills, Garry, Mr. Jefferson’s University (Washington, DC, 2002), Wilson, Richard Guy (ed.), Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), Whiffen, Marcus, and Frederick Koeper, American Architecture, 1603–1976, pp. 102–9 (Cambridge, MA, 1981), and Turner, Paul Venable, Campus: An American Planning Tradition, pp. 76–87 (Cambridge, MA, 1984). On the campus atmosphere: Meyers, Edgar Allen Poe, p. 21. Gessner Harrison, who with other students was then having tea with Professor Long, describes the invasion of the urine bottle in a letter to his father, Gessner Harrison to Peachy Harrison, 25 October 1825, Harrison-Smith-Tucker Papers, Small Special Collections Library. (Harrison’s student letters shed much light on

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38

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both Long’s and Blaettermann’s teaching of geography.) Student reaction to the foreign professors and the early disciplinary situation at the university is discussed in all the Jefferson biographies and in Bruce (see esp. Malone, The Sage of Monticello, pp. 461–9). See also Novak, Steven J., The Rights of Youth: American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1778–1815, pp. 123–8 (Cambridge, MA, 1977); Wagoner, ‘Honor and dishonor at Mr. Jefferson’s university: the antebellum years’, History of Education Quarterly, xxvi/2 (1986), pp. 155–79, and Adiss, Jefferson’s Vision for Education, pp. 122–4. More recently, Hayes’ excellent Road to Monticello and Crawford, Twilight at Monticello have added a sharper perspective on student behavior in 1825–6 through examining the correspondence among female members of Jefferson’s family. For Jefferson’s own account, see Jefferson to Joseph Coolidge, Jr, 13 October 1825 and Jefferson to Ellen W. Coolidge, 14 November 1825, in The Jefferson Papers, pp. 356–63, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th Ser., vol. 1 (Boston, MA, 1900). The murder of Professor John Davis by a University of Virginia student is noted in Crane, Theodore Richard (ed.), The Colleges and the Public, 1787–1862, p. 50 and note (New York, 1963), and Wagoner, ‘Honor and dishonor’, p. 177. For Brougham’s educational activities, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Stewart, Robert, Henry Brougham, 1778–1868: His Public Career, esp. pp. 184–99 (London, 1985) and Crowther, J. C., ‘Henry Brougham, 1778–1868’, in Crowther, Statesmen of Science, esp. pp. 42–56 (London, 1965). For the early University of London, see Bellot, H. Hale, University College London, 1826–1926, esp. ch. 2 (London, 1929); Maynard, John, Browning’s Youth, ch. 11 (Cambridge, MA, 1977); and Rothblatt, Sheldon, ‘London: A Metropolitan University?’, in T. Bender (ed.), The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, pp. 119–49 (New York, 1988). Brougham’s papers are at the University of London; typescript copies of his correspondence with Long are in the Small Special Collections Library. The influence of Jefferson and the University of Virginia on the founders of the University of London is argued in Simon, Brian, Studies in the History of Education, 1780–1870, pp. 118–25 (London, 1960). Rothblatt, ‘London’, p. 26 is more skeptical. Jefferson on Long: Jefferson to Cabell, 22 December 1824, in Early History of the University of Virginia, p. 23. Reprint (recipient unidentified): Jefferson, Writings, vol. 16, pp. 84–9. Madison’s evaluations: Madison to Marquis de Lafayette, 20 February 1828, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 3, 1816–1828, p. 621; Madison to Cabell, 18 March 1827, vol. 3, pp. 570–1 and vol. 4, 1829–1836, p. 35, 4 vols (Philadelphia, 1867). Long and Dunglison, Grecian and Roman Geography, passim (Charlottesville, VA, 1829); Dunglison, ‘The autobiographical ana of Robley Dunglison, M.D.’, S. X. Radbill (ed.), Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. liv/8 (1963), pp. 30–1. Long, An Introductory Lecture Delivered at the University of London on Tuesday, November 4, 1828, pp. 9, 20, 26–7 (London, 1828). In it Long praised the work of James Rennell (see Chapter 5 of this volume); Long, A Summary of Herodotus (London, 1829). References to Long in Bellot, University College, pp. 16, 39, 87–92, 118, 209–11 and Maynard, Browning’s Youth, pp. 271–4; Cambridge History of English Literature, A. W. Ward and A. R. Walker (eds), vol. 12, The Nineteenth Century, part 1, p. 335, 14 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1964); and Matthews, ‘Long, George’, p. 856. For the SDUK, see Crowther, Brougham, pp. 47–56 and Stewart, Brougham, pp. 188–95. The SDUK Papers are at the University of London. Knight’s Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, vol. 2, has numerous references to Long, especially pp. 126–7, 163–4, 206, 228–9, 232–7, 3 vols (London, 1864). See Long’s SDUK work, especially ‘On the study of geography’, Quarterly Journal of Education,

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42

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vii/1 (whole no. 13), (1834), pp. 81–97 (and, putatively, as the author of other SDUK articles and reviews on geography); [Long?], ‘Geography’, Penny Cyclopaedia, vol. 11, pp. 124–7 (and other entries on geography). For Tucker, see DAB, ANB, Halderman, Leonard C., ‘A social scientist of the old South’, Journal of Southern History, ii/2 (1936), pp. 148–74, and McLean, Robert Colin, George Tucker: Moral Philosopher and Man of Letters, esp. ch. 4 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1961). Tucker comments on his SDUK book in ‘Autobiography of George Tucker’, vol. 2 (1858), p. 6, ms. in Small Special Collections Library. [Tucker’s autobiography was subsequently published in Bermuda Historical Quarterly, xviii/3 and 4 (1961).] Tucker seems to have regarded geography in the traditionally restrictive way, as a subject that ‘trained’ the memory. See his A Citizen of Virginia [pseud.], Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy, p. 90–1 (Georgetown, DC, 1822). His contribution to Long’s series reflects this. For Key, see DNB, ODNB, and Long, ‘Thomas Hewitt Key’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, clxix (1876), pp. x–xvi; Bellot, University College, passim; Maynard, Browning’s Youth, p. 271; and Usher, H. J. K. et al., An Angel Without Wings: The History of University College School, 1830–1980, pp. 15–27 (London, 1981). For his work at Virginia, see Bruce, ‘Professor Key and Professor Long’, University of Virginia Alumni Bulletin, 3rd Ser., xvii/3 (1924), pp. 1–2. For Long’s promised absence and Key’s taking his classes, see Gilmer to Jefferson, 15 September and 30 November 1824, in Jefferson and Gilmer, Correspondence, pp. 101–2, 122 and Davis, Gilmer, p. 219, as well as Long’s obituary of Key. For the departures of Key and Long, see Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 2, pp. 144–51 and Trent, English Culture in Virginia, pp. 71–8. For Bonnycastle’s teaching of cartography, see [George Tucker], ‘Education in Virginia’, Quarterly Journal of Education, iv/1 (1832), p. 61. In addition to standard biographical references, see Mill, Hugh R., The Record of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830–1930, p. 58 (London, 1930); Stafford, Robert A., Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism, p. 24 (Cambridge, UK, 1989); Long, ‘On the site of Susa’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, iii (1833), pp. 257–67 and ‘Professor Long’s remarks on the ruins of Susiana, and the site of Susa’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xii (1842), pp. 104–9. See also ‘Obituary: Mr. George Long, M.A.’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, i/10 (1879), p. 674. For Mill’s disdain for the influence of classical scholars in the RGS (as well as geologists and historians), see Mill, An Autobiography, p. 100 (London, 1951). Hutton, Richard Holt, ‘Preliminary memoir’, in Bagehot, Walter, Literary Studies, vol. 1, p. 15, R. H. Hutton (ed.), 3 vols (London, 1895); Arnold, Matthew, ‘Marcus Aurelius’, in Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, pp. 136–40, 143, note p. 442, R. H. Super (ed.), Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 3, 11 vols (Ann Arbor, MI, 1962); Robert E. Lee to Thomas H. Key, 17 February 1870, Thomas Hewitt Key Papers, Small Special Collections Library. Harrison, DAB; Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 2, pp. 81–9; Madison to Cabell, 19 March 1829, in Madison, Letters and Other Writings, vol. 4, 1829–1836, p. 35; Broaddus, John Albert, ‘Memoir of Gessner Harrison’, in E. A. Alderman and J. C. Harris (eds), Library of Southern Literature, vol. 2, pp. 507–25, 10 vols (Atlanta, GA, 1909). For Tutwiler, see Letters of George Long. For Hunter and Long, see DAB and Hunter, Martha T., Memoir of Robert M.T. Hunter, pp. 34–5, 128–31 (Washington, DC, 1903). Harrison’s text was a consolidation of two parts subsequently joined: Lectures on the Geography of Ancient Greece (Charlottesville, VA, 1834), 65 pp., and Notes of Lectures on the Geography of Ancient Italy (Charlottesville, VA, 1835), 70 pp. See also [Tucker], ‘Education in Virginia’, pp. 59–60 and Broaddus, Memorial of Gessner Harrison, M.A., Professor of Ancient Languages in the University of Virginia (Char-

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lottesville, VA, 1874). (This address contains material on Harrison and ancient geography omitted from Broaddus’ memoir in the Library of Southern Literature.) Sources stressing Harrison’s influence, including the teaching of classical geography throughout the South, include Smith, Charles Foster, ‘Southern colleges and schools’, Atlantic Monthly, lvi/338 (1885), pp. 738–50; Smith, ‘The South’s contribution of classical studies’, in The South in the Building of the Nation, vol. 7, History of the Literary and Intellectual Life of the South, pp. 135–72 (Richmond, VA, 1909); Wood, William R., ‘Gessner Harrison: the early life and teaching of an Albemarle classicist’, Albemarle County History, xix (1960–1), pp. 19–39 (highlights the influence of Harrison’s geography text); and Benario, Herbert W., ‘The classics in Southern higher education’, pp. 15–20, in ‘The classical tradition in the South: a special issue’, separate paging in Southern Humanities Review, xi (1977). Bruce, University of Virginia, vol. 2, p. 294 and vol. 3, p. 49 (Table). For Gildersleeve, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Briggs, Ward W., Jr, ‘Basil Gildersleeve at the University of Virginia’, in Briggs and H. W. Benario (eds), Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve: An American Classicist, pp. 9–20 (Baltimore, MD, 1986) and Briggs, ‘Politics and scholarship: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and nineteenth-century British classics’, in Hallett, J. P. and C. Stray (eds), British Classics Outside England, pp. 97–110 (Waco, TX, 2009). See also Gildersleeve, Letters of Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, Briggs (ed.) (Baltimore, MD, 1987) (includes valuable notes). Quote from Gildersleeve, Essays and Studies: Educational and Literary, p. 74 (Baltimore, MD, 1890. Reprint: New York, 1968). Robert L. Pounder has pointed to Gildersleeve’s ‘windbag pomposity and frequent disdain for anyone with different views of how the classics should be taught’, Pounder, ‘Archaeology vs. philology: together in the trenches?’ p. 221, in Culham, P. and L. Edmunds (eds), Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis?, pp. 221–4 (Lanham, MD, 1989). Pounder refers to Gildersleeve’s Essays and Studies, which collects Gildersleeve’s miscellaneous writings from both Virginia and Johns Hopkins years. Board of Visitors, Minutes, vol. 4, pp. 680, 771, 788, 795; Bruce, University of Virginia, passim. For Rogers, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Angulo, A. J., William Barton Rogers and the Idea of MIT, p. 73 (Baltimore, MD, 2009) and Ernst, William, ‘William Barton Rogers, ante bellum Virginia geologist’, Virginia Cavalcade, xxiv/1 (1974), pp. 13–21, as well as the university’s catalogue for 1849–50; Williams, Frances L., Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea, pp. 338, 590 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1963); Clemons, The University of Virginia Library, p. 170; Dunbar, Gary S., ‘Geography in the bellweather universities of the United States’, Area, xviii/1 (1986), pp. 5–33. Reprint (without notes): Dunbar, The History of Geography: Collected Essays. ([Cooperstown, NY], 1986), pp. 166–76. Kent, Charles W., ‘Jefferson’s quest of [sic] knowledge’, in Jefferson, Writings, vol. 20, pp. iii–xiv. See also comments on Jefferson’s integration of geography and languages in Lehmann, Karl, Thomas Jefferson: American Humanist, pp. 199–200, 204, 208 (New York, 1947. Reprint: Charlottesville, VA, 1985).

CHAPTER 4 1

2

Withers, Charles W. J., Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason, p. 197 (Chicago, IL, 2007); Mayhew, Robert J., Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850, pp. 202–3 (Basingstoke, UK, 2000). Biographical material from DNB, ODNB, as well as Rodd, Rennell, ‘Major James Rennell’, Geographical Journal, lxxv/4 (1930), pp. 289–99 and Downes, Alan. ‘James Rennell, 1742–1830’, in T. W. Freeman, M. Oughton, and P. Pinchemel (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 1, pp. 83–8 and references (London,

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3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10

1977). The only full biography in English, Markham, Clements R., Major James Rennell and the Rise of Modern English Geography (London and New York, 1895), should be read with caution. A modern biography is much needed. Most recent writing on Rennell has been devoted to his survey work in India, his pioneering cartographic work, and his equally important studies of ocean currents. Matthew Edney’s important book, Mapping an Empire, places Rennell’s mapping of India in a chapter entitled ‘Mapping and Imperialism’, Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Constitution of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, IL, 1997). Zaheer Baber had provided a more nuanced analysis of Rennell’s work in his brief discussion in The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany, NY, 1996). Michael T. Bravo’s excellent essay on the rise of precision in late eighteenth-century scientific travel and exploration (a subject, as we have seen, equally important in humanistically based travel), ‘Precision and curiosity in scientific travel: James Rennell and the Orientalist geography of the new Imperial Age (1760–1830)’, in J. Elsner and J.-P. Rubliés (eds), Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, pp. 162–83 is marred only by its subtitle (London, 1999). See also such works as Livingstone, David N., The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, UK, 1992), p. 130 (Rennell’s imperialism) and Livingstone, ‘British Geography, 1500–1900’ (Rennell’s Orientalism), in R. Johnston and M. Williams (eds), A Century of British Geography, p. 35 (Oxford, UK, 2003). More general works riddled with the imperialist trope include the essays in A. Godlewska and N. Smith (eds), Geography and Empire (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, 1994); M. R. Bell, R. A. Butlin and M. Heffernan (eds), Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940 (Manchester, UK, 1995); and Driver, Felix, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, UK, 2001). The list is far from exhaustive. Heaney, G. F., ‘Rennell and the surveyors of India’, Geographical Journal, cxxiv/3 (1968), pp. 318–27 (see the important criticism by Judge Waris Ameer Ali, p. 327); Baker, J. N. L., ‘Major James Rennell, 1742–1830, and his place in the history of geography’, in Baker, The History of Geography: Papers by J. N. L. Baker, pp. 130–57 (Oxford, UK, 1963). Edney, Mapping an Empire, pp. 16, 99–104; Baker, ‘Major James Rennell’, p. 143; Baber, Science of Empire, pp. 140–6; Berthon, Simon, and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World: The Mapping and Discovery of the Earth, pp. 134–5 (Chicago, IL, 1991). Edney, Mapping an Empire, p. 11, citing Rennell’s Hindoostan Memoir. See also Hagerman, Christopher A., ‘In the footsteps of the “Macedonian conqueror”: Alexander the Great and British India’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, xvi/3–4 (2009), pp. 349–92 (and refs on p. 356 and in note 36). Bravo, ‘Precision and curiosity’, pp. 166, 174, 177, 179–80. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, pp. 96–7, discusses the scientific meaning of Rennell’s camel study. For Miller’s approval, see Miller, Samuel, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), vol. 1, ch. 5, ‘Geography’, pp. 339 and 347 (Reprint: New York, 1970). Bravo, ‘Precision and curiosity’, p. 183; Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, pp. 59–60, 130–1 and references. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, p. 194. Here Mayhew cites the ur-text of the ‘imperialist’ theme in recent histories of geography, Brian Hudson’s ‘The new geography and the new imperialism’, Antipode, ix/2 (1977), pp. 12–19. A more nuanced view of late Victorian imperialism (or lack thereof), discussing Oxford scholars and including geographers, is Symonds, Richard, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (London, 1986. Reprint: Oxford, UK and New York, 1991). Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, pp. 194–6.

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13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

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Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, pp. 194–6, 199–204. See also Guido Abbattista’s superb essay, ‘Establishing the “order of time and place”: “rational geography”, French erudition and the emplacement of history of Gibbon’s mind’, in D. Womersley (ed.), Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, pp. 45–72 (Oxford, UK, 1997). Both Gibbon and D’Anville praised Rennell’s work on Hindoostan (Allibone, vol. 2, p. 1,771). Partial bibliography in Downes, ‘James Rennell’, p. 86. Rennell Rodd, a descendant, summarizes Rennell’s publications in classical geography in Rodd, ‘Major James Rennell’. See also Miller, Brief Retrospect, vol. 1, p. 352. In addition to Downes, see Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, ch. 9 notes. Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus, Preface, pp. xi, xiv–xv (London, 1800. 2nd edn, London, 1830); ‘The Second Book of the Maccabees’, in The New English Bible: The Apocrypha, p. 362 (Oxford and Cambridge, UK, 1970). Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus, vol. 1, title page. Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus, Preface (refs to D’Anville, pp. xvii–xviii, and to his own maps, p. xix). Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus, chs 1 and 26; Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, p. 195. Rennell, Geographical System of Herodotus, vol. 2, ch. 16, pp. 444–5. Rennell, Observations on the Topography of the Plain of Troy, Preface (London, 1814); Cook, J. M., The Troad: An Archaeological and Topographical Study, pp. 27–30 (Oxford, UK, 1973); Luce, J. V., Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited, chs 2–5 (New Haven, CT, 1998); Haubold, Johannes, ‘Wars of Wissenschaft: the new quest for Troy’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, viii/4 (2002), pp. 554–79. Markham, Major James Rennell, ch. 6, puts his major works into Rennell’s larger project, but discusses the minor works in ch. 9, under the somewhat dismissive title ‘Antiquarian Research’. Rennell, Illustrations (Chiefly Geographical) of the History of the Expedition of Cyrus… and of the Return of the Ten Thousand Greeks (London, 1811); Rood, Tim, The Sea! The Sea!: The Shout of the Ten Thousand and the Modern Imagination, pp. 135–6 (London and New York, 2005); Waterfield, Robin, Xenophon’s Retreat: Greece, Persia, and the End of the Golden Age, p. 236 (London, 2006). Markham, Major James Rennell, pp. 119–21. Bunbury, Edward H., A History of Ancient Geography (1883 edn), vol. 1, p. 156 and passim, 2 vols (New York, 1959); Baker, ‘Major James Rennell, 1742–1830’, p. 156. For biographical material, see Boase, Charles William, Registrum Collegii Exoniensis, pp. clxxi, 188–9, 198 (Oxford, UK, 1894); Jackson, William W., ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer, 1829–1916’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 7 (1915–16), pp. 566–74; Fraser, Peter M., ‘Tozer, Henry Fanshawe (1829–1916)’, in C. S. Nicholls (ed.), The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons, pp. 678–9 (Oxford, UK, 1993); Fraser and Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Tozer, Henry Fanshawe, (1829–1916)’, ODNB, vol. 55 (2004), pp. 192–3; Butlin, Robin A., Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time, pp. 7–12 (London, 1993); Koelsch, William A., ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer: a “missing person” in historical geography?’, Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, lxxii (2010), pp. 118–27. Jackson, ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, p. 569; Stocking, George W., Jr, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951, pp. 88, 170 (Madison, WI, 1995). See also references to Tozer in Stride, William Keitley, Exeter College, pp. 199, 212–13, 254 (London, 1900). For Carpenter and his Exeter contemporaries, see Boase, Registrum Collegii Exoniensis, pp. 92–3; Baker, ‘Nathaniel Carpenter and English geography in the eighteenth century’, Geographical Journal, lxxi/3 (1928), pp. 261–71. Reprint: Baker, The History of Geography, pp. 1–13; Scargill, D. I., ‘The RGS and the founda-

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27 28 29

30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

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tions of geography at Oxford’, Geographical Journal, cxlii/3 (1976), p. 439; Bowen, Margarita, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt, pp. 72–5 (Cambridge, UK, 1981); Withers and Mayhew, ‘Rethinking “disciplinary history”: geography in British universities, c. 1580–1887’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N.S. xxvi/1 (2002), pp. 11–29; Mayhew, ‘Geography’s English revolutions: Oxford geography and the war of ideas, 1600–1660’, in Livingstone and Withers (eds), Geography and Revolution, pp. 243–72 (Chicago, IL, 2005). Exeter in Carpenter’s time is briefly mentioned for geography and cosmography in McConica, James, ‘Elizabethan Oxford: the collegiate society’, p. 717, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3: The Collegiate University, James McConica (ed.) (Oxford, UK, 1996). For Butler, Pelham and Ramsay, see DNB, ODNB and Chapter 6 of this volume. Butler is also treated in Baker, History of Geography, principally on pp. 37–8, 43, 56, and 124; Ramsay is mentioned on pp. 76–7. See also Boase, Registrum Collegii Exoniensis, p. clxxii, pp. 183–4 (Butler), p. 195 (Pelham) and p. 197 (Ramsay). Jackson, ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, pp. 571–2. Farnell, Lewis R., An Oxonian Looks Back, pp. 38–9 (London, 1934). Marett, R. R., A Jerseyman at Oxford, pp. 112, 128 (New York, 1941); James Bryce, ‘Annual Presidential Address’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 7 (1915–16), p. vii; Jackson,’Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, pp. 571–2. Jackson, ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, p. 571; Tozer, Lectures on the Geography of Greece, 1883 edn (Reprint: Chicago, IL, 1974), Preface, p. v.; Engel, Arthur J., From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford, pp. 81–93 (Oxford, UK, 1983). George Brodrick, Warden of Merton College and a member of the RGS Council, believed the intercollegiate lecture system had ‘greatly raised the standard of tutorial instruction’ and obviated the need for ‘coaches’ at Oxford. See Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 1831–1900, p. 80 (London, 1900). Tozer, Lectures, Preface, p. vii. Tozer, Lectures, Preface, pp. vii, viii. The phrase about the ‘minds’ sight’ is directly quoted from Ruskin. For Ruskin and geography, see Cosgrove, Denis E., ‘John Ruskin and the geographical imagination’, Geographical Review, lxix/1 (1979), pp. 43–62. Tozer, Lectures, Preface, pp. vii, ix. Tozer, Lectures, Preface, pp. vii, ix. Tozer, Lectures, pp. 1–3; Saturday Review, xxxvii, p. 563. Quoted in Allibone, Supplement, vol. 2, p. 1,444. Tozer, Lectures, pp. 122, 140, 154. Tozer, Lectures, p. 175. Tozer, Lectures, p. 282. Stedman, Algernon M. M., Oxford: Its Social and Intellectual Life, pp. 226, 241, 249– 50, 280 (London, 1878). Tozer, Classical Geography (New York, 1877); Koelsch, ‘Ancient landscapes revisited: classical geography in the American university, 1870–1930’, in F.-P. Hager et al. (eds), Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education, p. 179 (Hildesheim, DE, 1992). Tozer, Selections from Strabo: With an Introduction on Strabo’s Life and Works, Preface, pp. v–vi (Oxford, UK, 1893). Tozer, Selections from Strabo, ‘Introduction’, pp. 20–1, 30–1. My interpretation of Strabo’s intent is further developed in Koelsch, ‘Squinting back at Strabo’, Geographical Review, xciv/4 (2004), pp. 502–18. Mill, H. R., ‘Geographical literature of the month’, Geographical Journal, iii/3 (1894), p. 257; Strabo, Geography, Horace L. Jones (trans.), 8 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1917–32); Frazer, in DAB: Missing Persons; Fraser and Baigent, in ODNB.

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53

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Fraser and Baigent, ‘Tozer’, p. 193; Scargill, ‘Foundations of geography at Oxford’, 442–4; Tozer to J. Scott Keltie, printed in Keltie, ‘Report to the Council’, in Royal Geographical Society, Report of the Proceedings of the Society in Reference to the Improvement of Geographical Education, pp. 44, 104, 542 (London, 1886); RGS to H. F. Tozer, 28 February 1895, Royal Geographical Society Archives. Tozer, Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, vol. 1, Preface and pp. 5, 22, 41; vol. 2, Appendix A, 2 vols (London, 1869); Cook, The Troad, p. 38. Jackson, ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, pp. 566–7; Levi, Peter, Edward Lear: A Life, p. 256 (New York, 1995); Lear, Edward, Edward Lear: Selected Letters, pp. 234, 310, V. Noakes (ed.) (Oxford, UK, 1988); Hofer, Philip, Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman, pp. 52, 54, 68 (Cambridge, MA, 1967). Tozer, ‘Norway’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1860, pp. 362–421 (Cambridge, UK, 1861); Freeman, T. W., The Geographer’s Craft, ch. 2 (Manchester, UK and New York, 1967). Tozer, ‘The monks of Mt. Athos’, in Galton (ed.), Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1861, pp. 87–120 (Cambridge, UK, 1862). Tozer, Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor, Preface (unpaginated) (London, 1881). Crowder’s journals of this and earlier expeditions are in the Corpus Christi College Library, Oxford University. Tozer, Turkish Armenia, pp. 38, 194–5, 292 ff., 406–7, 432–3, 446 ff. See also Hugh Lindsay’s description of Strabo’s birthplace: Lindsay, ‘Amasya [sic] and Strabo’s patria in Pontus’, in D. Dueck, H. Lindsay, and S. Pothecary (eds), Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia, pp. 180–99 (Cambridge, UK, 2005). (Though Lindsay cites several later travelers who have visited Strabo’s native city, he does not mention Tozer.) See also Tim Rood’s brief but insightful comments on Tozer in The Sea! The Sea!, pp. 134–5 and 154–6. Robin Waterfield’s description of his own expedition in Xenophon’s Route, esp. pp. 151–6, includes a photo of Waterfield standing on the remains of the cairn erected by the Ten Thousand at the site where they first saw the sea. See also Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond, p. 128 (New York, 1956. Reprint: New York, 1995). Tozer, The Islands of the Aegean, Preface and pp. 1–2, 119, 231 (Oxford, UK, 1890. Reprint: Chicago, IL, 1976); Keltie, John Scott, Review of ‘The Islands of the Aegean’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, iii/4 (1890), p. 244. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography; Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, Preface (Cambridge, UK, 1897, 2nd edn, with notes by Max Cary. Cambridge, UK, 1935. Reprint: New York, 1971). Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, passim; Anonymous, Review of ‘Tozer’s History of Ancient Geography’, Geographical Journal, x/3 (1897), pp. 331–2; C[rone], G. R., Review of ‘A History of Ancient Geography’, 2nd edn, Geographical Journal, lxxxvi/5 (1935), p. 478; Fraser, ‘Tozer’, in Nicholls (ed.), DAB: Missing Persons, p. 678; Haggett, Peter, The Geographer’s Art, p. 198, note 3 (Oxford, UK, 1990). In addition to previously cited work, see relevant volumes of Poole’s Index to Periodicals, the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols (Toronto and London, 1966–89), and Farnell, Bibliography of the Fellows and Tutors of Exeter College, Oxford, in Recent Times (Oxford, 1914). For Tozer’s (and Wilde’s) tie with the Hellenic Society, see Journal of Hellenic Studies, i (1880), pp. xv, xxv. For Wordsworth as a Greek traveler, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Stoneman, Richard, Land of Lost Gods: The Search for Classical Greece, pp. 163–4 (Norman, OK, 1987). Wilde’s 1877 trip to Greece is reconstructed in Ross, Iain, ‘Oscar Wilde in Greece: topography and the Hellenist imagination’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, xvi/2 (2001), pp. 176–96. Wilde later joked that he was sent down ‘for being the first undergraduate to visit Olympia’, Knox, Bernard, The Oldest Dead White Males and Other Reflections on the Classics, p. 11 (New York, 1993).

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DAB: Missing Persons, p. v; Fraser, ‘Tozer’, in DAB: Missing Persons, pp. 678–9; Fraser, revised by Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Tozer’, ODNB, vol. 55, pp. 192–3; Butlin, Historical Geography, pp. 8–12. Baker, J. N. L., The History of Geography, pp. 33–50, 74, 124–5; Clark, Andrew H., ‘Historical Geography’, in P. E. James and C. F. Jones (eds), American Geography: Inventory and Prospect, pp. 74 note C, and 79 note K (Syracuse, NY, 1954). Darby, H. C., ‘On the writing of historical geography, 1918–1945’, in R.W. Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918–1945, p. 117 (Cambridge, UK, 1987); [Coppock, Terry], ‘Prologue: The Origin of the Manuscript’, in H. C. Darby, The Relations of History and Geography: Studies in England, France, and the United States, pp. xiii–xiv (Exeter, UK, 2002). Haggett, The Geographer’s Art, p. 198; Freeman, T. W., A Hundred Years of Geography (Chicago, IL, 1962); Gilbert, E. W., British Pioneers in Geography (New York, 1972); Freeman, History of Modern British Geography (London and New York, 1980); Stoddart, D. W., On Geography and its History (Oxford, UK, 1986); Baker, Alan R. H., Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, UK, 2003). For the historical contingencies of Darby’s early development, see Darby, ‘Historical geography in Britain, 1920–1980: continuity and change’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N. S. viii/4 (1983), pp. 421–8. Haggett, The Geographer’s Art, p. 198 note 3. Grundy, G. B., ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, Geographical Journal, xlviii/1 (1916), p. 177; Freshfield, Douglas W., ‘The summits of Olympus’, Geographical Journal, xlvii/4 (1916), pp. 293–7; Bryce, ‘Annual Presidential Address’, p. vii; Jackson, ‘Henry Fanshawe Tozer’, pp. 566, 570; Fraser and Baigent, ODNB, p. 192.

62

Capel, Horacio, The History of Science and the History of the Scientific Disciplines. GeoCritica, no. 84; English Parallel Series, no. 1, p. 12 (Barcelona, Spain, 1969); Bill, E. G. W. and J. F. A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform, 1850–1867, p. 2 (Oxford, UK, 1970); Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography, p. 257.

63

Mackinder, Halford J., ‘Modern geography, German and English’, Geographical Journal, vi/5 (1895), p. 370; also printed as ‘Address to the geography section of the British Association’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, xi/10 (1895), pp. 497–511. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, p. 60, accurately quotes the appropriate section of Franklin’s lengthier account. Saturday Review, li, p. 464. Quoted in Allibone Supp., vol. 2, p. 1,145. Germaine Greer, quoted in Koelsch, ‘Academic geography, American style: an institutional perspective’, in G. S. Dunbar (ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject Since 1870: An International Survey, p. 261 (Dordrecht, Neth, 2001).

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Shannon, Richard, Gladstone, vol. 1, 1809–1865 and Gladstone, vol. 2, 1865–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984, 1999); Gladstone, William E., The Gladstone Diaries, M. R. D. Foot and H. G. C. Matthew (eds), 14 vols (Oxford, UK, 1968–94); Myres, John L., ‘Gladstone’s View of Homer’, in Myres, Homer and His Critics, p. 96 (London, 1958). Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, ‘Gladstone on Homer’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 January 1975, pp. 15–17. Reprint: ‘Gladstone’, in Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, pp. 110–25 (Baltimore, MD, 1982); Bebbington, David W., William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain, p. 126 (Grand Rapids, MI, 1993). In a later work devoted to the influence of Gladstone’s Homeric and religious studies on his political theory, Bebbington points out ‘Gladstone’s Homeric studies have not fared well with

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commentators, either past or present’, Bebbington, The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and Politics, p. 142 (Oxford, UK and New York, 2004). Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, pp. 159–60 (New Haven, CT, 1981); Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 203 (Cambridge, MA, 1980). Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 2, p. 68; vol. 11, pp. 625–6; vol. 13, pp. 166–7. Bryce, James, William Ewart Gladstone: His Character as a Man and Statesman (New York, 1898), pp. 88–9; Gladstone, ‘On the place of Homer in classical education and historical enquiry’, p. 45, in Oxford Essays, 1857 (London, 1857); Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, vol. 2, p. 23, 3 vols (Oxford, UK, 1858). Ward, Mary Augusta Arnold (Mrs Humphrey Ward), A Writer’s Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 78, 2 vols (New York, 1918); Stoddart, David R., ‘”That Victorian science”’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, lxvi/1 (1975), pp. 17–40. Reprint: Stoddart, On Geography and Its History, pp. 180–218 (quote p. 181) (Oxford, UK, 1986). Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 1, pp. 96, 139, 242–3, 301, 309, 315–16, 341. Niebuhr’s essay was originally published as ‘Über die Geographie Herodots’, in KoniglichPruessische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philologisch-historische Klasse, Abhandlungen 1812/1813, pp. 209–24 (Berlin, 1816). English translation: Niebuhr, A Dissertation on the Geography of Herodotus, With a Map, together with Researches into the History of the Scythians, Getae, and Sarmatians (Oxford, UK, 1830). Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 1, p. 249; Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 3, pp. 586, 600. See, for example, Simpson, Richard Hope and J. F. Lazenby, The Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford, UK, 1970). Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 1, pp. 217–18, 221. The alternative position, that Homer wrote from familiarity with a real geography, tends to be maintained largely by lay persons with an interest and some background in classics rather than professional Homerists. Hölscher, Uwe, Die Odysee: Epos zwischen Marchen und Roman, ch. 11, ‘Der Mythologische Raum’ (Munchen, DE, 1989) is a useful scholarly analysis of Homeric geography, ‘real’ and ‘mythological’. Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 3, pp. 250–1, 254, 261; Wright, John K., The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades (New York, 1925. Reprint: New York, 1965); Wright, ‘Terrae Incognitae: the place of the imagination in geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xxxvii/1 (1947), pp. 1–15. Reprint: Wright, Human Nature in Geography: Fourteen Papers, 1925–1965, pp. 68–88 (Cambridge, MA, 1966); Wright, Geography in the Making: The American Geographical Society, 1851–1951, pp. 300–16 (New York, 1952); Allen, John Logan, ‘An analysis of the exploratory process’, Geographical Review, lxii/1 (1972), pp. 13–39. Gladstone, Studies on Homer, vol. 1, p. 228, vol. 3, pp. 249–50, 254, 331; Gladstone, Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age, p. 475 (London, 1869; 2nd edn, 1870); Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 5, pp. 273–4. Smith, W. H., ‘Gladstone’s Homer’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, lxxxiv/2 (1858), p. 128; Pattison, Mark, ‘History and biography’, Westminster Review, lxx/ N.S. 14 (1858), p. 267; Stebbing, W., ‘Gladstone’s Homer’, North British Review, xxix/1 (1858), pp. 40–2; Jones, W. B., ‘Studies on Homer and the Homeric age’, Bentley’s Quarterly Review, i/1 (1859), pp. 48, 69, 71; The Times (London), 13 August 1858; Merivale, H., ‘Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric studies’, Edinburgh Review, cviii/2 (1858), p. 514. Pattison made similar strictures concerning Gladstone’s methods in an 1863 article on Bishop Warburton in the National Review. See Pattison, Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, vol. 2, p. 166, H. Nettleship (ed.), 2 vols (Oxford, UK, 1889. Reprint: New York, c. 1967). Gladstone to Alexander Keith Johnston, 19 August and 6 September 1865, Gladstone Papers, British Library; Johnston, Atlas of Classical Geography, new edn

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16

17

18

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20 21

(Edinburgh, 1866), pp. 1–2; Freeman, Edward A., ‘Mr. Gladstone’s Homer and the Homeric Age’, National Review, vii/113 (7 July 1858), pp. 48, 50. Reprint: Freeman, Historical Essays, 2nd Ser., 3rd edn, pp. 60, 63 (London, 1889). A paper by Armin Wolf discusses some 30 attempts between 1597 and 1997 to map the geography of the Odyssey. Gladstone appears to be the first in the English-speaking world to have done so, however. See Wolf, ‘Mapping Homer’s Odyssey’, in G. Tollias and D. Loupis (eds), Eastern Mediterranean Cartographies, pp. 309–34 (Athens, 2004). Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 5, pp. 334, 341, 368; Gladstone, ‘The Dominions of Odysseus, and the island group of the Odyssey’, Macmillan’s Magazine, xxxvi/10 (1877), pp. 417–28; Bunbury, Edward H., A History of Ancient Geography, vol. 1, p. 84, 2 vols (London, 1879); Gladstone, ‘Phoenician affinities of Ithaca’, Nineteenth Century, xxvi/2 (1889), pp. 280–93. Gladstone’s ‘Dominions’ essay was also published as a separate 12 page pamphlet, which is undated in the US Library of Congress catalogue. Bittlestone, Robert, Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca (Cambridge, UK, 2005), following C. H. Goekoop, dates it as 1863. This seems unlikely, since the references include such publications as the first volume of Eduard Buchholz’s Die Homerischen Realien (Leipzig, DE, 1871), which Gladstone had read only in 1876. Gladstone, ‘Dominions’, pp. 419–20, 428; Palmer, Mr [Arthur], ‘Honour Examination in Classics: Homer’, Michaelmas Term, 1877, Glynne-Gladstone Papers, #1634, St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, Wales. Schliemann had sent Gladstone a copy of his Ithaka, der Peloponnes und Troja (1869) in December 1873 and Gladstone had begun reading it the following month, but does not cite it in his Ithaca essay. See Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 8, pp. 437–8, which prints Gladstone’s reply to Schliemann’s letter. Luce, J. V., Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven, CT, 1998) has more recently attempted the close comparison of site and text on modern Ithaca Gladstone had recommended. Bittlestone, Odysseus Unbound, also believes, like Gladstone, that Homer considered Cephalonia to be two islands. He differs from Gladstone, however, in believing, on the basis of his preliminary topographic, stratigraphic and other geophysical surveys, that the present western segment, when it was a separate island, was Homer’s Ithaca. Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 5, p. 320, vol. 6, p. 647, and vol. 8, p. 846; Gladstone to Mr. [James] Knowles, undated [c. 1870], ms., The Boston Athenaeum; Gladstone, Juventis Mundi, pp. vi–ix; Hall, W. P., Mr. Gladstone, p. 165 (New York, 1931). Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, pp. 129, 472, 474; Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, pp. 350–2, 380–1 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987); Gladstone, ‘Phoenicia and Greece’, Quarterly Review, cxxiv/1 (1868), pp. 199–225. The line of British Homerists attempting to read the Iliad with the aid of the landscape of Troy runs from Robert Wood in 1787 to Luce, Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes (1998). For a report on recent excavations there, see Haubold, Johannes, ‘Wars of Wissenschaft: the new quest for Troy’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, viii/4 (2002), pp. 564–79. Illustrated London News, 17 July 1869; Daily Telegraph (London), 8 July 1869; Eden, R., ‘Review: Juventus Mundi’, pp. 14–15 (London, 1869), 16 pp. Reprinted from The Record, 3 September 1869; Bryce, ‘Mr. Gladstone on Homer’, Macmillan’s Magazine, xxi/1 (1869), p. 36. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, vol. 1, pp. xxix, 50, 50 note 5, 59 note 2, and map following p. 84. Wolf, Armin and Hans-Helmut, Die Wirkliche Reise des Odysseus: Zur Reconstruktion des Homerischen Weltbildes, p. 159 (München und Wien, 1983); Brundage, Anthony, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian

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England, p. 130 (Westport, CT, 1994); Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 10 (1990), pp. 219– 21. Traill, David A., Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit (London, 1995); Allen, Susan H., Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (Berkeley, CA, 1999); Robinson, Marcelle, ‘Troy revisited: towards the increasing recognition of Frank Calvert’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vii/3 (2001), pp. 400–8; Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 8, pp. 400–1, vol. 9, p. 46, vol. 10, p. 186, and vol. 11, p. 619 note 7; Vaio, J., ‘Gladstone and the early reception of Schliemann in England’, in W. M. Calder and J. Cobet (eds), Heinrich Schliemann nach Hundert Jahren, pp. 415–30 and references (Frankfurt, DE, 1990); Vaio, ‘Schliemann and Gladstone: New Light From Unpublished Documents’, in J. Herrmann (ed.), Heinrich Schliemann: Grundlagen und Ergebnisse moderner Archaeologie 100 Jahre nach Schliemann’s Tod, pp. 73–6 (Berlin, 1992); Gladstone, Preface to Schliemann, Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Troy, pp. v–xl (New York, 1878); Myres, Homer and His Critics, pp. 116–17. Buchholz’s dedication to Gladstone is in his Die Homerischen Realien, Vol. 2: Offentliches und privates Leben, 1. Abth., Das offentliche Leben (Leipzig, DE, 1881). Gladstone, Homer (New York, 1878); Gladstone Diaries, vol. 9 (1986), p. 325; Brundage, People’s Historian, pp. 111, 139–41, 144–5; Koelsch, William A., ‘Ancient landscapes revisited: classical geography in the American university, 1780–1930’, in F.-P. Hager et al. (eds), Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education, p. 179 (Hildesheim, DE, 1992). Bebbington, Gladstone, p. 126; Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts, p. 115; A. Macmillan to Gladstone, 18 September, 5 November 1878, Gladstone Papers, British Library; Gladstone, Landmarks of Homeric Study, p. 124 (London, 1890); Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 9, p. 340, vol. 12 (1994), pp. 349–51. Evans, Arthur J., Scripta Minoa, p. 94 note 1 (Oxford, UK, 1909); Myres, Homer and His Critics, pp. 120–1; Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 10, p. 221; Luce, The End of Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend, p. 13 (London, 1969. Reprint: Athens, 1982). Gladstone, Diaries, vol. 12, p. 269; Oman, C. W. C., ‘Mr. Gladstone at All Souls College, January 29 to February 8, 1890’, in Oman, Things I Have Seen, pp. 89–90 (London, 1933); Koelsch, ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954’, in G. J. Martin (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 16 (1995), pp. 53–62 (London, 1995); Myres, Homer and His Critics, p. 119; Fletcher, C. R. L., Mr. Gladstone at Oxford, 1890, pp. 53, 65–9 (London and New York, 1908); Percy Gardner, Autobiographica, pp. 34–5 (Oxford, 1933). Hartog, Francois, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, Janet Lloyd (trans.), p. 26 (Chicago, IL, 2001). Originally Memoir d’Ulysse: réçits sur la frontière en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1996).

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The Committee’s records are now at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). For its work, see Freeman, T. W., ‘Looking before and after: British geography in 1947’, History of Geography Newsletter, 5 (1986), pp. 10–13. See also Baker, J. N. L., ‘Notes of interview with Sir John Myres, 1950’, ms., School of Geography Library, Oxford University. For Myres, see Koelsch, William A., ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954,’ in G. J. Martin (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 16 (1995), pp. 53– 62 (London, 1995). John L. Myres to T. Walter Freeman, 6 June, 10 August 1950, Records of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Committee on the Revival of British Geography, RGS Archives, London; Baker, ‘Notes of interview’ with Myres. See also Fleure, H. J., ‘The development of geography’, Geography, xxvii/2 (1943),

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5

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8

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p. 75 and Garnett, Alice, ‘Comment: “the pioneers”: some reminiscences’, Institute of British Geographers: Transactions and Papers, N.S. xii/2 (1987), p. 241. For an example of writers who limit their purview to geographers, see Gilbert, E. W., ‘The Right Honourable Sir Halford Mackinder, P. C., 1861–1947’, Geographical Journal, x/1–3 (1947), p. 99, who describes his subject as ‘the greatest of that band of men who fought and won for geography its rightful place [italics mine] in British education’, the others named being all members of the RGS or other geographers. Similarly, Leonard Cantor in his otherwise careful essay, ‘The Royal Geographical Society and the projected London Institute of Geography, 1892–1899’, Geographical Journal, cxxviii/1 (1962), p. 30, attributes the successful establishment of academic geography in Britain solely to ‘the primary work of a few gifted and visionary geographers’. Ogilvie, R. M., Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics in English Life From 1600 to 1918, p. 127 (London, 1964). Heyck, T. W., The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, p. 131 (New York, 1982); Burrow, J. W., A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past, p. 98 (Cambridge, UK, 1981); Oman, Charles, On the Writing of History, p. 224 (London, 1939); Baker, J. N. L., The History of Geography, p. 122 (New York, 1963). The ‘Liberal Anglican’ school is analyzed in Forbes, Duncan, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, UK, 1952). See DNB and ODNB, and numerous biographies. I have drawn principally on McCrum, Michael, Thomas Arnold: Head Master: A Reassessment (Oxford, UK, 1989), which has more on Arnold’s geography than most. Arnold, Thomas, ‘Rugby School – use of the classics’. Quarterly Journal of Education, 1834. Reprinted in Arnold, Miscellaneous Works, pp. 343–7, 356, A. P. Stanley (ed.) (London, 1845. Reprint: Farnborough, UK, 1971). David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning: Four Studies on a Victorian Ideal, pp. 64–6, briefly describes the Rugby curriculum and its importance as a model (London, 1961). Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 1, p. 141, vol. 2, p. 309. Arnold, letter to H. Strickland, Esq., 18 May 1835, vol. 1, pp. 362–3, 2 vols (London, 1844. Reprint: 2 vols in 1; New York, 1895); McCrum, Thomas Arnold: Head Master, pp. 3–4, 12, 55–6. See also Arnold, Thomas Arnold’s Travelling Journals, Stanley (ed.) (London, 1852). Baker, The History of Geography, pp. 34, 36; Jann, Rosemary, The Art and Science of Victorian History, pp. 28–9 (Columbus, OH, 1985). Forbes, Liberal Anglican Idea, p. 140, makes the vital point that ‘the Liberal Anglicans were perhaps the first English historians… to indulge in extensive and systematic travel….’ Hare, Julius, Preface to Arnold, History of Rome, 4th edn, vol. 3, pp. iii–xiii (‘singular geographical eye’ on p. viii) (London, 1850); Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 1, pp. 141, 339; Arnold, The Second Punic War, Being Chapters of the History of Rome, W. T. Arnold (ed.) (London, 1886); Review of The Second Punic War, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, NS viii/5 (1886), p. 340. Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History Delivered in Lent Term, 1842 [and] Inaugural Lecture Delivered in December 1841 (Oxford, UK, 1842. Reprint: New York, 1880), p. 150; Jann, Art and Science of Victorian History, pp. 16–17. Much of the third lecture stresses the need for the student of modern history to acquire a working knowledge of geography. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 2, pp. 254–6. For the suggestion that Butler may have been present: Baker, The History of Geography, pp. 37 and 56. Baker excerpts Arnold’s Introductory Lectures on pp. 33–6, and argues that ‘to him may be traced the development of historical geography in England’. Arnold, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides…Illustrated by Maps Taken Entirely From Actual Surveys With Notes, Chiefly Historical and Geographical,

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20 21 22 23

24

3 vols (Oxford, UK, 1830–5), vol. 1, Preface; McCrum, Thomas Arnold, p. 91. Use of this edition at Oxford and Winchester: Anderson, Warren D., Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, p. 12 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1965. Reprint, 1971). For the general nineteenth-century shift to Greek studies, particularly Plato and Thucydides, see Ogilvie, Latin and Greek, ch. 4. Peter Green, ‘Victorian Hellas’, ch. 2 of his Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture, has some provocative thoughts on impact of Hellenism on Victorian culture (London, 1989). DNB, ODNB; Arnold, History of the Peloponnesian War, vol. 2, p. 398. Arnold to Reverend Trevenson Penrose, 6 July 1841, in Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 2, p. 218. Arnold to H. Strickland, Esq., 18 May 1835, in Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 1, pp. 362–3. Arnold to Chevalier Bunsen, 21 September 1835, in Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, vol. 1, p. 373; Marsh, George Perkins, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (New York, 1864. Reprint: Cambridge, MA, 1965). Darby, H. C., ‘The changing English landscape’, Geographical Journal, cxvii/4 (December 1951), pp. 377–98; Thomas, William L., Jr (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago, IL, 1956); B. L. Turner II et al. (eds), The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (Cambridge, UK, 1980). Murray, Oswyn, ‘Ancient History’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 6, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, pp. 522–3 and notes (Oxford, UK, 1997); Heyck, Transformation, p. 131; Oman, Writing of History, p. 227. Baker, The History of Geography, pp. 36–9, 123; see also Hammond, Peter, Dean Stanley of Westminster, passim (Worthing, UK, 1987). The Victorian biography by Rowland Prothero (Lord Ernle), Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 2 vols (London, 1893), is of little use for Stanley’s historical geography. For Green, see DNB, ODNB; Brundage, Anthony, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian England (Westport, CT, 1994); Jann, Art and Science of Victorian History, ch. 5, and Green’s own books, especially A Short Geography of the British Islands (1879) and The Making of England (1882). Baker, The History of Geography, pp. 41–3, 74–5 has valuable comments on Green’s geographical interests. Stanley, ‘Greek topography. Colonel Leake’s topography of Athens, with some remarks on its antiquities’, Classical Museum, i/1, pp. 41–81; Leonhard Schmitz, Preface, Classical Museum, i/1, p. vi (London, 1844). For Schmitz, see DNB, ODNB, and Allibone, vol. 2, p. 1,949. Stanley, ‘Greek Topography’, pp. 41–4. Stanley, ‘Greek Topography’, pp. 59, 81. Stanley, ‘Greek Topography’, pp. 45, 80. See DAB, ODNB, and Stevens, W. R. W., Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, vol. 1, pp. 66, 76, 104–8, 118, 121–4, 308, 2 vols (London, 1895); Gooch, George Peabody, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 346–7 (London, 1913. Reprint: New York, 1949). Surprisingly, there is no modern biography of Freeman. Stevens, Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, vol. 1, pp. 3–4, 109, 118, 216; Gooch, History and Historians, p. 348; Powell, Frederick York, Introduction, to Grant Allen, Country and Town in England, p. viii (London, 1901). Freeman’s debt to Green’s topographical insights: Letters of J. R. Green, p. 63, Leslie Stephen (ed.) (London and New York, 1901). Bryce, James, ‘Edward Augustus Freeman’, Studies in Contemporary Biography, p. 267, also stresses Freeman’s mastery of topography on site as an important tool of history (New York, 1903).

399

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

25

26

27

28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35

36

37 38 39 40

Ward, Mrs Humphrey (Mary Augusta Arnold Ward), A Writer’s Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 199, 2 vols (New York, 1918); Symonds, Richard, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause?, p. 110 (London, 1986. Reprint: Oxford, UK, 1991). Freeman, The Historical Geography of Europe, 3rd edn (London, 1903), Preface to the First Edition, p. x and ch. 1, Introduction, pp. 2–3; F. G. A., Review of The Historical Geography of Europe, The Geographical Teacher, ii/9 (1904), p. 234; Butlin, Robin A. and R. A. Dodgson (eds), An Historical Geography of Europe, Preface, p. v (Oxford, UK, 1998); Koelsch, ‘Derwent Stainthorpe Whittlesey’, in P. H. Armstrong and G. J. Martin (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 25 (2006), pp. 138–58 (ref. on p. 145) (London, 2006). Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, Lecture 8, pp. 296–312 (London, 1886); Soffer, Reba N., Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930, pp. 101–2, 241, note 10 (Stanford, CA, 1994). Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, pp. 296, 312–23. Freeman, ‘Curtius’s history of Greece’, in Freeman, Historical Essays, 2nd Ser., pp. 148–60, quote pp. 149–50 (London, 1873); ‘First impressions of Athens’, in Freeman, Historical Essays, 3rd Ser., pp. 295–8, quote p. 295 (2nd edn, London, 1892). Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest of England, 6 vols (Oxford, UK, 1867–79) (ref. to Domesday Book in vol. 5, p. 41); Freeman, The Reign of William Rufus, 2 vols (Oxford, UK, 1882); Darby, ‘Domesday Geographies of England’ series, 7 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1952–77). Freeman, The Story of Sicily: Phoenician, Greek, and Roman (London and New York, 1892); Freeman, History of Sicily From Earliest Times, 4 vols (Oxford, UK, 1891–4). Freeman, Sicily: Phoenician, Greek, and Roman, chs 1, 2 (2nd edn, London, 1894). Freeman, ‘Sicilian cycles’, pp. 434–42 and ‘Normans and Palermo’, pp. 443– 84, in Freeman, Historical Essays, 3rd Ser., 2nd edn (London, 1892); Stephens, Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, vol. 2, Bibliography, pp. 481–91. Freeman, History of Sicily, vol. 1, Preface, p. viii and ch. 2; vol. 3, Preface, p. ix. Baker, The History of Geography, pp. 56, 123. For Vaughan, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see George Butler, comment in Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, NS viii/2 (1886), p. 117, and Bill, E. G. W., University Reform in Nineteenth-Century Oxford: A Study of Henry Halford Vaughan, 1811–1885, esp. chs 6 and 12 (Oxford, UK, 1970). Baker also points out that Freeman’s successor, James A. Froude, also inserted geography into his history lectures. The distinctions mentioned are those made by the historical geographer H. C. Darby and some of his disciples. See Darby, ‘The relations of geography and history’, Institute of British Geographers: Transactions and Papers, xix (1953), pp. 1–11. Reprint: G. Taylor (ed.), Geography in the Twentieth Century, 3rd edn, pp. 640–52 (New York, 1957) and Darby’s other publications, including his posthumously published The Relations of History and Geography: Studies in England, France, and the United States (Exeter, UK, 2002), which includes a full bibliography. Keltie John Scott, ‘Report to the Council’, in Royal Geographical Society, Report of the Proceedings of the Society in Reference to the Improvement of Geographical Education, pp. 19, 28 (London, 1888–9); Mackinder, ‘Geographical education: the year’s progress at Oxford’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, x/8 (1898), p. 533 and Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, xi/8 (1899), p. 502. The standard reference here is Scargill, D. I., ‘The RGS and the foundations of geography at Oxford’, Geographical Journal, cxlii/3 (1976), pp. 438–61. ‘Freeman, Edward Augustus’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, ix/1 (1893), pp. 36–7. M[arkham], C. R., ‘The late Professor Freeman and his services to geography’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, NS, xiv/6 (1892), pp. 401–4. For Pelham, in addition to DNB, ODNB and D B C, see Myres’ interview, 1950; Haverfield, F. J., ‘Henry Francis Pelham, 1846–1907’, Proceedings of the British Aca-

400

NOTES

41

42

43

44

45

demy, vol. 3 (1907–8), pp. 365–70; Haverfield, ‘Biographical notice’, in Pelham, Essays by Henry Francis Pelham, vii–xxii, F. J. Haverfield (ed.) (Oxford, UK, 1911); Murray, Oswyn, ‘The triumph of Roman history, 1877–1914: Henry Francis Pelham and the new professionalism’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2, pp. 338–44 (Oxford, UK, 2000). For Haverfield, in addition to ANB, ODNB and DBC, see Baker, ‘Interview with Myres’, 1950; Anderson, J. G. C., ‘Obituary: Professor F. Haverfield’, Classical Review, xxii/7–8 (1919), pp. 165–6; Crater, H. H. E., ‘Francis Haverfield’, English Historical Review, xxxv/137 (1920), pp. 63–70; MacDonald, George, ‘F. Haverfield’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 9 (1919–20), pp. 475–91; MacDonald, ‘Biographical notice’ and ‘A bibliography’, in Haverfield, The Roman Occupation of Britain, rev. edn, pp. 15–57 (Oxford, UK, 1924); Myres, ‘The man and his past’, p. 5, in W. F. Grimes (ed.), Aspects of Archaeology in Britain and Beyond: Essays Presented to O. G. S. Crawford, p. 5 (London, 1951); Haverfield, ‘The Ordnance Survey maps from the point of view of the antiquities on them’, Geographical Journal, xxvii/2 (1906), pp. 165–77; Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology, esp. ch. 9 (London and New York, 2000) and Hingley, ‘Francis John Haverfield (1860–1919): Oxford, Roman Archaeology and Edwardian Imperialism’, in Stray (ed.), Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000, pp. 135–53 (London, 2007). Haverfield’s summer course: ‘Reports of vacation courses, 1914’, Geographical Teacher, vii/40 (1914), p. 420. Myres to T. W. Freeman, 6 June 1950, Records of the BASS Committee, RGS. For biographical material, in addition to DNB, ODNB, and DBC, see Koelsch, ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954’, pp. 53–62 and references. There are valuable personal remembrances of Myres in [various authors], ‘John Linton Myres: 1869–1954’, Man, liv/3 (1954), pp. 37–43. See also various Annual Reports of the School of Geography and Minutes of the Committee on Geography, Oxford University Archives. Hogarth’s lectures are described in Mackinder, ‘Reports on geography in the universities’, Geographical Journal, ii/2 (1893), p. 26 and commented on by Myres, in Fletcher, C. R. L., ‘David George Hogarth’, Geographical Journal, lxxi/4 (1928), p. 328, footnote. Myres’ activity while at Liverpool is taken from University of Liverpool, Annual Report of the Vice-Chancellor for 1908 and 1909; University of Liverpool, Institute of Archaeology, Annual Reports 1906–7 through 1909–10; and University of Liverpool Calendars, 1907–10. The individual lecture topics of his ‘Geographical conditions of Mediterranean civilization’ course for 1907 are listed in the Annual Report of the Institute for 1907–8. Taylor’s observations on Myres’ Dublin lecture are in Griffith Taylor, Journeyman Taylor, p. 68 (London, 1968). Myres to Alfred E. Zimmern, 27 March 1910, Alfred E. Zimmern Papers, New Bodleian Library, Oxford University; University of Liverpool, Annual Report of the Council and Senate, November, 1910, p. 5 (Liverpool, 1910); Steel, R. W., ‘The Oxford School of Geography’, p. 60, in Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918–1945, pp. 58–75 (Cambridge, UK, 1987). Myres wanted Zimmern to succeed him at Liverpool, but Zimmern declined; see Myres to Zimmern, 18 June 1910, Zimmern Papers, and Telegram, Zimmern to Myres, 19 June 1910, Myres Papers, New Bodleian Library. Steel, ‘Oxford School of Geography’, p. 60; Howarth, Janet, ‘The Edwardian Reform Movement’, p. 826, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2 (Oxford, UK, 2000); M[ason], K[enneth], ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954’, Geographical Journal, vxx/4 (1954), pp. 541–2; Fleure, H. J., ‘Diamond Jubilee Celebration’, Geography, xxxvii/4 (1953), pp. 253–5. Elsewhere, Steel has suggested a link between Myres’

401

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

46

47

48

49

50

51

successful advocacy of an increased status of geography at Liverpool and his subsequent efforts at Oxford. See Steel, ‘Geography at the University of Liverpool’, in R. W. Steel and R. Lawton (eds), Liverpool Essays in Geography: A Jubilee Collection, pp.1–23 (note, p. 3) (London, 1967). On the Victoria Medal, see L. P. Kirwen to John L. Myres, 19 March 1953, Myres Papers. D[unbabin], T. J., ‘Obituary: Sir John Myres: 1869–1954’, Annual of the British School at Athens, xlix (1954), pp. 311–12 (London, 1954); Myres, J. N. L., Commander J. L. Myres, R. N. V. R.: The Blackbeard of the Aegean, Tenth J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture, 1979 (London, 1980); Myres, ‘An attempt to reconstruct the maps used by Herodotus’, Geographical Journal, viii/6 (1896), pp. 605–31; Myres, Herodotus: Father of History (Oxford, UK, 1953); Myres, ‘The ancient shape of Attica’, Greece and Rome, xii/35–6 (1943), pp. 33–42. Buxton, John, ‘Reflections on an undergraduate diary’, p. 141, in J. Buxton and P. Williams (eds), New College Oxford, 1379–1979 (Oxford, UK, 1979); Bowra, C. M., Memories 1898–1939, pp. 103–4 (Cambridge, MA, 1967). Boardman, John, ‘Myres, Sir John Linton (1869–1954)’, ODNB, vol. 40, p. 88; Fleure, ‘Sir John Linton Myres’, Geography, xxxix/2 (1954), p. 128; Library charge card for The Dawn of History, noting ‘Miss Semple’s Reserve’, 24 October 1922 (author’s possession); Mason, ‘Obituary: John Linton Myres’, p. 541; Darby, ‘On the writing of historical geography, 1918–1945’, in British Geography, 1918–1945, p. 128; Koelsch, ‘John Linton Myres, 1869–1954’, passim. Surprisingly, there is no book-length biography, considering the wealth of manuscript and published sources. But given the range of Myres’ interests, who would have the audacity to write it? ‘What is historical geography?’, Geography, xvii/1 (1932), pp. 39–45; Myres, correspondence with Clarendon Press, 1926, Myres Papers. For a thoughtful review, see Pearson, Lionel, Review of Sir John L. Myres, Geographical History in Greek Lands, Gnomon, Band 26 (1954), pp. 148–50. For George, in addition to DNB and O D N B, see M[yres], J. L., ‘Rev. Hereford Brooke George’, Geographical Journal, xxxvii/3 (1911), pp. 325–6; Baker, ‘Interview with Myres’, 1950; Symonds, Oxford and Empire, pp. 145–6; and the sections on George in Robin A. Butlin, ‘Historical geographies of the British empire, c. 1887– 1925’, in M. Bell, R. Butlin, and M. Heffernan (eds), Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940, pp. 151–88 (Manchester, UK, 1995). For George’s comments on the combination lectures, see Engel, Arthur J., From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth Century Oxford, pp. 84, 89, 91 (Oxford, UK, 1983). For his appointment to the BAAS Committee, see ‘Geography at the universities’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, NS viii/11 (1886), p. 740 and British Association for the Advancement of Science, Annual Report, 1887, p. 158 (London, 1888). For George’s comments on his efforts for geography teaching at Oxford, see discussion in Freshfield, Douglas, ‘The place of geography in education’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, NS viii/11 (1886), p. 715 and Ravenstein, E. G., ‘The aims and methods of geographical education’, p. 178, in Royal Geographical Society, Report of the Proceedings of the Society in Reference to the Improvement of Geographical Education (London, 1886). For the status of geography in the School of Modern History, see Warrington, T. C., ‘The beginnings of the Geographical Association’, Geography, xxxviii/4 (1953), p. 223. In addition to DNB and ODNB, for Powell see Rait, Robert S., ‘Frederick York Powell’, English Historical Review, xix/75 (1904), pp. 484–92 and Elton, Oliver, Frederick York Powell: A Life, especially Mackinder’s tribute, vol. 1, pp. 192–3, 2 vols (Oxford, UK, 1906). For Firth, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Clark, G. N., ‘Sir Charles Firth’, English Historical Review, li/2, (1936), pp. 257–63; Davies, G., ‘Charles Harding Firth, 1857–1936’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xx (1936),

402

NOTES

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53

54

55

56

57

58

pp. 380–400; Godfrey, Eleanor Smith, ‘Sir Charles Firth (1857–1936)’, in B. E. Schmitt (ed.), Some Histories of Modern Europe: Essays in Historiography, pp. 130–51 (Chicago, IL, 1942. Reprint: Port Washington, NY, 1966); Baker, ‘Interview with Myres’, 1950; Rex, Millicent B., ‘Sir Charles Henry Firth’, in H. Ausabel, J. B. Brebner, and E. M. Hunt (eds), Some Modern Historians of Britain: Essays in Honor of R. L. Schuyler, pp. 192–214 (New York, 1951); Ashley, Maurice, ‘Sir Charles Firth: A tribute and reassessment’, History Today, vii/4 (1957), pp. 251–6. Baker, ‘Interview with Myres’, 1950; Edmund W. Gilbert, Geography as a Humane Study, inaugural lecture (Oxford, UK, 1955). For Bryce, see Fisher, H. A. L., James Bryce, 2 vols (New York, 1927. Reprint: Westport, CT, 1973); and Fisher, ‘Viscount Bryce of Dechmont, O.M.’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 12 (1926), pp. 297–305. See also Bryce, ‘Introductory essay’, in H. F. Helmolt (ed.), The World’s History: A Survey of Man’s Record, pp. xvii–lx, 7 vols (London, 1901–7). Bryce’s comment on ‘so much of its environment as varies locally’ is quoted in M[yres], ‘The Oxford Magazine and geography: a retrospective over forty years’, Oxford Magazine, 28 February 1929, p. 457. Mackinder’s variant is [geography] ‘traces the influence of locality, that is, of environment varying locally’, Mackinder, ‘On the scope and methods of geography’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, ix/3 (1887), p. 143. For Cruttwell, see DNB, ODNB and Gilbert, Geography as a Humane Study, pp. 9–10; Mason: see Goudie, Andrew S., ‘Kenneth J. Mason, 1887–1976’, in P. H. Armstrong and G. J. Martin (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 18 (1998), pp. 67–72 (London, 1998). In addition to DNB and ODNB, see [Markham, Clements], ‘Sir Edward H. Bunbury, Bart.’, Geographical Journal, v/5 (1895), pp. 198–200, and Stahl, W. H., Introduction to the Dover Edition, Bunbury, A History of Ancient Geography, 2nd edn (1883), vol. 1, pp. iii–viii, 2 vols (Reprint: New York, 1959). The 1879 and 1883 editions were published in London by John Murray. The first edition was republished in Amsterdam by J. C. Gieben, Publisher, on its centennial in 1979. See also Bunbury, ‘Ptolemy’, EB, 9th edn, vol. 20, pp. 87–91; William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, 2 vols (London and Boston, 1854–7. Reprint: New York, 1966; London and New York, 2005). ‘Petition to Council’, 15 March 1880, and Bunbury to Council, 2 June 1880 Bunbury file, 1871–1880, Royal Geographical Society Archives. The 2004 quotation is from Talbert, Richard J. A., in ODNB, vol. 8, p. 674. Robertson, C. J., ‘Scottish geographers: the first hundred years’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, lxxxix/1 (1973), p. 6; Charles W. J. Withers and Robert Mayhew, ‘Rethinking disciplinary history’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, NS xxvii/1 (2002), pp. 11–29 (esp. pp. 21–4 and Table II, p. 18). For G. A. Smith, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Cook, S. A., ‘George Adam Smith, 1856–1942’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 8 (1942), pp. 325–46; Robertson, ‘Scottish geographers’, p. 7; Middleton, Dorothy, ‘George Adam Smith, 1856–1942’, in T. W. Freeman, M. Oughton, and P. Pinchemel (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 1 (1977), pp. 105–6 (London, 1977); Butlin, ‘George Adam Smith and the historical geography of the Holy Land: contents, contexts, and connections’, Journal of Historical Geography, xiv/4 (1988), pp. 38–404. For the use of Smith’s atlas during World War I, see Jan Morris, The Matter of Wales, p. 327 (Oxford, UK, 1984). For Smith’s statement on the importance of Mediterranean geography to classical study, see Fleure, Memorandum dated 24 March 1948, BAAS Committee on Records of British Geography, 1947, Royal Geographical Society. See also Edwin J. Aiken, Scriptural Geography: Portraying the Holy Land, ch. 5 (London, 2009 and New York, 2010). For Ramsay, in addition to DNB, ODNB, DBC, and Robinson, ‘Scottish geographers’, p. 7, see Boase, Charles W., Registrum Collegii Exoniensis, pp. clxxii, 197

403

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59

60

61

62

63

64 65

(Oxford, UK, 1894); Stride, William K., Exeter College, p. 255 (London, 1900); Ramsay, ‘Presidential Address to the Geographical Association’, Geographical Teacher, ix/50 (1918), pp. 175–81; Boardman, John, ‘100 years of classical archaeology at Oxford’, in D. Kurtz (ed.), Beazley and Oxford, pp. 44–6 (Oxford, UK, 1985); French, William H. C., The Archaeology of Early Christianity: A History, chs 7 and 8 (Minneapolis, MN, 1996). In addition to DNB and ODNB, see Fletcher, C. R. L., ‘David George Hogarth: President R.G.S., 1925–1927’, Geographical Journal, lxxi/4 (1928), pp. 321–44; Breasted, James H., ‘Obituary: David George Hogarth’, Geographical Review, xviii/1 (1928), pp. 159–60; Sayce, A. H., ‘David George Hogarth, 1862–1927’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 13 (1927), pp. 379–83; Baker, ‘Interview with Myres’, 1950; Lock, Peter, ‘D. G. Hogarth (1862–1927)… a specialist in the science of archaeology’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 85 (1990), pp. 175–200; and Hogarth’s own books, especially his travel account, The Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896), his autobiography, Accidents of an Antiquary’s Life (1910), his Ancient East (1914) in the Home University Library series and his regional geography book, The Nearer East (1902). Hogarth is another interesting scholar who deserves biographical treatment. For the Hakluyt Society, see Crone G. R., ‘“Jewels of Antiquitie”: the work of the Hakluyt Society’, Geographical Journal, cxxviii/3 (1962), pp. 321–4; Middleton, Dorothy,’The early history of the Hakluyt Society, 1847–1923’, Geographical Journal, clii/2 (1986), pp. 217–24; and R. C. Bridges and P. E. H. Hair (eds), Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth: Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society, 1846–1996 (London, 1996). For Beazley, see Who Was Who, 1951–1960, p. 83; Adams, H. P., ‘Sir Raymond Beazley, 1868–1955’, University of Birmingham, Historical Journal, v (1955), pp. 102–7. For Baker, in addition to ODNB, see Crone, review of Baker, History of Geographic Discovery and Exploration, Geographical Journal, lxxvi/6 (J932), pp. 527–8; Steel, ‘Obituary: J. N. L. Baker’, Geographical Journal, cxxxviii/2 (1972), pp. 276–7; Steel, ‘John Norman Leonard Baker, 1893–1971’, in G. J. Martin (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 16 (1995), pp. 1–11 (London, 1995). Eva Taylor’s research and teaching is discussed in ODNB, in Campbell, Eila M. J., ‘Geography at Birkbeck College, University of London’, in Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918– 1945, pp. 45–57 and in Freeman, T. W., ‘Two ladies’, Geographical Magazine, xliz/3 (1976), p. 208. The principal obituaries are Crone, ‘Professor E. G. R. Taylor, D.Sc.’, Geographical Journal, cxxxii/4 (1966), pp. 594–5 and ‘Obituary: Eva Germaine Rivington Taylor’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xlv/3 (1968), pp. 181–6 (full bibliography). Withers and Mayhew, ‘Rethinking disciplinary history’, Table I, p. 15; Davis, William Morris, ‘Geography at Cambridge University, England’, Journal of Geography, xix/6 (1920), pp. 207–10; David R. Stoddart, On Geography, ch. 5 (Oxford, UK, 1986); Stoddart, ‘A hundred years of geography at Cambridge’, Geographical Journal, clv/1 (1989), pp. 24–32. For Guillimard and Oldham, in addition to Who Was Who, see especially Stoddart, ‘Foundations’, pp. 92–7, 100–18. Geography in the 1908 Cambridge Summer Meeting is from Geographical Teacher, iv/21 (1908), pp. 297–8. Markham, C. R., ‘The sphere and uses of geography’, Geographical Journal, xxvi/6 (1905), pp. 593–604, esp. pp. 603–4. For Cary and Warmington, see DBC, as well as Ehrenberg, Victor, ‘Max Cary’, Gnomon, Band 30 (1958), pp. 319–20 and ‘Eric Herbert Warmington’, Geographical Journal, cliv/1 (1988), p. 150, and biographical sketches, inside front cover, Pelican edition of The Ancient Explorers.

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Diller, Aubrey, Review of J. Oliver Thomson, History of Ancient Geography and Cary, Max, The Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History, Geographical Review, xl/2 (1950), p. 348 and Taylor, Eva G. R., Review of Max Cary, The Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History, Geographical Journal, cxiv/1–3 (1949), pp. 83–4. See also Heidel, W. A., Review of E. H. Warmington, Greek Geography, Geographical Review, xxv/4 (1935), p. 703. Bowen, E. C., ‘Geography in Wales: a retrospect’, Cambria, i (1974), p. 4; also Bowen, ‘Geography in the University of Wales, 1918–1948’, in Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918–1945, p. 25. In the first essay, Bowen gives the name as ‘the Rev. Hoskyns-Abrahall’, and in the second as ‘Reverend W. Hoskins Abrall’. I have taken the later reference as a correction.

CHAPTER 7 1

2

3

4

5

6

Storr, Richard J., The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America (Chicago, IL, 1953); Stevenson, Louise L., Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore, MD, 1986); Hawkins, Hugh, Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (New York, 1972). Brown, Ralph H., ‘A plea for geography, 1813 style’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xli/ 3 (1951), pp. 233–6; Warntz, William, Geography Now and Then: Some Notes on the History of Academic Geography in the United States, ch. 2 (New York, 1964), and Koelsch, William A., The Enlargement of a World: Harvard Students and Geographical Experience, 1840–1861, pp. 12–19, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1966. For Guyot, see Ferrell, Edith H., ‘Arnold Henry Guyot, 1807–1884’, in T. W. Freeman (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 4 (1981), pp. 62–71 and references (London, 1981); Wilson, Philip K., ‘Influences of Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos in Arnold Guyot’s Earth and Man (1849)’, Omega: Indian Journal of Science and Religion, iv/1 (2005), pp. 33–51; and Koelsch, ‘Seedbed of reform: Arnold Guyot and school geography in Massachusetts’, Journal of Geography, cvii/2 (2008), pp. 35–42. Professor Wilson is presently working on a full-length biography of Guyot. Emerton, Ephraim and Samuel Eliot Morison, ‘History, 1838–1929’, p. 153, in Morison (ed.), The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929, pp. 150–77 (Cambridge, MA, 1930); Pfitzer, Gregory M., Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World (Boston, MA, 1991). Wiesen, David S., ‘Cornelius Felton and the flowering of classics in New England’, Classical Outlook, lix/2 (1981–2), pp. 44–8; Winterer, Caroline, ‘The humanist revolution in America, 1820–1860: classical antiquity in the colleges’, History of Higher Education Annual, vol. 18 (1998), pp. 111–29; Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore, MD, 2002); and Richard, Carl J., The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, passim (Cambridge, MA, 2009). See also Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 2, pp. 428–9; NCAB, vol. 6, pp. 419–20; DAB, vol. 3, pp. 317–18; and ANB, vol. 7 (1999), p. 808. The principal manuscript deposit is in the Harvard University Archives. There are two other important Felton manuscript holdings in the Houghton Library, Harvard, consisting of Felton’s incoming correspondence and a miscellaneous collection, the Felton Family Papers. In addition to Wiesen, Reinhold, Winterer and Richard, see Trent, William Peterfield et al., Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 4, p. 460, 4 vols (New York, 1921) and James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, p. 47 (Baltimore, MD, 1999).

405

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7

8

9 10

11

12

13

Early biographical memoirs include Barnard, Henry, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, American Journal of Education, x/24 (1861), pp. 265–96; Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, ‘Eulogy of Cornelius Conway Felton, LL. D., & C.’, in Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report of the Board of Regents, 1861 (Washington, DC, 1862), pp. 109–16; Robert C. Winthrop, George S. Hillard and James Walker, ‘Remarks’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, v (1860–2), pp. 443–58; ‘Cornelius Conway Felton, LL. D.’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vi (1862–5), pp. 7–11; Hillard, George S., ‘Memoir of Cornelius Conway Felton, LL.D.’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, x (1867–9), pp. 352–68; Goodwin, William Watson, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, in F. O. Valle and H. A. Clarke (eds), The Harvard Book, vol. 1, pp. 162–3, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1875); Peabody, Andrew P., ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, iv (1860–2), pp. 444–53 (Boston, MA, 1895); Peabody, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, in Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, pp. 168– 75 (Boston, MA, 1888); Goodwin, ‘Address of William Watson Goodwin’ [on C. C. Felton], Publications of the Cambridge Historical Society, ii (1906–7), pp. 117–30, reprinted as Goodwin, ‘Recollections of President Felton’, Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, xvii/68 (1909), pp. 650–60; [Emerson, Edward Waldo], ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, in E. W. Emerson (ed.), The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855–1870, pp. 159–65 (Boston, MA, 1918). There is no modern biography. For Everett as classicist, see Long, Orie William, Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture, pp. 63–76, 237–40 (Cambridge, MA, 1935; Reprint: New York, 1963); Larrabee, Stephen, Hellas Observed: The American Experience of Greece, 1775–1865, pp. 28–42 (New York, 1957); Reinhold, Meyer, ‘A “New Morning”: Edward Everett’s contributions to classical learning’, Classical Outlook, lix/ 2 (1981–2), pp. 37–41. For Hoar’s comment on classics teaching at Harvard, see Hoar, George Frisbie, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. 1, p. 89, 2 vols (New York, 1903). See biographical references in note 7 above, as well as Dupree, A. Hunter, Asa Gray, 1810–1888, pp. 122–3, 252–3 (Cambridge, MA, 1959). Membership in the AAAS from Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848–1860, Appendix (Urbana, IL, 1976). The outline of a lecture on Pompeii and Herculaneum that Felton gave to the Cambridge Scientific Club on 13 December 1860, after returning from Europe, is in the ‘Miscellaneous AMS Fragments’ folder of the Felton Family Papers. Cornelius Conway Felton, A Discourse Pronounced at the Inauguration of the Author as Eliot Professor of Greek in Harvard University, August 26, 1834, pp. 8, 26 (Cambridge, MA, 1834). Among the many references to American (and other) interest in the Greek War of Independence and its effects, see Larrabee, Hellas Observed and St Clair, William, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, ch. 30 (London, 1972). Date of Felton’s first lectures in Greek literature is from Smith, Herbert Weir, ‘The Classics, 1867–1929’, p. 60, in Morison (ed.), The Development of Harvard University. Description of Felton in Hoar, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 93. Felton’s ‘Lectures on Greek history and literature, 1855–1861’, which include a fair amount of geography, are in the Harvard University Archives. See also the annual reports of the presidents and other materials in the Harvard College Annual Catalogues for the period. Barnard, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, p. 281; Storr, Beginnings of Graduate Education, pp. 25–8, 161–2; McCaughey, Robert A., Josiah Quincy, 1772–1864: The Last Federalist, pp. 173–4, 177 (Cambridge, MA, 1974).

406

NOTES

14

15

16

17

18

19

[Everett, Edward, Chair], Report of the Committee of the Overseers of Harvard College, Appointed to Visit the Lawrence Scientific School, in 1849 (Cambridge, MA, 1850); Barnard, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, p. 281; Storr, Beginnings of Graduate Education, pp. 46–53, 168–9; Yanikoski, Richard A., ‘Harvard’s early quest for a graduate school of theoretical and practical science’, in M. F. Koenig and M. Kaufman (eds), Education in Massachusetts: Selected Essays, pp. 34–62 (Westfield, MA, 1989). For the Lazzaroni and their ambitions, see Storr, Beginnings of Graduate Education, esp. pp. 25–8, 67–74, 89–91; Lurie, Edward, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, pp. 182–4, 323–34 (Chicago, IL, 1960); Beach, Mark, ‘Was there a Scientific Lazzaroni?’, in G. H. Daniels (ed.), Nineteenth-Century American Science: A Reappraisal, pp. 115–32 (Evanston, IL, 1972); Miller, Lillian, The Lazzaroni: Science and Scientists in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Washington, DC, 1972) (Felton, pp. 66–9); Kohlstedt, Formation of the American Scientific Community, ch. 7; Bruce, Robert V., The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876, chs 16, 17 (New York, 1987); James, Mary Anne, Elites in Conflict: The Antebellum Clash Over the Dudley Observatory, pp. 29–34 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987); Slotten, Hugh R., Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey, pp. 89–90, 107 (Cambridge, UK, 1994); Rothenberg, Marc (ed.), The History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia (New York and London, 2001), s.v. ‘Lazzaroni’, p. 310 and refs. For the intermarriage of Harvard faculty with daughters of the Boston mercantile elite, see McCaughey, ‘The transformation of American academic life: Harvard University, 1821–1892’, Perspectives in American History, viii (1974), p. 272 and Story, Ronald, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870, pp. 86–7 (Middletown, CT, 1980). The Feltons’ hospitality and openness to new ideas is charmingly expressed in Caroline Gardiner Curtis, Memories of Fifty Years in the Last Century, pp. 53, 55, 120–1, 138 (Boston, MA, 1947); see also Peabody, Sermon on the Death of Cornelius Conway Felton, Ll. D., pp. 10–11 (Cambridge, MA, 1862) and, for his service in Mrs Agassiz’ school, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz, vol. 2, p. 529, 2 vols (Boston, MA, 1885). Lazzaroni expectations of Felton’s Presidency: Joseph Henry to Agassiz, 13 August 1864, Benjamin Peirce Papers, Harvard University Archives, printed in N. Reingold (ed.), Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History, pp. 212–16 (New York, 1964. Reprint: Chicago, IL, 1985); Emerson, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, pp. 163–4. The revolution of 1848 in Switzerland is briefly discussed in [Coolidge, William A. B.], ‘Neuchâtel’ (canton) and ‘Neuchâtel’ (city), EB, 11th edn, vol. 19 (1911), pp. 423–5 and in Martin, William, Switzerland: From Roman Times to the Present, pp. 216–17, 246–7 (New York, 1971). See Lurie, Louis Agassiz, for Agassiz’ patronage and employment of Swiss refugees. Daily Evening Transcript (Boston), Tuesday 16 January 1849, p. 3 and Wednesday, 17 January 1849, p. 2; also Chamberlin, Joseph E., The Boston Transcript: A History of its First Hundred Years, pp. 93–4 (Boston, MA, and New York, 1930). Almost all secondary sources claim Guyot’s 1849 lectures were given as a series sponsored by the (‘prestigious’) Lowell Institute. They were not, and Guyot does not claim that they were. They had merely been delivered in a hall in the Lowell Institute’s customary venue, the Marlboro Chapel, by permission of the Lowell Institute Trustee, John A. Lowell. Arnold Henri Guyot, The Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography in its Relation to the History of Mankind (Boston, MA, 1849), Preface (dated 1 May 1849, and reprinted in subsequent editions), pp. 5, 7; Daily Evening Traveller (Boston), 14 May 1849, p. 2.

407

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20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Guyot, in Earth and Man, 1st edn, Preface, p. 7. In the 2nd edn (Boston, MA, 1850), Preface, (dated July 1850), p. 8, Guyot thanks Felton for ‘exercising a severer criticism than the reader upon his own work’ of translation. The dedication to Felton was written for Guyot by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; see Guyot annotation on manuscript copy in Arnold Guyot Papers, Firestone Library, Princeton University. Figure of 5,000 taken from Rey, William, L’Amérique Protestante: Notes et Observations d’un Voyageur, vol. 2, p. 12, 2 vols (Paris, 1857). According to advertisements in later printings and in some of Gould and Lincoln’s other books, 2,000 copies had been printed by the spring of 1850, 11,000 by March 1856; 14,000 by 1859; and 16,000 by 1861. Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), published in the same month as Earth and Man, had sold only 200 copies in its first four years, after which the publisher returned all unsold copies to the author. Daily Evening Traveller (Boston), 14 March 1849, p. 2; [Gilman, Daniel Coit], ‘The Earth and Man’, The New Englander, viii/31 (1850), p. 365; Ampère, J. J., Voyage en Amérique: États-Unis, Cuba, Mexique, rev. edn, vol. 1, p. 61, 2 vols (Paris, 1860). Thomas Hill amusingly described one of Felton’s excursions with Agassiz and Guyot, quoted in Land, William G., Thomas Hill: Twentieth President of Harvard University, pp. 75–7 (Cambridge, MA, 1933). Everett to Guyot, 24 May 1849; Sparks to Guyot, 19 May 1849; Longfellow to Guyot, 25 May 1849; Ticknor to Guyot, 28 May 1849; Donald G. Mitchell to Guyot, 22 June 1849; Hillard to Guyot, 30 June 1849, all in Arnold Guyot Papers, Historical Society of Princeton, NJ; Ames, Mary Lesley Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, vol. 1, p. 221, 2 vols (New York, 1909). G. B. Emerson to Guyot, 31 July 1849, Guyot Papers, Historical Society of Princeton, NJ; ‘Texts for a teacher of geography’, Massachusetts Teacher, ii/10 (1849), p. 296; ‘C.’, ‘Geography’, Massachusetts Teacher, iii/1 (1850), p. 22; [Parsons, Theophilus], ‘The tendencies of modern science’, North American Review, lxxii/1 (1851), p. 94; ‘Lawrence Scientific School’, American Journal of Education, i/2 (1856), p. 222; Catalogue of the Pilgrim Sunday School Library, First Unitarian Society, Stockton Street, San Francisco, Issued July 1861 (San Francisco, 1861), p. 13; Hopkins, Louisa P., ‘Goodwin Atkins Stone’, in Thomas Wentworth Higginson (ed.), Harvard Memorial Biographies, vol. 2, p. 328, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1866); Jones, Leonard Chester, Arnold Guyot et Princeton, p. 38 (Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1929); Koelsch, ‘Seedbed of reform’, passim. Felton to Gould and Lincoln, Publishers, undated, in Guyot, Earth and Man, 1st edn, 1849, p. 4. Felton’s and other testimonial letters from Agassiz, Peirce, Ticknor, Charles Sumner and Hillard were omitted from the second and later editions. For the connections among Agassiz, Felton and Guyot, see Koelsch, ‘Three friends of Swiss-American science: Louis Agassiz, Arnold Guyot, and Cornelius C. Felton’, Swiss American Historical Society Review, xxxixiv/1 (2008), pp. 45–59. See comments on geography in ‘Report of the School Committee for the Municipal Year ending April 1, 1851’, p. 61, in City of Cambridge, Mayoral Address and Reports, pp. 53–85 (Cambridge, 1851); Ibid., Report, 1852, pp. 87–8; Ibid., Report, 1853, p. 75. The 1852 report, p. 88, refers to the textbook series that Guyot ‘is occupied in preparing’. The Massachusetts Teachers’ Institutes may be traced through the annual reports of the Massachusetts Board of Education; see also Koelsch, ‘Seedbed of reform’, passim. The Cambridge School Committee noted in 1853 that Guyot’s ‘invaluable lectures’ on geography ‘have been received by the teachers of Massachusetts with enthusiasm’, Report, 1853, p. 75.

408

NOTES

28

29

30

31

32 33

34

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

Felton, ‘Report of the Visitors of the Framingham Normal School’, Massachusetts Board of Education, Twentieth Annual Report, 1856 (Boston, MA, 1857), p. 23. See also Barnard, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, p. 276 and Guyot to Felton, 1 February 1860, Felton papers, Harvard University Archives. Ferrell, ‘Arnold Henry Guyot’, pp. 65–6; James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870, ch. 6 (Baltimore, MD, 1990); Koelsch, ‘Arnold Guyot and Humboldtian science in mid-nineteenth century New England’, The Northeastern Geographer, i/1 (2009), pp. 34–45. Felton, Discourse, p. 10; Merz, John Theodore, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 3, pp. 150–60, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1912). See also letters from Leake to Felton concerning the 1858 trip and Leake’s late work, On Some Disputed Questions of Ancient Geography, dated 10 March, 19 May, and 10 August 1858, in the Felton incoming correspondence, Houghton Library. Guyot, ‘Geography’, in F. Barnard and A. Guyot (eds), Johnson’s New Universal Encyclopedia, vol. 2, Part 2, p. 480 (New York, 1878); Felton to Publishers, undated, in Earth and Man, 1st edn, p. 4. Guyot, Earth and Man, pp. 308, 315–16, 325. Felton, Familiar Letters From Europe, [A. P. Peabody (ed.)], pp. 25, 40–2, 54, 61–5, 73, 84–9, 107–28 (Boston, MA, 1865). Felton also kept a ‘European Journal’ in six volumes, of which only the last three survive. His accounts of his visits to Ritter and von Humboldt are in ‘European Journal’, vol. 4, pp. 43 and 47–8, Felton Papers, Harvard University Archives. Felton, Greece, Ancient and Modern: Lectures Delivered Before the Lowell Institute, vol. 2, p. 499 [A. P. Peabody (ed.)], 2 vols (Boston, MA, 1866; 2nd edn, 1867); Goodwin, ‘Recollections’, p. 655. The lectures were reprinted as late as 1896, in a so-called 10th Edition. Larrabee, Hellas Observed, allots two pages to Felton’s visit. Barnard, ‘Cornelius Conway Felton’, p. 278; Felton, Familiar Letters, pp. 179–80, 187–8, 222, 363, 367. Felton, narrative of his horseback tour, in Greece, Ancient and Modern, vol. 2, pp. 523–9. Felton to Hillard, 7 July 1854 and Felton, ‘European Journal’, vol. 6, p. 152, Felton Papers, Harvard University Archives; ‘Cornelius Conway Felton, LL.D.’, Proceedings of the AAAS, vol. 6, p. 10. Clements, Ronald E., ‘Smith, Sir William (1813–1893)’, ODNB, vol. 51 (2004), pp. 376–7, and ch. 9 of this volume. Smith, William, A History of Greece, C. C. Felton (ed.) (Boston, MA, 1855), pp. iii–iv. Felton, Preface (dated January 1855), pp. iv–vii, in Smith, History of Greece. Felton, in Smith, History of Greece, notes on pp. 48, 97, 164, 170, 180, 183. Felton, in Smith, History of Greece, notes on pp. 234, 357, 380, 485. Carlisle, George W. F. H., 7th Earl, Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters, Preface C. C. Felton (ed.) (Boston, MA, 1855). For Carlisle, see Ian Machlin, ‘Howard, George William Frederick, seventh Earl of Carlisle (1802–1864)’, ODNB, vol. 28 (2004), pp. 355–7. Felton, in Carlisle, Diary, Preface, pp. x–xii. Felton, in Carlisle, Diary, notes on pp. 71–2, 132–3, 167, 220. Felton, in Carlisle, Diary, notes on pp. 252–5. Felton, in Carlisle, Diary, notes on pp. 253–4. Felton, Familiar Letters, p. 392. Felton, in Carlisle, Diary, p. ix and note on p. 254; Felton to J. H. Hill, 18 February 1855 and Carlyle to Felton, 23 July 1855, Felton Papers, Harvard University Archives; Felton to Guyot, 21 November 1856, Guyot Papers, Historical Society of Princeton NJ; Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, p. 175.

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50 51

52 53 54

55

56

57 58 59

60

61 62

63

Felton, Familiar Letters, p. 124. Reports of Felton presentations: Proceedings of the AAAS, iii (1852–7), pp. 173, 210–12; iv (1857–60), pp. 5, 103, 180–92, 219–25, 324, 409–10; v (1860–2), pp. 230–1. Felton’s correspondence with Hill is divided between the Harvard University Archives (outgoing) and the Houghton Library (incoming). Felton, Familiar Letters, p. 363; Larrabee, Hellas Observed, p. 259. Felton, ‘Hellas and the Hellenes’, Greece, Ancient and Modern, vol. 1, p. 275. Felton’s interest in modern Greece is clear, not only from his second Lowell Lecture series, ‘Modern Greece’ (originally titled ‘On the Downfall and Reconstruction of Greece’) but also in his added chapter to Smith’s History, several published papers, and throughout the Familiar Letters. For Felton’s lectures on geography and topography, his use of a wall map, and other geographically related matters in his weekly lectures to Juniors, see Felton, ‘Lectures on Greek History and Literature, 1855–1861’, Harvard University Archives, and a box of manuscript fragments in Felton Family Papers, Houghton Library. See also Felton, ‘Characteristics of the American college’ (Inaugural Address, 26 July 1860), American Journal of Education, ix/22 (1860), p. 125; also found in Addresses at the Inauguration of Cornelius Conway Felton, LL.D., as President of Harvard College – July 19, 1860, p. 111 (Cambridge, MA, 1860). For the photograph collection, see James Walker, Annual Report of the President of Harvard College, 1856–1857, p. 4. Bowdoin prize essay topics are taken from the Harvard catalogues; other titles are selected from ‘Order of performances for exhibition, 1820–1868’ and ‘A historical transcript and collection of the order of exercises for Commencement at Harvard College, 1820 to 1870’, Boston Public Library. For Harvard student travel in this period, see Koelsch, ‘Enlargement of a World’, chs 6–8. Larrabee, Hellas Observed, p. 288; Koelsch, ‘Enlargement of a world’, chs 6–7. Horace Howard Furness, The Letters of Horace Howard Furness, vol. 1, p. 95, H. H. F. Jayne (ed.), 2 vols (Boston, MA and New York, 1922). Felton, Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the President of Harvard College, 1859–1860, p. 17; Goodwin, ‘Address’, pp. 126–7; Chase, Thomas, Hellas: Her Monuments and Scenery (Cambridge, MA, 1863); Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, pp. 263, 301 (Cambridge, MA, 1946). For Chase, see Labaree, Hellas Observed, pp. 257–8. Herbert Baxter Adams, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, pp. 17–20, US Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, no. 2, 1887 (Washington, DC, 1887). Adams, Study of History, pp. 23–6; Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, pp. 291–3. Ticknor to Marsh, 5 February 1855; Felton to Marsh, 9 February, 18 March 1855; Marsh to Ticknor, 10 February 1955, in George Perkins Marsh Papers, University of Vermont; David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter, pp. 168–9 (New York, 1958. Rev. edn, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation, Seattle, WA, 2000). See also Lowenthal. ‘George Perkins Marsh and the American geographical tradition’, Geographical Review, xliii/2 (1953), pp. 207–13. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, p. 169, Marsh, Man and Nature, D. Lowenthal, (ed.) (Cambridge, MA, 1965). See also Marsh, ‘Address to the Agricultural Society of Rutland County’ [VT], 1847, printed by a local press in 1848, Koelsch (ed.), in B. G. Rosenkrantz and W. A. Koelsch (comps), American Habitat: A Historical Perspective, pp. 340–64 (New York, 1973). The original was reprinted, along with several other early Marsh writings (including ‘The Study of nature’ and an abridgment of Man and Nature), in S. C. Trombulak (ed.), So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh (Hanover, NH, 2001).

410

NOTES

64

65

66

67

68

69 70

71 72

73

74

75

Emerton, ‘The practical method in higher historical instruction’, in G. S. Hall (ed.), Methods of Teaching History, 2nd edn, p. 50 (Boston, MA, 1884); Adams, Study of History, p. 23. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, p. 347. Morison, who gets the date of Torrey’s appointment wrong by three years (ibid., p. 293), also points out that before President Eliot’s tenure (i.e., long after Torrey’s student days), ‘there was no such thing in America as an academic profession of history’ (p. 347). Morison was notorious, especially in his early years at Harvard, for complaining about his teaching responsibilities and lecturing only on those topics on which he would publish. See Washburn,Wilcomb E., ‘Samuel Eliot Morison, Historian’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., xxxvi/3 (1971), pp. 325–52 and Pfitzer, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Historical World, pp. 78–9, 88–9. Goodwin, ‘Memoir of Henry Warren Torrey, LL.D.’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Ser. ix (1894–5), pp. 202–3; H. B. Adams, ‘Professor Henry W. Torrey’, in Adams, Study of History, pp. 26–31. ‘January Meeting, 1894’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Ser. viii (1892–4), p. 401; Goodwin, ‘Memoir of Torrey’, pp. 203–4; Smith, H. W., ‘William Watson Goodwin’, Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, xi/1 (1912), pp. 22–3; Turner, James, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, p. 138 (Baltimore, MD, 1999). Henry Warren Torrey, Lecture on the Uses of the Study of History (Cambridge, MA, 1868); Emerton and Morison, ‘History, 1838–1929’, in Morison (ed.), The Development of Harvard University, p. 153; Macvane, Silas E., ‘Henry Warren Torrey’, Harvard Monthly, xvii/4 (1894), p. 134. Scott, Henry E., ‘The courses of study in history, Roman law, and political economy, at Harvard University’, in Hall (ed.), Methods of Teaching History, p. 171 notes Macvane’s emphasis on historical geography. Albert Bushnell Hart, ‘Government’, in Morison (ed.), Development of Harvard University, p. 179; Goodwin, ‘Memoir of Torrey’, pp. 205–6. Torrey to Librarian of Harvard College, quoted in Warntz, Geography Now and Then, p. 42; Emerton, ‘History’, p. 153; Koelsch, ‘“A profound though special erudition”: Justin Winsor as historian of discovery’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, xciii/1 (1983), pp. 55–94. For the Ebeling collection, see Brown, Ralph H., ‘The Ebeling-Sotzmann maps of the northern seaboard states’, Geographical Review, xxx/3 (1940), pp. 471–9. H. B. Adams, Study of History, pp. 17, 19, 26. Thomas Arnold, Introductory Lectures on Modern History (London, 1842); Walker, James, Thirty-Third Annual Report of the President of Harvard College, 1857–1858, p. 25; Koelsch, ‘Enlargement of a world’, pp. 193–4. Leighton, R. F. (comp.), Harvard Examination Papers, 6th edn, pp. 6, 195, 257 (Boston, MA, 1877). Winterer, ‘The big picture: the ancient Mediterranean in early America’, Common-Place, viii/4 (2008), pp. 1–12, suggests that after the early nineteenth-century American interest in the ancient Mediterranean world shrank to Greece and Rome, mainly the former. But the Harvard examinations of the 1870s suggest that was not universally true. Anderson, Thornton, Brooks Adams: Constructive Conservative, pp. 6–7, 8, 10–11, 13, 16–19, 25, 88, 91, 192 (Ithaca, NY, 1951). An 1873 examination in Gurney’s Roman History course begins with a required question: ‘Draw a map of Italy showing its chief physical features and ancient political divisions.’ Students also had to indicate seven ancient cities and the courses of three rivers. Found in H. B. Adams, Study of History, p. 34. Henry Adams’ 1872 examination is printed in H. B. Adams, Study of History, p. 36.

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76

77

78

79

80

Channing, ‘The relation of geography to history’, National Educational Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, 1895, pp. 192–6 (St Paul, MN, 1895); H. B. Adams, Study of History, pp. 247–8. For Channing, see Morison, ‘Edward Channing’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, lxiv (1932), pp. 250– 84; Morison, By Land and By Sea: Essays and Addresses, pp. 299–337 (New York, 1953). For Hart, see his ‘Methods of teaching American history’, in Hall (ed.), Methods of Teaching History, pp. 1–31, 3rd edn (Boston, MA, 1898). (The third edition has Hart’s additional comments on the use of maps.) See also Hart’s review of A. P. Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History and E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, American Historical Review, ix/3 (1904), pp. 571–2; Morison, ‘Albert Bushnell Hart’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, lxvi (1942), pp. 434–8; Baird, Carol F., ‘Albert Bushnell Hart: the rise of the professional historian’, pp. 129–74, in P. Buck (ed.), Social Sciences at Harvard, 1860–1920: From Inculcation to the Open Mind (Cambridge, MA, 1965); and Cappon, Lester J., ‘Review article: the historical map in American atlases’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxix/4 (1979), pp. 622–34. For both, see Cappon, ‘Channing and Hart: partners in bibliography’, New England Quarterly, xxix/3 (1956), pp. 318–40, as well as Channing and Hart, Guide to the Study of American History (Boston, MA, 1896; 2nd edn [with Turner], 1912). For Turner and geography, see Robert H. Block, ‘Frederick Jackson Turner and American geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxx/1 (1980), pp. 31–42. See also Billington, Ray A., Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York, 1972) and Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman, OK, 1998). Koelsch, ‘Justin Winsor’, pp. 62–6 and references; Allen, John Logan, ‘Where we are and how we got there: surveying the record of exploration studies’, in E. C. Carter, Jr (ed.), Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930, pp. 3–18 (Philadelphia, PA,1999); Koelsch, ‘William H. Tillinghast, John K. Wright, and some antecedents of American humanistic geography’, Journal of Historical Geography, xxix/4 (2003), pp. 620–34 and references. Tillinghast, William H., ‘The geographical knowledge of the ancients considered in relation to the discovery of America’, in J. Winsor (ed.), Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. 1, pp. 1–52, 8 vols in 16 (Boston, MA, 1884–9). The Tillinghast essay was cited not only in Channing and Hart (1896), and in Channing, Hart and Turner (1912), but in both editions of the Harvard Guide to American History, in 1954 (p. 253) and 1974 (p. 613). In his penultimate book on the age of discovery, Morison cites it as ‘still the best scholarly account of this subject’, though at that time nearly a century old. Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, p. 11 (New York, 1971). Biographical detail in Koelsch, ‘John Kirtland Wright, 1891–1969’, in P. H. Armstrong and G. J. Martin (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 22 (2003), pp. 169–81 and references (London, 2003). For Davis’ disdain for historical geography, see his ‘The progress of geography in the United States’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xiv/4 (1924), p. 197. Wright’s papers on Herodotus and Eratosthenes are in the Wright Papers, American Geographical Society archives, New York. Wright’s graduate experience and its context are outlined in Koelsch, ‘William H. Tillinghast’, pp. 623–5. Wright’s praise of Tillinghast’s essay is in Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe (New York, 1925. Reprint: New York, 1965); Wright, ‘A plea for the history of geography’, Isis, viii/3 (1926), p. 482. Reprint: Wright, Human Nature in Geography: Fourteen Papers, 1925–1965, p. 15 (Cambridge, MA, 1966).

412

NOTES

81

82

For Wright’s influence, in addition to Allen, ‘Where we are’ and Koelsch, ‘John Kirkland Wright’, see Keighren, Innes M., ‘Geosophy, imagination and Terrae Incognitae: exploring the intellectual history of John Kirtland Wright’, Journal of Historical Geography, xxxi/4 (2005), pp. 546–62. A sample of writings influenced by Wright’s ideas may be found in D. Lowenthal and M. J. Bowden (eds), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John K. Wright (New York, 1976). The well-deserved encomiums on Ferguson and Haskins are found in Starr, Chester G. (himself a leading ancient historian), ‘Ancient history in the twentieth century’, Classical World, lxxxiii/3 (1991), pp. 177, 179.

CHAPTER 8 1

2

3

4

5

For the Mackinder Readership and the Oxford School of Geography, see Scargill, D. Ian, ‘The RGS and the foundations of geography at Oxford’, Geographical Journal, cxlii/3 (1976), pp. 438–61; Michael Wise, ‘The Scott Keltie report of 1885 and the teaching of geography in Great Britain’, Geographical Journal, clii/3 (1986), pp. 367–82; Steel, Robert W., ‘The Oxford School of Geography’, in Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918–1945, pp. 58–75 (Cambridge, UK, 1987); and Scargill, The Oxford School of Geography, 1899–1999 (Oxford, UK, 1999). For the RGS role more generally, see Freeman, T. W., ‘The Royal Geographical Society and the development of geography’, in E. H. Brown (ed.), Geography Yesterday and Tomorrow, pp. 1–99 (Oxford, UK and New York, 1980). For Mackinder, see DNB, ODNB, and, among others, Parker, William H., Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft, ch. 1 (Oxford, UK, 1982); Brian W. Blouet, Sir Halford Mackinder, 1861–1947: Some New Perspectives (Oxford, UK, 1985), which is a useful guide to manuscript sources; Blouet, Halford Mackinder: A Biography (College Station, TX, 1987); Gerry Kearns, ‘Halford John Mackinder, 1861–1947’, in T. W. Freeman (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 9 (1985), pp. 71–86 and references (London, 1985); Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire: The Legacy of Halford Mackinder (Oxford, UK, 2009) and references. Paul Coones, Mackinder’s ‘Scope and Methods of Geography’ after a Hundred Years provides an exhaustive and balanced view of Mackinder’s most famous lecture (Oxford, UK, 1987). Comment on physical geography: Mackinder, ‘Geographical education: the year’s progress at Oxford’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, x/8 (1888), pp. 531–3. Mackinder, ‘Geography as a pivotal subject in education’, Geographical Journal, lvii/5 (1921), p. 378; Mackinder, ‘Geography at the universities’, Geographical Journal, ix/6 (1897), p. 653; Kearns, ‘Mackinder’, p. 72; Mackinder, ‘The teaching of geography at the universities’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, ix/11 (1887), pp. 699–700; Mackinder’s annual reports to the RGS in its Proceedings and Geographical Journal; Mackinder to RGS Council, 1 November 1888, Mackinder file, RGS Archives. Baker, J. N. L., ‘The history of geography at Oxford’, in Baker, The History of Geography: Papers by J. N. L. Baker, p. 124 (New York, 1963). See also Howarth, Janet, ‘Science education in late-Victorian Oxford: a curious case of failure?’ English Historical Review, cii/2 (1987), pp. 334–71 and Harvie, Christopher, ‘Reform and expansion, 1854–1871’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 6, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, p. 700 and note 15 (Oxford, UK, 1997). Mackinder, ‘Geographical education: the year’s progress at Oxford’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, xi/8 (1889), pp. 502–3; Coones, ‘The centenary of the Mackinder Readership at Oxford’, Geographical Journal, clv/1 1989) p. 16; Firth, Charles H., The Oxford School of Geography, p. 4 (Oxford, UK, 1918); Keltie, John

413

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Scott, The Position of Geography in British Universities, pp. 5, 11 (New York, 1921); The Student’s Handbook to the University and Colleges of Oxford, 16th edn, p. 159 (Oxford, UK, 1903). (The Handbooks carry the same statement through 1914.); Currie, R., ‘The arts and social studies, 1914–1939’, in B. Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8, The Twentieth Century, pp. 110–11 (Oxford, UK, 1994); Symonds, Richard, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (Oxford, UK, 1986), pp. 31–5; and Withers, Charles W. J., ‘A partial biography: the formalization and institutionalization of geography in Britain since 1887’, in G. S. Dunbar (ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject since 1870: An International Survey, pp. 85–7 (Dordrecht, Neth, 2001). See also Ward, William R., Victorian Oxford (London, 1965), passim and Walsh, W. H., ‘The zenith of greats’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7, NineteenthCentury Oxford, Part 2, pp. 311–26, as well as Richard Jenkyns, ‘Classical studies, 1872–1914’ (pp. 327–31), Oswyn Murray, ‘Ancient history, 1872–1914’ (pp. 333– 50), and Reba N. Soffer, ‘Modern history’ (pp. 361–84), in the same volume (Oxford, UK, 2000). Oxford University, Delegates of the Common University Fund, Committee for the Supervision of Instruction in Geography (hereafter ‘Geographical Committee’), Minutes, Oxford University Archives, Bodleian Library, Oxford, passim; J. L. Myres to T. W. Freeman, 6 June, 10 September 1950, Records of the Committee on the Revival of British Geography, R.G.S. Archives. For Brodrick, see DAB and ODNB and his Memories and Impressions, 1831–1900 (London, 1900), pp. 187, 211. For Pelham, see Murray, ‘Ancient history, 1872–1914’, as well as DAB, ODNB, and ch. 6 of this volume. Mackinder, ms. autobiography, Mackinder Papers, School of Geography, Oxford, p. 36; Coones, Mackinder’s ‘Scope and Methods of Geography’, passim; Firth, Oxford School of Geography, pp. 5–6. For George, in addition to DNB and O D N B, see Butlin, Robin, ‘Historical geographies of the British empire, c. 1887–1925’, in M. R. Bell, R. Butlin, and M. Heffernan (eds), Geography and Imperialism, 1880– 1940, pp. 151–88 (Manchester, UK, 1995) and ch. 6 of this volume. Cantor, Leonard, ‘Halford Mackinder and the genesis of modern geography’, Journal of the Loughborough Victorian Studies Group, vi/6 (1981), pp. 3–13 (esp. pp. 8–9); ‘Monthly record’, Geographical Journal, i/2 (1893), pp. 157–8. ‘Discussion on educational papers’, International Geographical Congress, 6th London 1895, Proceedings, p. 91 (London, 1896); Dryer, Charles Redway, ‘The Oxford School of Geography’, Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, v / 1 (1907), p. 32. Keltie, ‘Report to the Council’, p. 28, in Royal Geographical Society, Report of the Proceedings of the Society in Reference to the Improvement of Geographical Education (London, 1886); Sir Clements Markham to Vice-Chancellor, 17 February 1899 (draft), Oxford University Department of Geography file, RGS Archives; The Times (London), 29 March 1899, p. 4; Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entry for 8 June 1899; Mackinder, ms. autobiography, pp. 45–6 and Baker, interview with J. L. Myres, ms. 1950, Oxford School of Geography Archives. For Grundy, see his Fifty-Five Years at Oxford: An Unconventional Autobiography (London, 1945); ‘Dr. G. B. Grundy’, Geographical Journal, cxii/4–6 (1949), p. 259, and DBC. [Baker], ‘Oxford Geography’, ms. c. 1928, p. 63, Oxford School of Geography Archives; Scargill, ‘RGS and … Oxford’, p. 443; ‘The geographical studentship at Oxford’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, N.S., xiv/4 (1892), p. 235; Crawford, O. G. S., Said and Done: The Autobiography of an Archaeologist, pp. 42, 44 (London, 1955). Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, pp. 73–4 (on Mackinder), 81, 86, 93, 146–7; Grundy to Royal Geographical Society, 9 March 1892, Grundy file, RGS Archives; ‘Mr.

414

NOTES

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25

26

Grundy’s surveys in Boeotia’, Geographical Journal, i/3 (1893), pp. 262–3; Grundy, The Topography of the Battle of Plataea (London, 1894); Mackinder, ‘Geography at the universities’, Geographical Journal, vi/1 (1895), p. 26. See also Collier, Peter, and Rob Inkpen, ‘The Royal Geographical Society and the development of surveying, 1870–1914’, Journal of Historical Geography, xxix/1 (2003), pp. 93–108 and Jones, Max, ‘Measuring the world: exploration, empire, and the reform of the Royal Geographical Society, c. 1874–93’, in M. J. Daunton (ed.), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, pp. 320–3 (Oxford, UK and New York, 2005). Grundy, Plataea, pp. 8–9, 22, 43; Fifty-Five Years, p. 66; Crawford, Said and Done, pp. 302–3. Grundy, Plataea, pp. 3, 26, 31, 41, 47–9 and maps. Grundy, The Great Persian War and its Preliminaries: A Study of the Evidence, Literary and Topographical, Preface, pp. xii–xiii, 223, 277 (London and New York, 1901. Reprint: New York, 1969). Grundy, Great Persian War, Preface, pp. v–vi, 223–4, 452–3. Balsdon, Dacre, Oxford Now and Then, p. 117 (New York, 1970). Grundy, Great Persian War, pp. 452–3. [C. W. W.], ‘The geography of the Graeco-Persian Wars’, Geographical Journal, xix/3 (1902), p. 360; Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, p. 94; Freeman, T. W., ‘Eminent Edwardians’, Geographical Magazine, xlvii/9 (1975), pp. 575–7. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of his Age (London, 1911; 2nd edn, Oxford, UK, 1948), p. 61; appraisal by Victor Davis Hanson in R. B. Strassler (ed.), The Landmark Thucydides, p. 634 (New York, 1996). Pritchett, W. Kendrick, Studies in Ancient Greek Topography, Part 1, University of California Publications: Classical Studies, vol. 1, p. 15, note 27 lists the relevant publications of the Grundy-Burrows debate (Berkeley, CA, 1965). See also Myres, Herodotus: Father of History (Oxford, UK, 1953), pp. 25, 283; Pritchett, ‘New light on Plataia’ [sic], American Journal of Archaeology, 2nd Ser., lxi/1 (1957), p. 9; Burn, Andrew R., Persia and the Greeks, pp. 17 and 520–1, note 21, 2nd edn (Stanford, CA, 1984); and Wilson, John B., Pylos 425 BC: A Historical and Topographical Study of Thucydides’ Account of the Campaign, p. 133 (Warminster, UK, 1979). Some critics of Grundy’s identifications are quite acerbic; see, for example, Levi, Peter (trans. and ed.), Pausanias, Guide to Greece, vol. 1, Central Greece, p. 317, note 2 (Harmondsworth, UK, 1971). Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entries for 5 December 1900 and 4 June 1901; ‘The School of Geography at Oxford’, Geographical Teacher, i/2 (1902), p. 90; Annual Reports of the School of Geography, 1901–2 and later (included with Geographical Committee, Minutes, Oxford University Archives); Blouet, Halford Mackinder, p. 99. Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entries for 4 June 1901, 23 June 1904. Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entries for 15 May 1902, 11 February 1904. Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entries for 13 October 1904, 25 October 1906; University of Oxford School of Geography, Regulations for 1907 and Examination Papers for 1906, p. 20 (Oxford, 1907). Keltie, ‘On apparatus used in teaching geography’, p. 193, in Royal Geographical Society, Report… in Reference to the Improvement of Geographical Education; Talbert, R. J. A., ‘Mapping the classical world: major atlases and map series, 1872–1990’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, v (1992), pp. 9–11, with lists and dates of Grundy’s maps, pp. 32–3. For contemporary reviews of the series, see ‘Murray’s handy classical maps’, Geographical Journal, xvi/2 (1900), pp. 234–5 and D. G. H[ogarth], Geographical Journal, xxi/3 (1903), p. 314. See also Toynbee, Arnold J., ‘The growth of Sparta’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxxiii (1913), foldout map between pages 246

415

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27

28

29

30

31 32 33

and 247, and Zimmern, Alfred E., The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth Century Athens, p. 49, note 1 (London, [1911]; 2nd edn, 1915). Grundy, Preface (dated September 1904) to Murray’s Small Classical Atlas (London, 1904; 2nd edn, 1917); Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, pp. 147–50. See also reviews in Geographical Journal, xxv/2 (1905), pp. 242 and H. C., in Geographical Journal, xxvi/4 (1905), pp. 447–8. Grundy’s claim to have introduced layered tinting of contour maps to Britain is refuted in Robinson, Arthur H., Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography, p. 213 (Chicago, IL, 1982) and in H. M. Wallis and Robinson (eds), Cartographical Innovation: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms, p. 230 (Tring, UK, 1987). MacMunn, Nora F., ‘Historical maps and atlases’, Geographical Teacher v/27 (1909), p. 35; Crawford, Said and Done, pp. 164–5; Thomson, J. Oliver, History of Ancient Geography, p. 394 (Cambridge, UK, 1948. Reprint: New York, 1965); Murray, ‘Ancient history’, p. 357 repeats Grundy’s claim. Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entries for 26 May, 23 June 1904, 26 October 1905, and 22 October 1908; ‘Memorandum on the Requirements of the School of Geography in the University of Oxford, November 1907’, p. 3 ms., RGS Archives; Myres to A. E. Zimmern, 9 September 1907, Alfred E. Zimmern Papers, New Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Myres to Electors to the Wykeham Professorship of Ancient History [1910], John Linton Myres Papers, New Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Blouet, Halford Mackinder, pp. 99–105; Koelsch, William A., ‘John Linton Myres’, in G. J. Martin (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 16 (1995), pp. 54, 61 (London, 1995); Mackinder, ‘Andrew John Herbertson’, Geographical Teacher, viii/43 (1915), p. 144 (also quoted in Gilbert, Edmund W., ‘Andrew John Herbertson (1865–1915)’, in Gilbert, British Pioneers in Geography, p.188) (New York, 1972); Scargill, Oxford School of Geography, pp. 7–8. Geographical Committee, Minutes, vol. 1, entries for 6 May 1909, 5 May 1910, 30 June 1911; Crawford, Said and Done, p. 42; Curthoys, Mark C., ‘The examination system’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 6, Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, p. 354 (Oxford, UK, 1997); Grundy, Fifty-Five Years, p. 102; Grundy, ‘Marathon’, in H. Lunn (ed.), Aegean Civilizations, 4th edn, pp. 171–86 (London, 1929). Mackinder, ‘Geography as a pivotal subject’, p. 379; Bowra, C. M., Memories, 1898–1929, pp. 106–8, 264–5 (Cambridge, MA, 1967). Murray, ‘Ancient history’, p. 350 and note 75; Grundy, Fifty Years, pp. 130–2, 156–8; ‘Dr. G. B. Grundy’, p. 259; Blouet, Halford Mackinder, p. 106. Hood, Rachel, ‘Maurice Scott Thompson, 1884–1971’, in Hood, Faces of Archaeology in Greece, pp. 109–14 (Oxford, UK, 1998); T[oynbee], A. J., ‘Maurice Scott Thompson’, British School at Athens, Annual Report of the Managing Committee for the Session 1970–1971, pp. 12–13; Waterhouse, Helen, The British School at Athens: The First Hundred Years, pp. 20–3, 54, 132, 157 (London, 1986). Also Thompson to John L. Myres, 7 September 1910, 14 January 1912; Myres to Thompson, 6 February 1912; Thompson to Myres, 12 February, 2 June, 8 August 1912; Myres to Thompson, 18 May, 10 August 1912, all in Myres Papers; Reports of the Committee for the Supervision of Instruction in Geography (Oxford, 1912, 1913); Minutes of the Geography Committee, vol. 2, entries for 9 May, 24 October 1912. Thompson’s publications around this time included Wace, Alan J. B. and Thompson, ‘The distribution of early civilization in northern Greece’, Geographical Journal, xxxvii/6 (1911), pp. 631–42; Wace and Thompson, Prehistoric Thessaly (Cambridge, UK, 1912); Wace and Thompson, The Nomads of the Balkans (London, 1912); and Thompson, ‘Deforestation in ancient Greece’, Proceedings of the Durham Philosophical Society, Newcastle-on-Tyne, v/5, Part 2 (1912–13), pp. 100–12. See also

416

NOTES

34 35

36

37

38

39 40

41 42

43

44

45

McNeill, William Hardy, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, p. 180 (New York, 1989) and Toynbee, Experiences, p. 295 (London and New York, 1969). Minutes of the Geography Committee, vol. 2, entry for 1 May 1913 and vol. 3, List of Staff for Michaelmas Term, 1913 and entry for 2 December 1913. For Toynbee, as well as earlier notes see DNB, ODNB, DBC and refs. For Rendall, also see DNB and ODNB and references. Toynbee, ‘Montague John Rendall’, in Toynbee, Acquaintances, pp. 37–42 (London and New York, 1967); McNeill, Toynbee, passim. McNeill, ‘Arnold Joseph Toynbee, 1889–1975’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxv (1977), pp. 441–69 is also valuable. Toynbee’s marked copies of his ‘Greats’ examination questions: ‘Second Public Examination: Classical Paper, Ancient History, Trinity Term, 1911’ and ‘Second Public Examination, Greek History, Trinity Term, 1911’, in envelope marked ‘Oxford and Winchester Examination Papers’, Arnold J. Toynbee Papers, New Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Toynbee’s essay, ‘What the Historian Does’ (typescript) is identified in Toynbee’s hand as ‘(Essay read to an undergraduate club at Oxford in the University Year 1910–1911)’, Toynbee Papers. Toynbee to Alfred E. Zimmern, 23 August 1909, Zimmern Papers; Zimmern, Preface to Second Edition, dated 2 December 1914, The Greek Commonwealth, 2nd edn (Oxford, UK, 1915). See also Toynbee, Acquaintances, ch. 5, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern’, pp. 49–61 (quote p. 49); Fink, Carole, ‘Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard’, in Kuehl, Warren (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists, pp. 815–16 (Westport, CT, 1983); Paul Millett, ‘Alfred Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth revisited’, in C. Stray (ed.), Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000, pp. 168–202 (London, 2007); DNB, ODNB, DBC and refs. Toynbee’s map of Attica was retained in later editions, including the 1956 Modern Library reprint of the fifth (final) edition. DNB, ODNB, DBC and ch. 6 of this volume; Koelsch, ‘John Linton Myres, 1869– 1954’; Myres, Greek Lands and the Greek People (Oxford, UK, 1910. Reprint: Myres, Geographical History in Greek Lands, pp. 1–33, Oxford, UK, 1953); Myres to Thompson, 6 February 1912, Myres Papers. Toynbee, Experiences, pp. 18–39, 99, 103–4. Toynbee, Journal of Greek Travels, 1911–12 (2 bound vols), vol. 1, entry for 14 December 1911, Toynbee Papers; Toynbee to Edith M. Toynbee, 25 December 1911, Toynbee Papers; Thompson to Myres, 12 February 1912, Myres Papers. McNeill, Toynbee, p. 180; Toynbee, Journal, 1911–12, passim; Toynbee to Edith M. Toynbee, 6 December 1911, 8 January, 26 January 1912, Toynbee Papers. Myres to Gilbert Murray, 2 September 1913, Gilbert Murray Papers, New Bodleian Library, Oxford University; Committee for Geography, Minutes, vol. 2, entry for 2 December 1913; Toynbee, ‘The growth of Sparta’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxx (1913), pp. 246–75; Toynbee, Acquaintances, p. 26; McNeill, Proceedings, p. 443. Syllabus marked AJT in red, Myres Papers, Box 118, also marked ‘Lectures as Delivered ET [Easter Term], 1914’; Lecture, ‘From Isotherms to Minoan Crete’ in Toynbee’s handwriting, identified in red ink in Myres’ hand as ‘A. J. Toynbee, on my behalf, E.T. 1914’, Myres Papers. Syllabus, ‘General Scheme: Lectures Delivered E. T. 1915 (AJT)’ and ‘The Economic Basis of Society Under Mediterranean Conditions’, Myres Papers; Toynbee to Gilbert Murray, 12 July 1914, Toynbee Papers. Spate, O. H. K., ‘Toynbee and Huntington: a study in determinism’, Geographical Journal, cxvii/4 (1952), pp. 406–28 greatly distorts Toynbee’s views on human relationships to the environment. Toynbee, notes for lectures, ‘The Geography of Greece’, undated, Toynbee Papers.

417

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

46 47

48

49

50 51

52

53

54

55

56

Toynbee, Experiences, p. 104; Hannibal’s Legacy: The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life, vol. 1, p. v and passim, 2 vols (New York and London, 1965). Committee for Geography, Second Annual Report, 1914–1915, pp. 3, 4; Committee for Geography, Minutes, vol. 3, entries for 22 October 1914, 6 May 1915; Andrew R. Herbertson to A. R. Hinks, 13 May 1915, Herbertson file, RGS Archives; Toynbee, Nationality and the War, Preface, p. vii (London, 1915). For Myres’ wartime service, see Myres, J. N. L., Commander J. L. Myres, R.V.N.R.: The Blackbeard of the Aegean, Tenth J. L. Myres Memorial Lecture (London, 1980). [Frances] Dorothy Herbertson to Toynbee, 31 July [1915], Toynbee Papers. Dorothy Herbertson had taken a first in classics at the University of London and had taught the subject at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College prior to her marriage; Jay, L. J., ‘A. J. Herbertson: his services to school geography’, Geography, l/4 (1965), pp. 359–60. Dorothy Herbertson survived her husband by only a fortnight. See ‘The late Mrs. Herbertson’, Geographical Teacher, viii/44 (1916), p. 211. McNeill, Toynbee, pp. 117, 303 note 5; Toynbee, ‘Directions for Publication’ dated 22 June 1929, Toynbee Papers. For the Koraes Professorship, see Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London, 1986). (Reprinted from Middle Eastern Studies, xxi/4 [1985], pp. 1–117.) Toynbee, ‘Lectures on the Historical Geography of Greece’, Toynbee Papers. Blouet, Mackinder, p. 105; Coones, Centenary, p. 16; Annual Report of the School of Geography for 1913–14 (Oxford, 1914); Committee for Geography, Minutes, vol. 3, entries for 6 May 1915 and 30 October 1919. In 1913, under a new statute, the old supervisory committee had been reconstituted, enlarged, and renamed the ‘Committee for Geography’, though the numerical sequence of minute books was retained. See Herbertson to J. Scott Keltie, 10 October 1913, Oxford School of Geography file, RGS Archives. Mackinder to Douglas C. Freshfield, Mackinder file, RGS Archives; Firth, Oxford School, pp. 22–3; O[gilvie], A[lan] G. and J. N. L. B[aker], ‘Henry Oliver Beckit’. Geographical Journal, lxxvii/5 (1931), pp. 489–90; Scargill, ‘RGS and… Oxford’, p. 457; Cantor, ‘The Royal Geographical Society and the projected London Institute of Geography, 1892–1899’, Geographical Journal, cxxviii/1 (1962), p. 30. Committee for Geography, Minutes, vol. 3, entries for 7 February 1918 and 30 October 1919; vol. 4, entries for 18 May and 24 October 1922; Committee for Geography, Revised Report of the Subcommittee on a Scheme for a Final School in Geography, proof sheet, dated 1919, included in Minutes, vol. 3. An undated ms. indicates that after Toynbee’s departure ‘much of the instruction in historical geography has been taken by various lecturers in Ancient and Modern History’, cited in [Baker], ‘Oxford Geography’, ms., University of Oxford School of Geography archives. Committee for Geography, Minutes, vol. 4, entries for 7 June 1923, 7 February 1924 and passim; Steel, ‘John Norman Leonard Baker, 1893–1971’, in G. J. Martin (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 16 (1995), pp. 1–11 (London, 1995); Baker, History of Geographical Discovery and Exploration (London and Boston, MA, 1931. Rev. edn, 1936. Reprint: New York, 1967), ch. 1; Handbook to the University of Oxford, p. 145 (Oxford, UK, 1932); Handbook to the University of Oxford, p. 371 (Oxford, UK, 1966). Committee for Geography, Minutes, vol. 4, entry for 24 January 1929; Steel, ‘Oxford School of Geography’, pp. 58–75; Goudie, Andrew S., ‘Kenneth J. Mason, 1887–1976’, in P. H. Armstrong and G. J. Martin (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 18 (1998), pp. 67–72 (London, 1998). Freeman, T. W. ‘Edmund William Gilbert, 1900–1973’, in T. W. Freeman and P. Pinchemel (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 3 (1979), pp. 63–71 (London, 1979); Robinson, Guy and John Patten, ‘Edmund W. Gilbert and the

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development of historical geography: with a bibliography of his work’, Journal of Historical Geography, vi/4 (1980), pp. 409–19; Gilbert, Geography as a Humane Study; Gilbert, ‘The human geography of Roman Britain’, in H. C. Darby (ed.), An Historical Geography of England Before 1800, pp. 30–87 (Cambridge, UK, 1936). For Kendrew, see Smith, C. Gordon, ‘Wilfrid George Kendrew, 1884–1962’, in G. J. Martin and P. H. Armstrong (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 17 (1997), pp. 43–51 (London, 1997). Quote from Herbertson, ‘Regional environment, heredity and consciousness’, Geographical Teacher, viii/43 (1915), p. 153. For Herbertson’s insistence that an Honour School of Geography should be located in the Honour School of Natural Science, see Firth, Oxford School, p. 17; Baker, ‘The history of geography at Oxford,’ p. 127; Scargill, ‘RGS and … Oxford’, p. 455; and Currie, Robert, ‘The arts and social studies, 1914–1939’, p. 117, in Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 8, The Twentieth Century.

CHAPTER 9 1 2

3

4

5

6

Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960, p. 1 (Oxford, UK and New York, 1998). Rudolph, Frederick, ‘The neglect of students as a historical tradition’, in L. E. Dennis and J. E. Kauffman (eds), The College and the Student, pp. 47–58 (Washington, DC, 1966); Stray, ‘Schoolboys and gentlemen: classical pedagogy and authority in the English public school’, p. 30, in Y. L. Loo and N. Livingstone (eds), Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, pp. 29–46 (Cambridge, UK, 1998). See also Koelsch, William A., ‘Terrae Incognitae and arcana siwash: toward a richer history of academic geography’, in D. Lowenthal and M. J. Bowden (eds), Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirtland Wright, pp. 63–87 (New York, 1976). Adams, Henry, ‘Harvard College, 1786–87’, North American Review, cxiv/1 (1872), pp. 115–16, 116–17; John Kirtland Wright and Elizabeth T. Platt (comps), Aids to Geographical Research, p. 85, 2nd edn, rev. (New York, 1947). Stray, ‘Schoolboys and gentlemen’, p. 44 and Bowen, James, ‘Education, ideology, and the ruling class: Hellenism and English public schools in the nineteenth century’, pp. 161–86, in G. W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge, UK, 1989); Finley, Moses, The Use and Abuse of History, rev. edn, pp. 204–5 (New York, 1987). Gaisford’s alleged comment is quoted in Green, Peter, Classical Bearings: Interpreting Ancient History and Culture, p. 19, but is refuted on p. 272, note 16 (New York, 1989). Bill and Mason say Gaisford’s ‘misfortune is to be remembered chiefly as the butt of some largely apocryphal anecdotes’, E. G. W. Bill and J. F. A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform, 1850–1867, p. 6 (Oxford, UK, 1970). See also Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, pp. 81–102 (London, 1962). Davie, George Elder, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 10–13 (Edinburgh, UK, 1961); Anderson, R. D., Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities, pp. 238–9 (Oxford, UK, 1983). For classical teaching in Scotland generally, see Clarke, M. L., Classical Education in Britain, 1500–1900, ch. 7 (Cambridge, UK, 1959). For the teaching of geography in the Scottish Enlightenment, see Withers, Charles W. J., Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland Since 1520, pp. 134–42 (Cambridge, UK, 2001). Quoted in Sanderson, Michael (ed.), The Universities in the Nineteenth Century, p. 63 (London, 1975). Thompson’s remark is quoted from his 1929 lecture on ‘Science

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7

8

9

10

11

12

and the classics’, p. 15, in Thompson, Science and the Classics, pp. 1–36 (London, 1940). For Pillans and his textbooks, see Allibone, vol. 2, p. 1,596, DNB and ODNB. Pillans’ teaching and his books are also mentioned in Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, pp. 147, 157 and, somewhat dismissively, in Marsden, William, ‘The Royal Geographical Society and geography in secondary education’, pp. 192– 3, in M. H. Prince (ed.), The Development of the Secondary Curriculum (London, 1986). Ref. to Myres’ talk is from Knox, Ronald, ‘The Classical Association of Scotland: the first hundred years’, in Stray (ed.), The Classical Association: The First Century, 1903–2003, Appendix A, p. 257 (Oxford, UK, 2003). Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 238–9; Kermack, W. R., ‘Southern Palestine: some notes on historical geography’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, xxxiv/3 (1918), p. 99. Bowen, ‘Education, ideology, and the ruling class’, pp. 161–86. Bowen is one of many scholars, including Stray, making this point; see especially Stray’s ‘Schoolboys and gentlemen’, above. For Trollope, see Tracy, Robert, ‘Lana Medicata Fuco: Trollope’s classicism’, in J. Halprin (ed.), Trollope Centenary Essays, p. 2 (New York, 1982). Kandel, Isaac L., History of Secondary Education: A Study of the Development of Liberal Education, pp. 67, 100 (Boston, MA, 1930); MacGillivry, Joseph Alexander, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth, p. 36 (New York, 2000); Roach, John, Secondary Education in England, 1870–1902: Public Activity and Private Enterprise, esp. ch. 4 (London and New York, 1991). For the previous century, see Mayhew, Robert J., ‘Geography in eighteenth-century British education’, Paedogogica Historica, xxxiv/3 (1998), pp. 731–69 and references. For the early nineteenth, see Vaughan, J. E., ‘Aspects of teaching geography in England in the early nineteenth century’, Paedogogica Historica, xii/1 (1972), pp. 128–47. Withers, ‘Eighteenth-century geography: texts, practice, sites’, Progress in Human Geography, xxx/6 (2008), pp. 711–21 reviews recent work in this area. The anonymous classics master is quoted in Green, Classical Bearings, p. 27 and skeptically viewed on p. 274, note 56. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, p. 76. See also Stray; ‘Ideology and institution: English classical scholarship in transition’, Annals of Scholarship, x/1 (1993), pp. 111–31 and Turner, Frank M., especially ‘Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain’, in Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism, pp. 61–81 and ‘Victorian classics: sustaining the study of the ancient world’, in M. Daunton (ed.), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, pp. 159–72 (Oxford, UK and New York, 2005). For the contrast between history’s growth away from a ‘mere memory subject’ in the nineteenth century into a university discipline, and the failure of geography to move beyond its earlier role as ‘a kind of handmaid to history’ until after 1900, see Archer, R. L., Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 166, 340–1 (London, 1966). Figures on Greek enrollments in 1921 taken from the government report, The Classics in Education, quoted in The Classical Association, 1903–2003, p. 37. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, pp. 76–8; Charles Darwin, Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, pp. 27–8, N. Barlow (ed.) (New York, 1959); Oman, Charles, Memories of Victorian Oxford, And of Some Early Years, p. 56 (London, 1941); W. E. Heitland, quoted in Shrosbree, Colin, Public Schools and Private Education: The Clarendon Commission 1861–1864 and the Public Schools Act, p. 147 (Manchester, UK, 1988); T. H. Huxley, ‘A liberal education; and where to find it’ (1868), in Huxley, Science and Education: Essays, p. 97 (London [1893], 1925). Brodrick, George C., Memories and Impressions, 1831–1900, p. 44 (London, 1900); Lyte, H. C. Maxwell, A History of Eton College, p. 319 (London, 1875); Card, Tim, Eton Renewed: A History from 1860 to the Present Day, p. 9 (London, 1994).

420

NOTES

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14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Lyte, Eton College, pp. 438–9; Archer, Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century, p. 166; Gibson, Ian, The English Vice: Beating, Sex, and Shame in Victorian England and After, ch. 3 and elsewhere (London, 1978). For a more recent analysis of flogging and classics in the English public school, albeit fictional and involving letting a mouse loose in a mechanical drawing class, see McDermott, Emily A., ‘Playing for His Side: Kipling’s “Regulus”,’ corporal punishment, and classical education’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, xv/3 (2008), pp. 369–92 and references. Francis Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 212 (New York, 1909); Byrne, L. S. R. and E. L. Churchill, Changing Eton: A Survey of Conditions at Eton Since the Royal Commission of 1862–64, pp. 97–8, 125 (London, 1937); Card, Eton Renewed, pp. 100, 130, 231, 250. On the perceived hostility to geography among classics masters, see remark by J. R. Robinson, p. 439, following Andrews, A. W., ‘The teaching of geography in relation to history’, Geographical Journal, ix/4 (1897), pp. 427–38; Wilkinson, F. J., ‘Recent examination papers in geography’, Geographical Teacher, i/1 (1901), p. 52; Herbertson, Andrew J., ‘Recent discussions on the scope and educational applications of geography’, Geographical Journal, xxiv/4 (1904), pp. 426–7; J. L. Myres, ‘Ancient geography in modern education’ (1928). Reprint: Myres, Geographical History in Greek Lands, p. 99 (Oxford, UK, 1953); Warrington, T. C., ‘The beginnings of the Geographical Association’, Geography, xxxviii/4 (1953), p. 223. Stray, Classics Transformed, esp. chaps 4, 7. Larson, Victoria Tietze, ‘Classics and the acquisition and validation of power in Britain’s “Imperial Century” (1815–1914)’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vi/2 (1999), pp. 185–225 and references. For the government’s qualifying examinations, see Roach, Public Examinations in England, 1850–1900, p. 196 and Armstrong, John A., The European Administrative Elite, pp. 149–61 (Princeton, NJ, 1973). See also Keltie, J. Scott, ‘Thirty years’ progress in geographical education’, Geographical Teacher, vii/38 (1914), p. 222 for comment on geography’s place in the examinations. See the excellent summary of Wiesen, David S., ‘Ancient history and early American education’, in S. F. Wiltshire (ed.), The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 53–69 and notes (N.p. [1977]). For later periods, see Callcott, George H., ‘History enters the schools’, American Quarterly, xi/4 (1959), pp. 470–83 and Callcott, History in the United States, 1800–1860: Its Practice and Purpose (Baltimore, MD, 1970). Callcott points out that ancient history courses were the first history courses in American schools, unmatched by American and modern European history until 1860. For Exeter’s 1818 curriculum, see Brown, Elmer Ellsworth, The Making of Our Middle Schools, pp. 237–8 (New York, 1903. Reprint: New York, 1969); for Cambridge, James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, p. 37 (Baltimore, MD, 1999); and ‘Report of the School Committee of the City of Cambridge for the Nine Months Ending December 31, 1854’, in City of Cambridge, Mayor’s Address and Reports, pp. 114–15 (Cambridge, MA, 1854). Inglis, Alexander, Principles of Secondary Education, p. 413 (Boston, MA, 1918); Roorbach, Agnew O., The Development of the Social Studies in American Secondary Schools Before 1861, Tables 1, 13, 14, PhD dissertation, Department of Education, The University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1937). Roorbach’s primary sources were largely catalogues held by the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA, and are therefore somewhat biased toward institutions in the American Northeast. New England High School curricula are largely taken from Grizzell, Emit Duncan, Origin and Development of the High School in New England Before 1865 (New York, 1923).

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22 23

24 25 26

27

28

29

30

Stout, John Elbert, The Development of High School Curricula in the North Central States from 1860 to 1918, ch. 1 (Chicago, IL, 1921. Reprint: New York, 1969). Siljestrom, P. A., The Educational Institutions of the United States, Frederica Rowan (trans.), pp. 115, 303–4 (London, 1853. Reprint: New York, 1969); Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, pp. 264–5 (London, 1997). Lowell School Committee, Report (1839), quoted in Stout, Development of High School Curricula, p. 5. Data from various tables in Stout, Development of High School Curricula. Bacote, Clarence A., The Story of Atlanta University, pp. 25, 36 (Atlanta, GA, 1969). On classics generally in the South, see Miles, Edwin A., ‘The old South and the classical world’, North Carolina Historical Review, xlviii/3 (1971), pp. 258–75. On women’s education, see Woody, Thomas E., Women’s Education in the United States, p. 415 and elsewhere, 2 vols (New York and Lancaster, PA, 1929); Tolley, Kim, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective, chs 1 and 2 (New York and London, 2003). On the academy movement, see Sizer, Theodore R. (ed.), The Age of the Academies, and Sizer’s ‘The academies: an interpretation’, pp. 1–48 (New York, 1964); Symposium, ‘Reappraisals of the academy movement’, History of Education Quarterly, xli/2 (2001), pp. 216–70; N. Beadie and K. Tolley (eds), Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (New York and London, 2002); Richard, Carl A., The Golden Age of Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, ch. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 2009). For American women and the classics: Winterer, Caroline, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, NY, 2007). Kepner, Tyler, ‘The influence of textbooks upon method’, p. 143, in E. N. Wesley (ed.), The Historical Approach to Methods of Teaching the Social Studies (Philadelphia, PA, 1935) and Maddrell, Avril M. L., ‘Discussions of race and gender and the comparative method in geography school texts, 1830–1918’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, xvi/1 (1998), pp. 81–103. Identification and dates of British texts in classical geography are taken from scattered sources, mostly DNB and ODNB, as well as Sitwell, O. F. G., Four Centuries of Special Geography (Vancouver, BC, 1993). See also Dryer, Charles R., ‘A century of geographic education in the United States’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xiv/3 (1924), p. 119. Donald Dahmann’s recent manuscript compilation (primarily covering the nineteenth century), ‘Geography in America’s schools, libraries, and homes’ (Washington, DC, 2006), lists both American texts and atlases and American editions of British texts and atlases. Mayhew, ‘The character of British geography, c. 1660–1800: a textual approach’, Journal of Historical Geography, xxiv/4 (1998), pp. 399–400. Eighteenth-century texts are discussed in Mayhew, ‘Geography books and the character of Georgian politics’, in M. Ogborn and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 192–211 (Manchester, UK, 2004) and Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason, ch. 8 (Chicago, IL, 2007). For Butler, see DNB, ODNB, Sandys, John Edwin, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 1, pp. 398–9, 3 vols (Cambridge, UK, 1908) and Butler, Samuel (grandson), Life and Letters of Dr. Samuel Butler, 2 vols (London, 1896. Reprint, Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler, vols 10 and 11 [see vol. 10, p. 94], 20 vols, London and New York, 1924. Reprint of Shrewsbury Edition: New York, 1968). For the late use of Butler’s text, see Madrell, ‘Discourses of race and gender’, p. 84. Also Allibone, vol. 2, s.v. ‘Butler, Samuel, 1774–1840’. See also [Long?], scathing review of ‘Dr. Butler’s Ancient Atlas, 1827’, and a review of his Sketch of Modern

422

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33

34

and Ancient Geography, 5th and 9th edns, Quarterly Journal of Education, i/1 (1831), pp. 145–51 and iii/1 (1832), pp. 141–52. See Long (ed.), Quarterly Journal of Education, passim; [Long], ‘On the study of geography’, vii/13 (1834), pp. 81–97 and [Long?] ‘Geography’, Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. XI, pp. 125–7, 28 vols (London, 1838). Schmitz’s geographical volumes are listed in DNB but not his ODNB sketch. For Philadelphia publication of his Manual, see Curtis, Robert L., ‘Confederate classical textbooks: a lost cause?’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, iii/4 (1997), pp. 440 note 38. For T. K. Arnold, see DNB and ODNB. See Newbigin, Marion, The Mediterranean Lands, Preface, and reviews by M[yres], J. L., Geographical Journal, lx/4 (1925), pp. 352–5 and Lunt, W. E., Geographical Review, xvi/1 (1926), pp. 166–7. For her life and work, in addition to ODNB, see ‘Marion Isabel Newbigin’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, l/5 (1934), pp. 331–3; Taylor, Eva G. R., ‘Dr. Marion I. Newbigin’, Geographical Journal, lxxxiv/4 (1934), p. 367; ‘Marion I. Newbigin’, Geography, xix/3 (1934), p. 220, ‘Dr. Marion I. Newbigin’, Geographical Review, xxiv/4 (1934), p. 676. Also see Freeman, T. W., ‘Two ladies’, Geographical Magazine, xxxxlix/3 (1976), p. 208 and Edwards, K. C., ‘Geography in a University College (Nottingham)’, in R. W. Steel (ed.), British Geography, 1918–1945, pp. 93–4 (Cambridge, UK, 1987). Maddrell, ‘Marion Isabel Newbigin’, in H. Lorimer and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographers: Biobibliograpical Studies, vol. 27 (2009), pp. 119–30 is an up-to-date survey of and earlier references to Newbigin’s work (London, 2009). The best single source for Morse’s geographical work is Brown, Ralph H., ‘The American Geographies of Jedidiah Morse’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xxxi/3 (1941), pp. 145–217. Brown attributes the departures from Morse’s earlier geographies after 1812 to his group of younger assistants (p. 202). Morse had, however, written Jeremy Belknap in 1788 that he was considering his American Geography (1st edn, 1789) as eventually becoming a two-volume work, the second covering the eastern continents, ‘to preclude the necessity of importing a Classical Geography’ (Morse to Belknap, 3 June 1788, quoted in Brown, p. 179). This became the two-volume American Universal Geography (1st edn 1793). Madison quoted from Madison to Morse, 8 March 1823, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 3, 1816–1828, p. 305, 4 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1867). See also Livingstone, David N., ‘“Risen into empire”: moral geographies of the American republic’, in Livingstone and Withers (eds), Geography and Revolution, pp. 304–35 (Chicago, IL, 2005). Belok, Michael V., Forming the American Mind: Early Schoolbooks and their Compilers (1787–1837), p. 14 (Agra, India, 1973). The principal American published works on early geography texts, which I have often not cited separately, are, in chronological order, Johnson, Clifton, Old Time Schools and Schoolbooks (New York, 1904); Brigham, Albert Perry and Richard E, Dodge, ‘Nineteenth century textbooks of geography’, in National Society for the Study of Education, 33rd Yearbook, The Teaching of Geography, pp. 3–27 (Bloomington, IN, 1932); Roorbach, Development of the Social Studies, Appendix B, ‘A list of geography textbooks used or published in this country prior to 1861’; Chamberlain, James F., ‘Early American geographies’, Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, v (1939), pp. 23–9; Nietz, John A., Old Textbooks, ch. 6 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1961); Carpenter, Charles, History of American Schoolbooks, ch. 18 (Philadelphia, PA, 1963); Elson, Ruth Miller, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (list, pp. 392–406) (Lincoln, NE, 1964); Belok, Forming the American Mind; Sax, Margaret F., A Little Learning: School Books in America from Colonial Times to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Exhibition catalogue) (Hartford, CT, 1983); US Office of Education, Educational Research Library, Early American Textbooks, 1775–1800, pp. 147–

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35

36

37

38

39 40

41

42

67; Svobodny, Dolly (comp.) (Washington, DC, 1985 [1987]). None of them is anywhere nearly comprehensive for classical geography texts. For Mayo, see NCAB, vol. 10, p. 284 and Davis, Richard Beale, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, pp. 197–8 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964). For McDermott’s project, see Robert McDermott to Thomas Jefferson, 5 December 1811, in Jefferson, Papers: Retirement Series, J. J. Looney et al. (eds), vol. 5, 18 June 1811–30 April 1812, pp. 311–12 and note (Princeton, NJ, 2007). For Worcester, see DAB and ANB. For Willard and Woodbridge, see DAB, ANB and references; also Lutz, Alma, Emma Willard, Daughter of Democracy (Boston, MA, 1929. Rev. edn, Boston, MA, 1964); Calhoun, Daniel C., ‘Eyes for the Jacksonian world: William C. Woodbridge and Emma Willard’, Journal of the Early Republic, iv/1 (1984), pp. 1–26 (mostly Woodbridge); Scott, Anne Firor, ‘What then is the American, this new woman?’, Journal of American History, lxv/3 (1978), pp. 679–703; Nelson, Murry [sic] R., ‘Emma Willard: pioneer in social studies education’, Theory and Research in Social Education, xv/4 (1987), pp. 245–56; Walters, William C., Jr, ‘Emma Willard’s geographies’, The Pennsylvania Geographer, xxxvii/1 (1999), pp. 118–38; Bruckner, Martin, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity, pp. 247–8, 252–6 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). Goodsell, Willystine, Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, and Mary Lyon, pp. 99–104 (New York, 1931. Reprint: New York, 1970) reprints excerpts from the introduction to Willard’s ancient geography text, stressing map study; Hinsdale, Burke A., How to Study and Teach History, p. 164 ([1893], rev. edn, New York, 1898). For Anthon, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Newmyer, Stephen, ‘Charles Anthon: Knickerbocker scholar’, Classical Outlook, lix/2 (1981–2), pp. 41–4 and George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, A. Nevins and M. H. Thomas (eds), vol. 2, p. 406, 4 vols (New York, 1952). For Mitchell, in addition to DAB (not in ANB), see Allibone, vol. 2, s.v. ‘Mitchell’. Allibone estimated Mitchell’s annual sale of all his works at 400,000 copies. See also Walters, ‘Voices for reform in early American geographical education’, Journal of Geography, lxxxvi/4 (1987), pp. 156–60; Ristow, Walter W., ‘The S. A. Mitchell and J. H. Colton map publishing companies’, in Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers: Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, ch. 19 (Detroit, MI, 1985) and Ristow, ‘Early American atlases and their publishers’, in J. A. Wolter and R. E. Grim (eds), Images of the World: The Atlas Through History, pp. 301–29 (New York, 1997). Koelsch, William A., ‘Seedbed of reform: Arnold Guyot and school geography in Massachusetts, 1849–1855’, Journal of Geography, cvii/2 (2008), pp. 35–42 and refs. Roorbach, Development of the Social Studies, p. 7. This recommendation was later briefly institutionalized in American high schools following the influential report of the National Education Association’s Committee on Secondary School Subjects (the ‘Committee of Ten’) in 1892 (published 1893), with disastrous results. See Koelsch, ‘Academic geography, American style: an institutional perspective’, pp. 254–5, in G. S. Dunbar (ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject Since 1870: An International Survey, pp. 245–79 (Dordrecht, Neth, 2001). For Smith, in addition to DNB, ODNB, and the Preface (1853) to his Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, see Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 3, pp. 430–1; Jenkins, Fred W., Classical Studies: A Guide to the Reference Literature, p. 416 (Englewood, CO, 1996); and Stray, ‘Sir William Smith and his dictionaries: a study in scarlet and black’, in Stray (ed.), Classical Books: Scholarship and Publishing in Britain Since 1800, pp. 35–54 (London, 2007). For Grove, see note 42. Talbert, Richard J. A., ‘Mapping the classical world, 1872–1990’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, v (1992), pp. 6–9; Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Preface, p. xi;

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43 44

45

46

47

48

49

Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, Preface, p. vii. For Smith, see note 41 above; for Grove, see DNB and ODNB, and Young, Percy M., George Grove, 1830–1900: A Biography (Washington, DC, 1980) has a good bit on his geographical interests. The older Graves, Charles L., Life and Writings of Sir George Grove, C.B. reports on his geography primer on p. 222 (London and New York, 1903). Comment on the longevity of Smith’s classical atlas is by Ronald E. Clements in ODNB. I. B.Tauris and Co. has republished Smith’s Atlas (London, 2012) with an Introduction by Richard Talbert. Talbert, ‘Mapping the classical world’, pp. 9–11. Black, Jeremy, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven, CT, 1997) passim, and Goffart, Walter, Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570–1870 (New Haven, CT, 2003). Goffart is primarily interested in mediaeval and early modern maps and atlases but his book is also useful for the classical period, and his Appendix of the atlases he has seen is also valuable. I know of no bibliography devoted solely to maps and atlases of the classical world. See also Archer, Secondary Education in the Nineteenth Century, p. 57. For Butler, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see two memoirs by his wife, Josephine E. Butler: An Autobiographical Memoir, pp. 25–6 (Bristol, UK, 1909) and Recollections of George Butler, pp. 76–80, 171–2, 257–60 (Bristol, UK, 1892). For his promotion of geography at Liverpool College, see Wainwright, David, Liverpool Gentlemen: A History of Liverpool College, An Independent Day School, From 1840, pp. 124–5, 134–5, 153, 193 (London, 1960). See ‘A series of maps, modern and ancient, published under the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’ (London [1829–36]), bound set in the Boston Athenaeum; Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 2 vols (London, 1844). For Hughes, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see Vaughan, J. E., ‘William Hughes, F. R. G. S. (1818–1876) as geographic educationist’, in W. E. Marsden (ed.), Historical Perspectives in Geographical Education, pp. 66–79 (London, 1980), and Vaughan, ‘William Hughes, 1818–1876’, in T. W. Freeman (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 9 (1985), pp. 47–53 (London, 1985). See also appraisal of Hughes in Freeman, A Hundred Years of Geography, pp. 39–40 (Chicago, IL, 1961) and Long, Preface to Hughes and Long, Atlas of Classical Geography (New York, 1856) (cover title: Long’s Classical Atlas). Also Long to Henry Tutwiler, 26 March 1850, in T. Fitzhugh (ed.), Letters of George Long, p. 40 (Charlottesville, VA, 1917). See Wise, Michael J., ‘The Scott Keltie report, 1885 and the teaching of geography in Great Britain’, Geographical Journal, clii/3 (1986), pp. 367–82; Keltie, John Scott, ‘On appliances used in the teaching of geography’, p. 193, in Royal Geographical Society, Report of the Proceedings of the Society in Reference to the Improvement of Geographical Education (London, 1886); also inventory of items on exhibition. For the Johnston maps and atlases, in addition to DNB and ODNB, see McCarthy, James, ‘Alexander Keith Johnston, 1844–1879’, in H. Lorimer and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 27 (2007), pp. 98–111 (London, 2007). For Tanner, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Ristow, ‘Early American atlases and their publishers’, pp. 307–15; Ristow, ‘Henry S. Tanner’, in Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers, ch. 13; also Joerg, W. L. G., ‘Henry S. Tanner of Philadelphia: his place in American cartography’ (Abstract), Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xxv/1 (1935), p. 46. For Mitchell and Colton as atlas/map series publishers, see Ristow, ‘The S. A. Mitchell and J. H. Colton map publishing companies’; Black, Maps and History, p. 75.

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50

51

52

53 54

55

56

57

58

59

60

‘Classical Maps’ (Advertisement), in Lucinda Crocker, Methods of Teaching Geography (Boston, MA, 1883, 2nd edn, 1884); Descriptive Circular of Physical & Political Wall Maps by Professor Arnold Guyot (New York, 1866) (includes testimonials); Anstey, Robert, ‘A list of the known maps, books, articles, and lectures by Arnold Guyot’, Special Libraries Association, Geography and Map Division, Bulletin, xxxix (1960), pp. 14–15. For Crocker, see ANB and refs. Review of Alexander G. Findlay, F.R.G.S., A Classical Atlas, to illustrate Ancient Geography, comprising in twenty-five Maps, the various divisions of the world as known to the ancients: with an Index of the Ancient and Modern names (New York, 1849), Christian Review, xiv/3 (1849), p. 432. For Carey, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Harley, J. Brian, ‘Atlas maker for independent America’, Geographical Magazine, xxix/12 (1977), pp. 766–71. Godley, A. D., ‘The present position of classical studies in England’, in Émile Boutroux et al., Lectures Delivered in Connection With the Dedication of the Graduate College of Princeton University, October 1913, pp. 75–7, 84 (Princeton, NJ, 1914). Stray, ‘The foundation and its contexts’, in The Classical Association, pp. 18–19. Godley, ‘Classical studies in England’, p. 84; Forrest, Martin, ‘The abolition of compulsory Latin and its consequences’, in The Classical Association, pp. 42–66 and Raphaely, Judith, ‘Nothing but gibberish and shibboleths? The compulsory Greek debate, 1870–1919’, in Stray (ed.), Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community, pp. 71–93 (Cambridge, UK, 1999). See also Burrow, J. W., ‘The uses of philology in Victorian England’, pp. 182–3, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, pp. 180–204 (New York, 1967); and Stray, Classics Transformed, passim. Adams, ‘Harvard College, 1786–1787’, p. 118; Warntz, William, Geography Now and Then: Some Notes on the History of Academic Geography in the United States, ch. 2 (New York, 1964); Koelsch, The Enlargement of a World: Harvard Students and Geographical Experience, 1840–1861, ch. 1, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1966. ‘Excerpts from Col. T. W. Higginson’s diary, 1837’, in ‘Harvard examinations in 1821 and 1837’, Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, ix/36 (1901), pp. 491–5 (ref., p. 491); Hale, E. E., A New England Boyhood, p. 217 (New York, 1893); ‘Diary of a classmate, 1855–9’, in [C. J. White comp.], Records of the Class of 1859, pp. 66–82 (Cambridge, MA, 1896); Burrage, William W., ‘Charles Brooks Brown’, in T. W. Higginson (ed.), Harvard Memorial Biographies, vol. 1, p. 358, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1866). Siljestrom, P. A., Educational Institutions of the United States, p. 314, lists the Harvard admissions requirements at mid-century. For the period of this chapter, see the annual Catalogue of Officers and Students of Harvard University. Holmes, Pauline, A Tercentenary History of the Boston Public Latin School, 1635– 1935, pp. 377–8 (Cambridge, MA, 1935); [Thompson, J. P.], ‘Present geography of Palestine’, North American Review, lxxxv/2 (1857), p. 79. Eliot, Charles W., ‘President Eliot’s Inaugural Address’, in Samuel Eliot Morison (ed.), The Development of Harvard University since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929, p. lvi (Cambridge, MA, 1930); Gurney, E. W., ‘Report for 1869–1870’, in ‘Reports of the Deans of the Faculties’, Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the President of Harvard College, 1869–70, pp. 40–1 (Cambridge, MA, 1871); Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University: A History, p. 285 (New York, 1962). Rudolph, The American College and University, p. 295. For classics at Harvard in this period, see Smith, Herbert Weir, ‘The Classics, 1867–1929’, pp. 33–63; for geography, see Davis, William Morris and Reginald Aldworth Daly, ‘Geology and Geography, 1858–1928’ pp. 307–28, in Morison (ed.), The Development of Harvard

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University. In the 1870s Thomas Davidson, chair of an Overseers’ committee on classical studies at Harvard, criticized the low level of the Greek requirement for admission, adding ‘subjects that ought not to be there at all’, such as geography, ‘with which a university has nothing whatsoever to do directly’. See [Davidson], ‘Education’, Atlantic Monthly, xxxix/231 (1877), p. 127. Warntz, Geography Now and Then, chs 3–7; Butler, Nicholas Murray, Across the Busy Years, vol. 1, p. 58, 2 vols (New York, 1939); Webb, George Ernest, Tree Rings and Telescopes: The Scientific Career of A. E. Douglass, p. 3 (Tucson, AZ, 1983). Chase, W. T. and C. H. Thurber, ‘Tabular statement of entrance requirements to representative colleges and universities of the United States’, School Review, iv/6 (1896), pp. 341–412 (Table of Requirements in History, pp. 370–6). Graff, Gerald, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, pp. 28–35 (Chicago, IL, 1987); Wright, Louis B., ‘Thomas Jefferson and the Classics’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cxxxvii/3 (1943), p. 233. For the transformation of philology, see Grafton, Anthony. ‘Polyhistor into philolog: notes on the transformation of German classical scholarship, 1780–1850’, in History of Universities, iii (1983), pp. 159–92 (Amersham, UK, 1983). Kirk, Geoffrey S., ‘The future of classics’, American Scholar, xlv/4 (1976), pp. 539, 541; Childers, J. Wesley, Foreign Language Teaching, pp. 3–4 (New York, 1964). A 1919 survey of 21 leading colleges and universities by Arthur Schlesinger Sr had disclosed that ancient history had lost its traditional place as a freshman elective; only four of the 21 offered it. Schlesinger, ‘The history situation in colleges and universities, 1919–1920’, Historical Outlook, xi/3 (1920), pp. 103–6. See also Higham, John, History: The Development of the Historical Profession in the United States, p. 53 (Englewood, NJ, 1965). Africa, Thomas W., ‘The owl at dusk: two centuries of classical scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas, liv/1 (1993), p. 162.

CHAPTER 10 1

For the founding and early years of these institutions, see (in order of opening) Ferrier, William W., Origin and Development of the University of California (Berkeley, CA, 1930); Becker, Carl, Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (Ithaca, NY, 1943) and Bishop, Morris, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, NY, 1962); Hawkins, Hugh, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, NY, 1960) and French, John C., A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, MD, 1946); Koelsch, William A., Clark University, 1887–1987: A Narrative History (Worcester, MA, 1987); Ellis, John Tracy, The Formative Years of the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC, 1946), Ahern, Patrick Henry, The Catholic University of America, 1887–1896: The Rectorship of John J. Keane (Washington, DC, 1948), Hogan, Peter E., The Catholic University of America, 1896–1903: The Rectorship of Thomas J. Conaty (Washington, DC, 1949), and Barry, Colman J., The Catholic University of America, 1903–1909: The Rectorship of Denis J. O’Connell (Washington, DC, 1950); Elliott, Orrin Leslie, Stanford University: The First Twenty-Five Years (Stanford, CA, 1937) and Edith R. Mirrielees, Stanford: The Story of a University (New York, 1959) (unfortunately not indexed); Goodspeed, Thomas Wakefield, A History of the University of Chicago: The First Twenty-Five Years (Chicago, IL, 1916); and Storr, Richard J., Harper’s University: The Beginnings (Chicago, IL, 1966). For the general nature of the so-called university movement between 1865 and 1910, the basic text is still Veysey, Lawrence R., The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, IL, 1965). Ryan, W. Carson, Studies in Early Graduate Education: The Johns Hopkins, Clark University, The University of Chicago (New York, 1939) remains useful. See also two excellent essays in A. Oleson and J. Voss (eds), The

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2

3

4 5

6

7

Organization of Knowledge in Modern America (Baltimore, MD, 1979): Edward Shils, ‘The order of learning in the United States: the ascendancy of the university’ (pp. 19–47) and Hawkins, ‘University identity: the teaching and research functions’ (pp. 285–312). For earlier attempts to establish graduate and research work in America, see Storr, The Beginnings of Graduate Education in America (Chicago, IL, 1953) and Bruce, Robert V., The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (New York, 1987. Reprint: Ithaca, NY, 1988). The Daniel Coit Gilman papers are in the Sheridan Libraries of the Johns Hopkins University. In addition to DAB and ANB, see Cordasco, Francesco, Daniel Coit Gilman and the Protean Ph.D.: The Shaping of American Graduate Education (Leiden, Neth, 1960), 2nd edn: The Shaping of American Graduate Education: Daniel Coit Gilman and the Protean Ph.D. (Lanham, MD, 1973). Franklin, Fabian, The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (New York, 1910) prints numerous letters. See Wright, John K., ‘Daniel Coit Gilman: geographer and historian’, Geographical Review, li/3 (1961), pp. 381–99. Reprinted (with revisions) in Wright, Human Nature in Geography: Fourteen Papers, 1925–1965, pp. 168–87 and notes, pp. 315–18 (Cambridge, MA, 1966); Dunbar, Gary S., Geography in the University of California (Berkeley and Los Angeles) 1868–1941 (Marina del Rey, CA, 1981. Reprint: Dunbar, The History of Geography, pp. 66–75, Cooperstown, NY, 1996). For the Gilman years at Berkeley, in addition to Cordasco and Franklin, see Ferrier, Origin and Development, pp. 334–65 and Stadtman, Verne A., The University of California, 1868–1968, pp. 61–80 (New York, 1970). See also Stadtman (ed.), The Centennial Record of the University of California, s.v. ‘College of Letters and Science’ (p. 75), ‘Classics’ (p. 83) and ‘Geography’ (pp. 86–7) (Berkeley, CA, 1967). Registers of the University of California, 1872–3, 1874, and 1875; Fontenrose, Joseph, Classics at Berkeley: The First Century, 1869–1970 (Berkeley, CA, 1982). Dunbar, Geography in the University of California, pp. 2–5; Dunbar, ‘George Davidson, 1825–1911’, in T. W. Freeman, M. Oughton, and P. Pinchemel (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 2 (1978), pp. 33–7 (London, 1978); Sauer, Carl O., ‘Memorial of Ruliff S. Holway’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xix/1 (1929), pp. 64–5; Keighren, Innes M., Bringing Geography to Book: Ellen Semple and the Reception of Geographical Knowledge, p. 147 (London, 2010). The extensive Sauer papers are in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For Sauer generally, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Leighly, John, ‘Carl Ortwin Sauer, 1889–1975’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxvi/3 (1976), pp. 337–48 and ‘Carl Ortwin Sauer, 1889–1975’, in T. W. Freeman and P. Pinchemel (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 2 (1978), pp. 99–105 (London, 1978); and Parsons, James J., ‘Carl Ortwin Sauer, 1889–1975’, Geographical Review, lxvi/1 (1976), pp. 83–9. For Sauer’s early California years, see also Dunbar, Geography at the University of California, pp. 7–8 and Speth, William W., ‘Berkeley geography, 1923–1933’, in B. W. Blouet (ed.), The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States, pp. 221–44 (Hamden, CT, 1981). For Sauer’s early life, see Kenzer, Martin S., ‘Milieu and the “Intellectual Landscape”: Carl O. Sauer’s undergraduate heritage’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxxv/2 (1985), pp. 258–70 and Kenzer, ‘Like father, like son: William Albert and Carl Ortwin Sauer’, in Kenzer (ed.), Carl O. Sauer: A Tribute, pp. 40–63 (Corvallis, OR, 1987). There are several collections of scholarly papers by and about Sauer; ‘Sauerologists’ abound. Speth, ‘Berkeley geography’, p. 237, Table 3, ‘Seminars, 1923–33’; Speth, ‘Carl O. Sauer’s uses of geography’s past’, Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, lv (1993), pp. 37–65. Reprint: Speth, How It Came To Be: Carl O. Sauer, Franz Boas and the Meanings of Anthropogeography, pp. 31–46 (Ellensburg, WA,

428

NOTES

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9

10

11

12

1999); also Macpherson, Anne, ‘Preparing for the national stage: Carl Sauer’s first ten years at Berkeley’, in Carl O. Sauer: A Tribute, pp. 69–89. Leighly recalled Sauer’s seminars in the history of geography as the one thing Berkeley students of his day had in common. See Leighly, ‘Drifting into geography in the twenties’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxix/1 (1979), p. 9. (The same issue has essays on the later years of Sauer’s leadership at Berkeley by Joseph Spencer and James Parsons.) Sauer, ‘The morphology of landscape’, University of California Publications in Geography, ii.2 (1925), pp. 19–53. Reprint: Leighly (ed.), Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, pp. 315–50 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1965) and Sauer, ‘Recent developments in cultural geography’, in E. C. Hayes (ed.), Recent Developments in the Social Sciences, pp. 154–212 (On Strabo, pp. 175–6, 185–6) (Philadelphia, PA, 1927). Kersten, Earl W., ‘Sauer and “Geographic Influences”,’ Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, xliv (1982), pp. 47– 73 is an excellent discussion of the context of ‘Morphology’. Mischa Penn and Fred Lukermann also point to Sauer’s rootage in Greek geography as underpinning his argument for geography as chorology, asserting (p. 281) ‘His geography was the geography of Herodotus and Strabo’: see Penn and Lukermann, ‘Chorology and landscape: an internalist reading of “the morphology of landscape”’, in K. Mathewson and M. S. Kenzer (eds), Culture, Land, and Legacy: Perspectives on Carl O. Sauer and Berkeley School Geography, pp. 233–59 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003). Sauer defined geography as ‘an understanding of the areal differentiation of the earth’ as late as 1934: Sauer, ‘Cultural geography’, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 6 (1934), p. 624. Sauer, ‘Foreword to historical geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xxxi/1 (1941), pp. 1–24. Reprint: Land and Life, pp. 351–79; Sauer, ‘The fourth dimension of geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxiv/2 (1974), p. 190; Leighly, ‘Carl Ortwin Sauer’, Annals, p. 339; Sauer, ‘Semple, Ellen Churchill (1863–1932)’, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 13 (1934), pp. 661–2. Sauer said of Semple that she ‘stirred imagination and feeling with her fervor and eloquence’, Sauer, ‘On the background of geography in the United States’, Heidelberger Studien zur Kulturgeographie, p. 70. Heidelberger Geographisches Arbeiten, Heft 15, pp. 59–71 (Wiesbaden, DE, 1966). Dunbar, ‘Credentialism and careerism in American geography, 1890–1915’, Origins of Academic Geography, pp. 72–3; Hewitt, Waterman Thomas, Cornell University: A History, ‘The department of geology’, vol. 2, pp. 228–44, 4 vols (New York, 1905); Bishop, History of Cornell, p. 172; Lurie, Edward, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, pp. 346, 360–1 (Chicago, IL, 1960); Brigham, Albert Perry, ‘Memoir of Ralph Stockman Tarr’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, iii (1913), pp. 92–8; Brice, William R., ‘Ralph Stockman Tarr: scientist, writer, teacher’, in E. T. Drucker and W. M. Jordan (eds), Geology and Ideas: A History of North American Geology, pp. 215–35 (Boulder, CO, 1985); Von Engeln, O. D., ‘American tendencies in geography’, Scientific Monthly, xvii/4 (1923), pp. 326–41. White, Andrew Dickson, The Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White, vol. 1, pp. 257–9, 2 vols (New York, 1906); White to D. C. Gilman, 27 February 1859, in Franklin, The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman, p. 339. Hewitt, Cornell University, ‘Ancient, medieval and modern European history’, vol. 2, pp. 101–20. For Burr, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Bainton, Roland H., George Lincoln Burr: His Life (Ithaca, NY, 1943). Burr’s stress on teaching historical geography methods is mentioned in Bainton, Burr, pp. 62–3 and in G. L. Hamilton, W. E. Lunt, and G. Sarton, ‘George Lincoln Burr’, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, xiv/3 (1939), pp. 412–13.

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13 14

15 16

17

18

19

Hewitt, Cornell University, ‘The Greek language’ and ‘The department of Latin’, vol. 2, pp. 6–22. Shils, ‘Order of learning’, p. 28; Hawkins, Pioneer, p. 226 and notes, p. 246 and note 31; Bishop, Charles C., ‘Teaching at Johns Hopkins: the first generation’, History of Education Quarterly, xxvii/4 (1987), pp. 499–515; Koelsch, ‘G. Stanley Hall, child study, and the teaching of geography’, Journal of Geography, ci/1 (2002), pp. 3–9. Hawkins, Pioneer, p. 242 and note 16, p. 247 and note 37; Johns Hopkins University Circular, No. 23 (May 1883), p. 96. Adams, Herbert Baxter, ‘Geographical bureau’, in Adams, New Methods of Study in History, pp. 128–30, Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, vol. 2, no. 2 (Baltimore, MD, 1884) and Adams, The Study of History in American Colleges and Universities, pp. 191–3, US Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, no. 2 (Washington, DC, 1887). See also his essay, ‘Special methods of teaching history’, in G. S. Hall (ed.), Methods of Teaching History, pp. 115–16, 125–7, 134, 146–7, 2nd edn (Boston, MA, 1884), and letters in Holt, W. Stull (ed.), Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901, pp. 83, 87, Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science, vol. 56, no. 4 (Baltimore, MD, 1938). For Jameson, in addition to DNB and ANB, see Seventh Annual Report of the President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1882, pp. 38–9; Rothberg, Morey (ed.), John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America, vol. 2, The Years of Growth, pp. 51–2, 3 vols (Athens, GA, 1996); Wright, ‘J. Franklin Jameson and the atlas of the historical geography of the United States’, p. 66, in R. A. Fisher and W. L. Fox (eds), J. Franklin Jameson: A Tribute, pp. 66–79 (Washington, 1965); Koelsch, ‘Ancient landscapes revisited: classical geography in the American university, 1870–1930’, in F.-P. Hager et al. (eds), Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education, pp. 177–82 (Hildesheim, DE, 1992). For Jameson’s later career, see Van Tassel, David D., ‘John Franklin Jameson’, pp. 81–96, in C. L. Lord (ed.), Keepers of the Past (Chapel Hill, NC, 1965). Ninth Annual Report of the President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1884, p. 36; Adams, New Methods of Study in History, p. 129; E. Donnan and L. F. Stock (eds), An Historian’s World: Selections from the Correspondence of John Franklin Jameson, pp. 31–2 note 87 and p. 40 (Philadelphia, PA, 1956); Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship, vol. 2, pp. 82, 97, 103–4, 116–17. Jameson’s ‘Lectures on the Science of Physical Geography in its Relation to History’ (January–April 1884) are in the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia; his diaries are with the Jameson Papers at the Library of Congress. Donnan and Stock believed the essay on ‘Physical geography and history’ to be Hall’s work, but Rothberg showed from Jameson’s diary that it was a combination of Gilman’s notes and Jameson’s revisions of them. Guyot and Marsh are not referenced in Hall’s own writings until nearly thirty years later. See Koelsch, ‘G. Stanley Hall’, p. 4. Allan Bogue, in his biography of Turner, erroneously thought that either Hall or John W. Burgess had written the geography essay: Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down, pp. 134–6 (Norman, OK, 1998). But Bogue suggests a number of the ways Turner got his interest in physical geography, before and after his studies at Hopkins. Jameson’s exit to Brown and discontent during his first year there are from diary entries in John Franklin Jameson, passim, esp. pp. 150 and 185. For Haskins, see DAB and ANB. Also Fourteenth Annual Report of the President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1889, pp. 58, 68; Robert H. Block, ‘Frederick Jackson Turner and American geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxx/lxx (1980), pp. 31–42; ‘Lectures to undergraduate students on physical geography’, Johns Hopkins University Circulars, vol. 8 (1889), p. 28.

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21 22

23 24

25

26

27 28

Koelsch, ‘Pioneer: the first American doctorate in meteorology’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, lxii/3 (1981), pp. 362–7; Johns Hopkins University Circulars, no. 82 (June 1890), p. 92; Ninth Annual Report of the President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1884, pp. 32, 34; Fifteenth Annual Report, 1890, pp. 32–4; Sixteenth Annual Report, 1891, p. 19; W. B. Clark to Gilman, 15 May 1891, Daniel Coit Gilman Papers. Even though Clark had taken over the physical geography course and had omitted any references to its relevance for Greek and Roman history, the course continued to be required as part of the P. H. E. (humanities) group requirement in the first year of the collegiate program. Clark’s purchases indicate the shift away from classical geography and to late nineteenth-century physiography. Ninth Annual Report of the President, 1884, pp. 80–1; Fifteenth Annual Report, 1890, pp. 45–6; Twentieth Annual Report, 1895, pp. 37, 62. Sauer, ‘Background’, p. 65; A. Petermann to Gilman, Gotha, 4 August 1860, in Franklin, Life of Daniel Coit Gilman, p. 371; Flexner, Abraham, Daniel Coit Gilman: Creator of the American Type of University, p. 15 (New York, 1946). (Also quoted in Wright, ‘Daniel Coit Gilman’, Human Nature in Geography, p. 179.); Hawkins, ‘Charles W. Eliot, Daniel C. Gilman and the nurture of American scholarship’, New England Quarterly, xxxix/3 (1966), pp. 291–308. The only recent analysis of Gilman by a geographer, Richard Heyman, ‘Libraries as armories: Daniel Coit Gilman, geography, and the uses of a university’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, xix/3 (2001), pp. 295–316 successfully combines ideological rigidity with factual inaccuracy. Franklin, Life of Daniel Coit Gilman, pp. 202–3, 284–5; Gilman to H. B. Adams, 25 May 1890, in Holt (ed.), Historical Scholarship in the United States, p. 131. ‘Women’s medical school fund’ and ‘President Gilman’s lectures and readings on the Mediterranean sea in its historical and geographical aspects’, Johns Hopkins University Circulars, No. 83 (November 1890), p. 14; Sixteenth Annual Report of the President, 1891, p. 10. ‘Report of the past year, 1886–1887’, Johns Hopkins University Circulars, No. 58 (July 1887) p. 114; Koelsch, ‘G. Stanley Hall’, pp. 3–9; Koelsch, ‘Academic geography, American style: an institutional perspective’, p. 250, in G. S. Dunbar (ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject Since 1870: An International Survey (Dordrecht, Neth, 2001). Yearbook of the Catholic University of America, 1899–1900, p. 38; Catholic University, Announcements of the Collegiate Department, 1908–1909, p. 7; Dunbar, ‘Geography in the bellwether universities of the United States’, Area, xviii/1 (1980), pp. 25–33. Reprinted with revisions in Dunbar, The History of Geography, pp. 166–76; see Table, p. 170 (Cooperstown, NY, 1996). David Starr Jordan, The Days of a Man, vol. 1, pp. 21–2, 2 vols (Yonkers, NY, 1922). Leland Stanford Junior University, First Annual Report, 1891–92, p. 56; Twelfth Annual Report, 1902–1903, p. 141; Thirteenth Annual Report, 1903–1904, p. 76; Albert Perry Brigham, ‘Remarks on geography in America’, Journal of Geography, xii/7 (1914), p. 203. Neither Huldah Winsted in 1912 nor Ray Whitbeck in 1919 reports any geography courses at Stanford. See Winsted, ‘Geography in American universities’, Journal of Geography, x/10 (1912), pp. 309–16 and Whitbeck, ‘Geography in American and European universities’, Journal of Geography, xviii/4 (1919), pp. 129– 41. See also Mirrielees, Stanford, p. 240; Dunbar, A Biographical Dictionary of American Geography in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn, s.v. ‘White, Charles Langdon (1897–1989)’ (Baton Rouge, LA, 1996); and Dunbar, ‘Bellweather universities’, Table, p. 172.

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29

30

31

32

33

34 35

University of Chicago, Annual Register, 1892–1893, pp. 18–20; Ben Stone to Geoffrey J. Martin, 27 September 2000 (letter in Martin’s possession). See also Halford J. Mackinder, in ‘Reports on geography in the universities’, Geographical Journal, ii/1 (1893), p. 26. Conger, Charles T., ‘Geography at the World’s Columbian Exposition’, Geographical Journal, iii/2 (1894), p. 134. Martin cites a letter from Conger to Mill, dated 16 November 1893 (Royal Geographical Society archives), signed by Conger as ‘Docent in Political Geography’; see Martin, ‘From the cycle of erosion to “the morphology of landscape”: or some thought concerning geography as it was in the early years of Carl Sauer’, in Culture, Land, and Legacy, p. 23 and note 3, p. 48. My reading of the evidence suggests that (1) political geography was being used in a Mackinderian sense, as non-physical or ‘human’ geography, and (2) as the Conger article indirectly suggests, and as a second Conger letter to Mill confirms (Conger to Mill, 21 February 1894, RGS archives), Conger was teaching geography during the university’s second year, as Docent, probably only in the Fall and Winter Quarters (though in the February letter he anticipates teaching in the Spring Quarter), but certainly not beyond 1894. Conger is not listed with ‘The faculty of the first year, 1892–93’ in Goodspeed, University of Chicago, Appendix, pp. 486–90 (data taken from the first University Annual Register, which includes Docents and Assistants with teaching responsibilities). Jameson to George L. Burr, 4 September 1902, George Lincoln Burr Papers, Cornell University Library. Text printed in An Historian’s World, pp. 83–4. See also Wright, ‘J. Franklin Jameson’, p. 68 and Appendix A, pp. 77–8 (J. Franklin Jameson to Andrew C. McLaughlin, 5 November 1903, on his plan for an ideal atlas). J. Paul Goode, ‘Geography in America: a plea for advanced geographic training, and for the development of economic geography’, Bulletin of the American Bureau of Geography, ii/4 (1901), p. 309. For Boas’ changing views, see Koelsch, ‘Franz Boas, geographer, and the problem of disciplinary identity’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, xl/1 (2004), pp. 1–22. For ‘geographic influences’ and its later rejection, see Kersten, ‘Sauer and “geographic influences”,’ and references. Sauer credits Lewis Mumford for the ’rediscovery’ of Marsh both in ‘Background’ and in correspondence relating to the planning of the Princeton conference resulting in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, which he called a ‘Marsh Festival’. See ‘Background’, p. 65, in which he says Marsh ‘was wholly unknown in my student days’ and correspondence quoted in Williams, Michael, ‘Sauer and “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth”,’ Geographical Review, lxxvii/2 (1987), pp. 218–31. See also Leighly to David Livingstone, 18 December 1980, quoted in Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise, p. 301, note 157 (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, 1993). But see Koelsch, ’The legendary “rediscovery” of George Perkins Marsh’, Geographical Review, cii/4 (October 2012), forthcoming. Burr to Jameson, 10 September 1902, in An Historian’s World, p. 84, note 27. For Breasted, in addition to DAB and ANB, see NCAB, vol. 29, pp. 258–9 (the only one to list the map series). See Abt, Jeffrey, American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute (Chicago, 2011), pp. 200–1, 432 note 1 in Albright, William F., ‘James Henry Breasted, humanist’, American Scholar, v/3 (1936), pp. 287–99 and Wilson, John A., ‘James Henry Breasted – The idea of an Oriental Institute’, in J. A. Sanders (ed.), Near Eastern Archaeology in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Nelson Glueck, pp. 41–55 (Garden City, NY, 1970). Huth’s joint editorship of the map series is listed in University of Chicago, Committee of the Faculty, Publications of Members of the University, 1902–1916, p. 62 (Chicago, IL, 1917). See also Breasted and Huth, A Teacher’s Manual

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38

39

40

Accompanying the Breasted-Huth Ancient History Maps (Chicago, IL, 1918); European History Atlas, 7th rev. edn (Chicago, IL, 1947), and European History Atlas, Student Edition, 1st edn (Chicago, IL, 1951). For early Chicago geography, see especially Foster, Alice, ‘The new department in its setting’, in A Half-Century of Geography – What Next?, pp. 1–7 (Chicago, IL, 1955) and Pattison, William D. ‘Rollin Salisbury and the establishment of geography at the University of Chicago’, in Blouet (ed.), Origins of Academic Geography, pp. 151–63; Pattison, ‘Rollin D. Salisbury, 1858–1922’, in T. W. Freeman (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 6 (1982), pp. 105–13 and references (London, 1982). See also Mitman, Gregg, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community and American Social Thought, 1900–1950, ch. 4 (Chicago, IL, 1992). For the original curriculum plan, see Pattison, ‘Goode’s proposal of 1902: an interpretation’, Professional Geographer, xxx/1 (1978), pp. 3–8. Also Foster, ‘The new department’ and Charles C. Colby, ‘Narrative of five decades’, in A Half Century of Geography – What Next?, pp. 8–20; Martin, ‘John Paul Goode, 1862–1932’, in T. W. Freeman (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 8 (1984), pp. 51–5 (London, 1984). Colby, ‘Narrative’, p. 15 claims that Goode’s wall maps of the United States and the continents were ‘the first series of wall maps by an American author’. See Foster, ‘The new department’; Colby, ‘Narrative’; Harlan H. Barrows, Lectures on the Historical Geography of the United States as Given in 1933, Koelsch (ed.) (Chicago, IL, 1962); Koelsch, ‘The historical geography of Harlan H. Barrows’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lix/4 (1969), pp. 632–51. The largest deposits of Semple manuscript material are in the Semple Collection in the University of Kentucky Library and more than 300 items in the Wallace W. Atwood Papers, Clark University Archives. There is a useful dissertation: Judith C. Bronson, Ellen Semple: Contributions to the History of Geography, unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, St Louis University, 1973. See also DAB, ANB, and James, E. T. (ed.), Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 3, pp. 260–2, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1971). Also see Bushong, Allen D., ‘Ellen Churchill Semple, 1863–1932’ and references in T. W. Freeman (ed.), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 8 (1984), pp. 87–94 (London, 1984) and James, Preston E., Wilford A. Bladen, and Pradyumna P. Karan, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple and the development of a research paradigm’, in Bladen and Karan (eds), The Evolution of Geographic Thought in America: A Kentucky Root, pp. 28–57 (Dubuque, IA, 1983). The fullest obituary (with list of publications) is Colby, ‘Memoir of Ellen Churchill Semple’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xxiii/4 (1933), pp. 229–40. See also Keighren, ‘Bringing geography to the book: charting the reception of Influences of Geographic Environment’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, xxi/4 (2006), pp. 525–40 and ‘Reading the messy reception of Influences of Geographic Environment (1911)’, in M. Ogborn and C. W. J. Withers (eds), Geographies of the Book, pp. 277–98 (Farnham, UK, 2010); also Koelsch, ‘Review essay: Bringing Geography to Book’, The Northeastern Geographer, 3 (2010), pp. 95–104. James et al., ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, pp. 41–2; University of Chicago, Annual Registers, 1920–1, 1922–3. For analyses of the effects of Semple’s anthropogeography, see Peet, Richard, ‘The social origins of environmental determinism’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxiii/3 (1985), pp. 309–33 and Keighren, Bringing Geography to Book, esp. ch. 2. For Semple’s work at Chicago, see Berman, Mildred, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple at Chicago and Clark’, session paper for ‘Geography in Illinois’, Association of American Geographers meeting, Chicago, March 1995.

433

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

41

42

43

44 45

46

47

48

49

50

James et al., ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, pp. 42–4; Bushong, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, p. 92. For the Inquiry, see Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry (New Haven, CT, 1963) and Martin, The Life and Thought of Isaiah Bowman, ch. 5 (Hamden, CT, 1980). Semple’s papers for the Inquiry are in ‘Papers of the American Peace Commission to Versailles, 1917–1919’, Manuscripts Division, US Library of Congress. Louisville student reminiscence in Bushong, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, p. 88; Ratzel schedule of lectures in the 1890s from Harriet Wanklyn (Steers), Friedrich Ratzel: A Biographical Memoir and Bibliography, p. 50 (part of note 27) (Cambridge, UK, 1961); see also Semple, ‘Emphasis on geography in schools’, Report of the Eighth International Geographical Congress, Washington, 1904, pp. 557–63. Reprint: Journal of Geography, iii/8 (1904), pp. 366–74; Semple, ‘Development of the Hanse towns in relation to their geographical environment’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, xxi/3 (1899), p. 236. James et al., ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, p. 40. Greek anecdote from ‘AnthropoGeographer is title of woman giving Summer course’, Worcester, MA Telegram, 6 July 1921 (Scrapbook, Clark University Archives). James, et al., ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, pp. 40–1. Bushong, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, p. 41; Colby, ‘Memoir of Ellen Churchill Semple’, p. 239; Chisholm, George G., ‘Geography in the United States’, Geographical Journal, xlviii/ 5 (1916), p. 400. For Atwood, in addition to DAB and ANB, see Koelsch, ‘Wallace Walter Atwood, 1872–1949’, in T. W. Freeman and P. Pinchemel (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 3 (1979), pp. 13–18 (London, 1979). For the Graduate School of Geography, see Koelsch, ‘Wallace Atwood’s “Great Geographical Institute”’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxx/4 (1980), pp. 567–82 and Koelsch, ‘Geography at Clark: the first fifty years, 1921–1971’, in J. E. Harmon and T. J. Rickard (eds), Geography in New England, pp. 40–8 ([New Britain, CT], 1988). Upton Sinclair’s opinion of anthropogeography is from The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, p. 294 (Pasadena, CA, 1923). Information on courses is from Clark University Bulletins of the 1920s. For the influence of Semple’s anthropogeography at Clark, directly and through her student Elmer Ekblaw, see Keighren, Bringing Geography to Book, esp. pp. 151–9. See also Berman, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple at Chicago and Clark’ and Berman, ‘The geographic influence of Ellen Churchill Semple at Clark University’, unpublished paper given at the Evalyn A. Clark Symposium on Excellence in Teaching, Vassar College, April, 1992. Colby, ‘Memoir’, p. 236. Colby wrote Derwent Whittlesey, ‘I shall be more than careful to do justice to her work at Clark, for, after all, Clark did afford her an outlet for her energies which she much desired’, Colby to Whittlesey, 18 June 1932, Derwent S. Whittlesey Papers, Harvard University Archives. For other lecturing, see Bushong, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple,’ p. 92; Koelsch, ‘Before NESTVAL: the New England Geographical Conference’, Proceedings, New England–St Lawrence Valley Geographical Society, xxvii (1997), pp. 23–33. For Semple’s teaching methods, see Baugh, Ruth, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple, teacher’, The Monadnock, vi/2 (1932), p. 3 and Baugh, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple: The Great Lady of American Geography’, Unpublished paper, given at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, East Lansing, MI, 1961. Colby, ‘Memoir’, pp. 239–40, lists the Mediterranean papers. Myres, J. L., review of Semple, The Geography of the Mediterranean, Journal of Hellenic Studies, lv/1 (1935), p. 85. Semple, The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History (New York, 1931. Reprint: New York, 1971); Bushong, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple’, p. 89; Bushong, ANB, s.v. ‘Semple, Ellen Churchill’.

434

NOTES

51 52

53 54

55 56

57

58

59

J. Paul Goode to Semple, 5 February 1932, Semple Collection, University of Kentucky Library; Colby, ‘Memoir’, p. 229. Lewis, Carolyn Baker, The Biography of a Neglected Classic: Ellen Churchill Semple’s The Geography of the Mediterranean Region, Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, 1979. Lewis has an excellent chapter on the reception of Semple’s last book, including an analysis of its reviews. Braden, Kathleen E., ‘Regions, Semple, and structuration’, Geographical Review, lxxxii/3 (1992), pp. 237–42. Lewis, ‘Biography’, ch. 5; Myres, ‘Review,’ p. 85; Richmond, I. A., Review of The Geography of the Mediterranean Region, Antiquity, vi/24 (1932), pp. 494–6; Cary, Max, The Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History, Preface, p. v. (Oxford, UK, 1949); Grant, Michael, The Ancient Mediterranean (New York, 1969); Rickman, Geoffrey, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome, p. 94 (Oxford, UK, 1980); Starr, Chester G., ‘Ancient history in the twentieth century’, Classical World, lxxxiv/3 (1991), p. 180; Dorn, Harold, The Geography of Science, Preface, p. xii (Baltimore, MD, 1991). Bronson, ‘Ellen Semple’, p. 246. Description of Semple’s Mediterranean course is taken from Clark University Bulletins of the 1920s. For the Midwestern origins of graduate students in the period before World War II, see Rugg, Dean S., ‘The Midwest as a hearth area in American academic geography’, in Blouet (ed.), Origins of Academic Geography, pp. 175–91 and Koelsch, ‘East and Midwest in American academic geography: two prosopographic notes’, The Professional Geographer, liii/1 (2001), pp. 97–105. Quotation: Schmidt, George P., The Liberal Arts College: A Chapter in American Cultural History, p. 187 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1957). For general surveys of American geography between the two world wars, see Spencer, Joseph E., ‘The evolution of the discipline of geography in the twentieth century’, Geographical Perspectives, xxxiii (1974), pp. 20–36; Koelsch, ‘Academic Geography, American Style’, in Dunbar (ed.), Geography, pp. 245–79; and Martin, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, 4th edn, ch. 16 (New York, 2005). Samuel Van Valkenburg assumed the course on short notice during Ekblaw’s final illness. Influences was still the text, but both he and Clark graduate students were able to debate and even disagree with it, possibly for the first time there. University of Toronto historian, Richard Turner, had taken two of Semple’s courses while a graduate student in geography at Clark. He later told geographer Stephen Jones ‘the most enjoyable thing about Miss Semple’s teaching was her complete confidence in the environmental explanation. It was the one course in which he was not taught to doubt’, Stephen B. Jones to Derwent S. Whittlesey, 24 November 1938, Whittlesey Papers; Berman, ‘Ellen Churchill Semple at Chicago and Clark’, pp. 1–2. M. A., ‘Dr. Semple completes work on Mediterranean region’, The Monadnock, vi/1 (1931) notes Baugh’s teaching of Semple’s Mediterranean course at Clark in the Fall semester, 1931. For Baugh, see pp. 13–17 of Trussell, Margaret E., ‘Five western woman pioneer geographers’, Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, xlix (1987), pp. 7–33, and the brief appraisal of Baugh’s teaching in Peter Nash, ‘The making of a humanist geographer’, in L. Guelke (ed.), Geography and Humanistic Knowledge, pp. 6–7 (Waterloo, ONT, 1986). See also Koelsch, ‘Remarks on Ellen Churchill Semple inaugural lecture’, in Saul B. Cohen, Geopolitics and the Shaping of a New Middle East Region, pp. iii–vi, Ellen Churchill Semple Lecture Series, no. 1 (Worcester, MA, 1991).

435

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

EPILOGUE 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

Lewis, Carolyn Baker, The Biography of a Neglected Classic: Ellen Churchill Semple’s The Geography of the Mediterranean Region, Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Geography, University of South Carolina, 1979, pp. 89, 136. Lewis, ‘Biography’, pp. 129–30, 133, 148. Maxey, Mima, ‘The place of geography from the viewpoint of orientation in the history and culture of the ancient world’, Journal of Geography, xvii/1 (1943), pp. 7–11. Mayhew, Robert, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1850–1850, p. 257 (Basingstoke, UK and New York, 2000). See also Capel, Horacio, The History of Science and the History of the Scientific Disciplines. GeoCritica, no. 84; English Parallel Series, no. 1 (Barcelona, Spain, 1969); Aay, Henry [Henk], ‘Textbook chronicles: disciplinary history and the growth of geographic knowledge’, in B. W. Blouet (ed.), The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States, pp. 291–301 (Hamden, CT, 1981) and Mayhew, ‘Geography’s Genealogies’, in J. Agnew and D. Livingstone (eds), The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, pp. 21–38 (London, 2011). See ‘What is historical geography?’ Geography, xvii/1 (1932), pp. 39–45; Darby, H. C., numerous methodological papers, especially his ‘Historical geography’, in H. P. R. Finberg (ed.), Approaches to History: A Symposium, pp. 127–56 (London, 1962); Hartshorne, Richard, The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past, ch. 6 (Lancaster, PA, 1939). For a more up-to-date view, see Baker, Alan R. H., Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, UK, 2003). Lukermann, Fred, ‘The concept of location in classical geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, li/2 (1961), pp. 194–210; Coones, Paul, ‘A Russian interpretation of classical geography’, Geographical Review, lxxviii/1 (1983), pp. 95–109; Koelsch, William A., ‘Squinting back at Strabo’, Geographical Review, xci/4 (2004), pp. 502–18. Cosgrove, Denis, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, ch. 2 (Baltimore, MD, 2001); Curry, Michael R., ‘Toward a geography of a world without maps: lessons from Ptolemy and postal codes’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, xcv/3 (2005), pp. 680–91; Olwig, Kenneth R., ‘Has “geography” always been modern?: choros, (non)representation, performance, and the landscape’, Environment and Planning A, xl/8 (2008), pp. 1,843–61; Glacken, Clarence J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought From Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, CA, 1967, 1976). Stanislawski, Dan, The Individuality of Portugal: A Study in Historical-Political Geography (Austin, TX, 1959); ‘Culture zones of the ancient Aegean area: selective contact and persistence’, Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, xxxv (1973), pp. 7–25; ‘Dark Age contributions to the Mediterranean way of life’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, lxiii/4 (1973), pp. 397–410; ‘Dionysius westward: early religion and the economic geography of wine’, Geographical Review, lxv/4 (1975), pp. 427–44; ‘Seeds for the flowers of Tuscany’, Geographical Review, lxvii/4 (1977), pp. 412–29. Cary, Max, The Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History (Oxford, UK, 1949); Myres, J. L., Geographical History in Greek Lands (Oxford, 1953); Thomson, J. Oliver, History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge, UK, 1948. Reprint: New York 1965). McDonald, W. A. and G. R. Rapp, Jr (eds), The Minnesota Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing a Bronze Age Environment (Minneapolis, MN, 1972). Renfrew, C. and M. Wagstaff (eds), An Island Polity: The Archaeology of Exploitation in Melos (Cambridge, UK, 1982).

436

NOTES

12

13

14

15

16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23

Doorn, Peter K., ‘Geographical analysis of early modern data in ancient historical research: the example of the Strouza region project in central Greece’, Institute of British Geographers: Transactions and Papers, N.S. x/3 (1985), pp. 275–91; Bintliff, J. L. and A. M. Snodgrass, ‘The Cambridge/Bradford Boeotian expedition: the first four years,’ Journal of Field Archaeology, xii/2 (1985), pp. 123–61. Bintliff is extremely prolific; for a sample of his work, see Natural Environment and Human Settlement in Prehistoric Greece (Oxford, UK, 1976); Bintliff, ‘New approaches to human geography – prehistoric Greece: a case study’, in F. W. Carter (ed.), An Historical Geography of the Balkans, pp. 59–114 (London, 1977); Bintliff and A. M. Snodgrass, ‘Mediterranean survey and the city’, Antiquity, lxii/234 (1988), pp. 57–71. See also Davies, John K., ‘Greek history: a discipline in transformation’, in T. P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome, pp. 245–6 (Oxford, UK and New York, 2002). For general surveys, see Wagstaff, ‘A century of achievement: topographical and environmental studies’, in D. Huxley (ed.), Cretan Quests: British Explorers, Excavators, and Historians, pp. 69– 75 (Athens, 2000); Cherry, John F., ‘Frogs round the pond: perspectives on current archeological survey projects in the Mediterranean region’, in D. R. Keller and D. Rupp (eds), Archaeological Survey in the Mediterranean Area, pp. 375–416 (Oxford, UK, 1983). Talbert, Richard J. A. (ed.), Atlas of Classical History (New York, 1985. Reprint: London, 1988); Jenkins, Fred W., Classical Studies: A Guide to the Reference Literature, p. 155 (Englewood, CO, 1966); Talbert et al. (eds), The Barrington Atlas of Greek and Roman History, Preface (Princeton, NJ, 2000). See also Barr, John and David Mattingly (eds), An Atlas of Roman Britain (Oxford, UK, 1990). Van Paassen, Christiaan, The Classical Tradition of Geography (Groningen, Neth, 1957); Hoekveld, Gerard, ‘Christiaan van Paassen’, in P. H. Armstrong and G. J. Martin (eds), Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, vol. 22 (2003), pp. 157–68 (London, 2003). Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Levi, Peter (trans. and ed.), 2 vols (Harmondsworth, UK, 1971. Reprint, with revisions, 1979). The Strabons Geographika project at the University of Groningen is under the direction of Stefan L. Radt. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Gottingen, DE published volume 1 of a projected ten, four of which will be commentary, in 2002. Volume 8 was published in 2009; volume 9 in 2011. Holt, W. Stull, ‘Historical scholarship’, in M. Curti (ed.), American Scholarship in the Twentieth Century, p. 100 (Cambridge, MA, 1953); P. Culham and L. Edmunds (eds), Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? (Lanham, MD, 1989); Galinsky, Karl, ‘Classics beyond crisis’, Classical World, lxxiv/6 (1991), pp. 441–53; Galinsky, ‘The challenge of teaching the ancient world’, in D. M. Astolfi (ed.), Teaching the Ancient World, pp. 1–41 (Chico, CA, 1983). Levine, Molly M., ‘Multiculturalism and the classics’, Arethusa, xxv/1 (1992), pp. 215–20. Galinsky, ‘Classics beyond crisis’, p. 445. Shakespeare, William, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Act 4 Scene 3, lines 25–26, in Shakespeare, The Complete Works, S. Wells et al. (eds), p. 1,117 (Oxford, UK, 1988); Unstead, J. F., ‘The meaning of geography,’ Geographical Teacher, iv/17 (1907) p. 28; Glacken, Traces, Preface, p. xiii. Capel, ‘Institutionalization of geography and strategies of change’, in D. R. Stoddart (ed.), Geography, Ideology and Social Concern, p. 38 (Totowa, NJ, 1981). God, quoted in ‘Job’, ch. 38, verse 1, in New Oxford Annotated Bible, rev. edn, p. 661 (New York, 1991); Goffart, Walter, Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570–1870, p. 1 (Chicago, IL, 2002).

437

Index

Academy and College of Neuchâtel, 210, 218 Academy and College of Philadelphia: 50–1, 59–63, 65–6, 73; Board of Trustees, 60; faculty of, 60, 71; Latin School, 60–2; suspension of charter of (1779), 63 Adams, Brooks: 234–5 Adams, Henry: 234–5, 274, 307 Adams, Herbert Baxter: 67, 228, 230, 233, 322–3, 327 Adams, John: 49–50, 86 Addison, Joseph: Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, 79, 81; Roman Antiquities, 80 Aeschylus: 97 African Association: members of, 37 Agamemnon: tomb of, 159 Agassiz, Louis: 214, 218, 224, 319; lectures of, 209; Professor of Zoology and Geology at Lawrence Scientific School, 209–10 Akbar: 108 Albania: 128 Alexander the Great: 45, 205, 254; expedition to India, 108 Ali Pasha: 37 Alison, Francis: 65, 71; background of, 61–2; death of (1779), 63; ViceProvost of Academy of Philadelphia, 62 American Academy of Arts and Sciences: members of, 207 American Association for the Advancement of Science: 209; members of, 207 American Geographical Society: 238, 315, 325, 358; ‘Millionth Map’ series, 148 American Philosophical Society: 30, 55, 86

ancient geography: 2, 4; concept of use as aid to historical study, 60, 344 ancient Greece: xxi, 59, 88, 124, 142, 234, 257–8, 325, 327, 329, 332, 334; battle of Marathon (490 BC), 33, 220, 249–50; see Maps, Classical ancient Rome: xxi, 59, 96, 124, 234, 257, 264, 284, 290, 324–5, 327, 329, 332, 334; see Maps, Classical Anthon, Charles: Professor of Greek at Columbia University, 293; System of Ancient and Modern Geography (1850), 293 Anuchin, V. A.: Theoretical Problems of Geography, 349 archaeography: 22, 27, 33, 38, 80; development of field, 26, 41, 43, 45–6; first uses of term, 10, 12–15 Arnold, Matthew, 99; family of, 99 Arnold, Thomas: xx, 99, 117, 123, 166, 171, 182, 319, 354; family of, 166, 175; Headmaster of Rugby School, 164–6; Introductory Lectures on Modern History, 167–9, 233, 235; lectures of, 169; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, 164–5, 170, 172–3 Arnold, William T.: family of, 166–7; The Second Punic War, 166 Association of American Geographers: 338–9; Presidential Addresses, 238, 317–18 Atlases, Classical, British: 65, 98, 100, 111, 116, 122, 124, 228, 254–5, 289, 296–9, 301, 303, 305, 354; American, 65–6, 228, 301–4, 354; Other, 3–5, 100, 124, 175–7, 196, 301, 305, 335, 361 Atwood, Wallace: 335, 339 Aurelius, Marcus: 99

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

Austrian Academy of Sciences: members of, 2 Baigent, Elizabeth: 126, 134, 136–7 Baker, Alan: Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (2003), xviii, 135–6 Baker, J. N. L.: 107, 116, 118, 135, 163; History of Geographical Discovery and Exploration (1931), 199, 268; president of Hakluyt Society, 199 Banks, Sir Joseph: 47, 107 Barker, Robert: Panorama of Athens, 88 Barrows, Harlan H.: lectures of, 335–6 Barth, Heinrich: lectures of, 314 Barton, Benjamin Smith: family of, 64 Beazley, Raymond: 253, 255–6; background of, 198–9; Dawn of Modern Geography (1897–1906), 198 Beck, Charles: 208–9 Bernal, Martin: Black Athena, 155–6 Bintliff, John: Natural Environment and Human Settlement in Prehistoric Greece (1976), 352; writings of, 352–3 Black, Jeremy: Maps and History, 3 Blaettermann, George: 90–2, 98 Bonnycastle, Charles: 98 Borra, Giovanni Battista: court architect at Kingdom of Piedmont, 23 Bouverie, John: 23; death of (1750), 23 Bowen, Francis: 307; background of, 229 Braudel, Fernand: 265, 353; Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 343 Bravo, Michael: writings of, 108 Brazilian Geological Survey: 319 Breasted, James H.: first American Professor of Egyptology, 334 Briet, Philippe: Parallela geographiae, 3 Brighton College: faculty of, 99; students of, 99 British Academy: xix; A Century of British Geography, xviii, xix; fellows of, xviii British Association for the Advancement of Science: 163; Committee of, 191 British East India Company: 106; personnel of, 107 Brodrick, George: Warden of Merton College, 126, 244, 279 Brougham, Henry: role in founding of University of London, 95–7 Brown University: 308, 310; faculty of, 323–4 Browning, Robert: 97–8, 102

Bryce, James: 126, 137, 157–8; Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford University, 193 Buchanan, James: President of USA, 72–3 Buchholz, Eduard: Die Homerische Realien, 159 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward: The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), 34 Bunbury, Edward: 34, 152, 296–7, 354; History of Ancient Geography (1879), 116, 132, 157–8, 194–5; member of the Royal Geographical Society, 194–5 Bunsen, Chevalier: 166, 169 Burford, Robert: Panorama of Athens, 88 Burke, Paul: xxi Burnet, Thomas: Theory of the Earth, 55 Burr, George: 320, 332–3 Butler, George: 118–19, 167; Public Schools Atlas of Ancient Geography (1877), 299 Butler, Samuel: 92, 278–9, 298; Atlas of Ancient Geography, 65, 228, 301; Geographia Classica; or, the Application of Antient Geography to the Classics (1802), 289; Modern and Antient Geography (1813), 289; Sketch of Modern and Ancient Geography, 289 Butlin, Robin: Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time, xvii–xviii, 134–5 Byron, Lord George: 35; poetry of, 35 Cabell, Joseph: 81, 96 Caesar, Julius: Commentaries, 308 Cambridge University: 33, 94, 190, 331; early geography program, 199– 201, 268–9; entrance requirements of, 95, 277, 283, 305–6; faculty of, 135, 164; Trinity College, 90, 194 Capel, Horacio: 137–8, 360 Carlisle, Lord: 223; Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters, 221–2 Carpenter, Nathaniel: Fellow of Exeter College, 118 Carpenter, Rhys: Beyond the Pillars of Heracles (1966), 201 Cary, Max: The Ancient Explorers (1929), 201–2; The Geographic Background of Greek and Roman History (1949), 201, 343, 350 Catholic University of America: 313, 328; Department of Geology and Geography, 330; School of Sacred Studies, 329

440

INDEX

Cephalonia: 153 Chamberlin, Thomas C.: 331 Chandler, Richard: 31, 44 115; Antiquities of Ionia, 29, 33–4; Ionia expedition (1764–6), 26–8, 30, 33; Travels in Asia Minor (1774), 28–9; Travels in Greece (1775), 28 Channing, Edward: 238–9, 310; background of, 235; Guide to the Study of American History (1896), 235, 239 Chase, Thomas: Hellas: Its Monuments and Scenery (1863), 228 Child, Lydia Maria: writings of, xix Christianity: 327; Bible, 69; relationship with Republicanism, 69 Cicero: 278 Clap, Thomas: President of Yale University, 53 Clark University: xi–xiii, 190, 193, 324, 328–9, 339–40, 358–9; faculty of, 313, 323, 329, 339–42, 345, 358–9; Graduate Department, 329; Graduate School of Geography, 339–45 classical geography: 2, 3, 7, 9, 14, 34, 51, 65, 97–8, 101, 105–6, 124, 127, 161, 165, 170, 172, 175, 196, 275–6, 283, 287, 289, 360; decline of, 47, 202, 204, 266–7, 269, 273; development of, 4, 25–6, 54, 62–3, 99, 103, 110–11, 139, 236; study of, 67, 70, 77–8, 84, 92, 100, 124–5, 183, 185– 6, 188, 195, 243, 246, 249, 252, 254–5, 258–60, 262–7, 276, 281, 285, 288, 306, 311, 314, 317, 321–2, 328–30, 332, 339, 344, 348, 356–9; writings on, 131, 133, 150, 154, 160, 171, 201–2, 236, 274, 276, 279, 284, 289, 291, 293–6, 298–305, 323, 349–50 Cockerell, C.R.: 43, 45; background of, 42; member of Society of Dilletanti, 299 Colby, Charles C.: 340, 342 Colby, Charles Galusha: The World in Miniature (1861), 302 College of New Jersey; see Princeton University College of William and Mary: 76, 82, 85, 88; curriculum of, 82–3; faculty of, 82–3; students of, 78, 81–3 Colton, John, and Sons, publishers: 301–2 Columbia College: 51, 54, 66, 89; faculty of, 66–7, 71 Columbia University: 237, 310; faculty of, 102, 293, 332, 337

Conger, Charles T.: background of, 331–2 Constantine, David: 17, 29–30 Cook, Captain James: 22, 31, 47; South Seas expedition, 30, 107 Cook, J. M.: 26, 128 Corfu: 42, 152, 222 Cornell University: Department of Geology, 319; faculty of, 319–21, 332–3 Cramer, John Anthony: Ancient Greece, 293; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, 170 Craven, Keppel: 34–5; family of, 34 Crimean War (1853–6): 221 Croatia: Pula (Pola), 19, 21 Crocker, Lucretia: Methods of Teaching Geography, 303 Crone, G. R.: 30, 133 Crook, J. Mordaunt: 48; ‘The Rediscovery of Greece’, 16 Crowder, T. M.: 127, 129–32 cult of Priapus: 47 Curtius, Ernst: 10, 13, 15, 17, 36, 178, 215; Peloponnesos, 122 Cust, Lionel: historian of Society of Dilettanti, 16, 41, 46 Cutting, Leonard: lectures of, 54 Cyriacus of Ancona: visit to Greece, 6, 10 Dante: 134, 149; map of the Cosmos, 148 D’Anville, Jean-Baptiste: 108, 110–11, 114–15; death of, 112; Géographie Ancienne Abrégée, 292 Darby, H. C.: xviii, 178, 190, 348–9; background of, 135–6; support for ‘vertical themes’ in historical geography, 170 Darwin, Charles: 14, 279; On the Origin of Species (1859), 12 Dashwood, Sir Francis: Chairman, Committee on Chandler expedition, 27; co-founder of Society of Dilettanti, 46, 58; revision of Book of Common Prayer (1773), 58; West Wycombe Park, 58 Davidson, James: Professor of Classics at University of Pennsylvania, 64 Davidson, Robert: 61, 71–2; family of, 64; Geography Epitomized: Or, a Tour round the World; Being a short but comprehensive Description of the Terraqueous Globe attempted in Verse for the Sake of the Memory; And principally

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designed for the Use of Schools, 71–3; minister of Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, 71; Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania, 64, 71; Vice-Principal of Dickinson College, 71 Davis, Richard Beale: 91 Davis, William Morris: 56, 139, 200, 239, 309, 328, 348; founder of geography program at Harvard University, 237 Davison, J. A.: 26 Dawkins, Boyd: 182 Dawkins, James: 18; travels of, 23–5 de Grey and Ripon, Lord: President of the Royal Geographical Society, 38; tribute to W. M. Leake, 38 Demosthenes: 226, 278 Denon, D. V.: writings of, 12 Desgodetz, Antoine: 19 Dickinson College: 51, 61, 69–70, 73, 89–90; faculty of, 71–2; students of, 71–3 Dilettanti, Society of; see Society of Dilettanti Diderot, Denis: Encyclopedie, 87 Dionysius Periegetes: 63, 78–9; Description of the World, 54 Domesday Book: xviii, 136, 178 Donnelly, Ignatius: 160; Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), 159 Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre S.: 50; writings of, 85 Dunbar, Gary: ‘Thomas Jefferson, Geographer’ (1960), 75 Dunglison, Robley: Professor of Anatomy and Medicine at University of Virginia, 96–8 Dyson, Stephen l: Ancient Marbles to American Shores: Classical Archaeology in the United States, xix; In Pursuit of Classical Pasts: A History of Archaeology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, xix Ebeling, Christoph Daniel: 79; geographical library of, 88, 232 Echard, Lawrence: Classical Geographical Dictionary, 78 Edrisi: writings of, 179 Egypt: 23, 36, 69, 155, 159, 234, 277, 333–4; Cairo, 12; Great Pyramid, 24; maps of, 334; Napoleonic expedition to (1789), 12; River Nile, 69, 112, 142 Eliot, Charles W.: President of Harvard University, 203, 309, 313

Eliot, Jared: 56 Emerson, Alfred: lectures of, 320; Professor of Archaeology and Art at Cornell University; Engels, Donald: writings of, 353 Enlightenment: 14–15, 24, 29–31, 46, 68, 105–6, 110, 114, 117; methods of compilation, 116; practices of reportage, 20 Eratosthenes: 142, 356 Eton College: 144, 275, 281, 298; faculty of, 281; students of, 183, 279– 81 Evans, Arthur: 278; Director of Ashmolean Museum, 197; discovery of Palace at Knossos, 160, 179 Evans, Lewis: 56; lectures of, 53 Everett, Edward: 206, 208; background of, 88–9; critique of ‘Rockfish Gap’ report, 88, 90; President of Harvard University, 208, 212 Ewing, John: Provost of College of Philadelphia, 63 Farnell, Lewis: Rector of Exeter College, 120 Fauquier, Francis: Governor of Virginia Colony, 78 Ferguson, William Scott: 237, 239 Felton, Cornelius Conway: 204–5, 207– 10, 216–17, 220, 222–7, 296; background of, 205–6; death of (1862), 210, 214, 228; lectures of, 225–6; President of Harvard University, 205, 214, 228; translator of Arnold Guyot’s Earth and Man, 211–13, 217 Findlay, Alexander: Classical Atlas for Ancient Geography (1858), 303, 305 First World War (1914–18): 184, 188, 257–8, 264–5, 267, 277, 283, 306, 337 Fischer, David Hackett: writings of, xxii France: 84, 211, 338; Collège de France, 218; Nimes, 77, 80; Paris, 81, 84, 88, 327; Revolution (1789– 99), 83; Sorbonne, 218 Franklin, Benjamin: 22, 50, 54–7, 68, 138; Deputy Postmaster General for American Colonies, 56, 58, 138–9; education of, 58–9; family of, 63; founder of Academy and College of Philadelphia, 59–61, 63; founder of Junto (1727), 57, 60; founder of the Library Company of Philadelphia, 57–8; removed as President of Board

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of Trustees of Academy of Philadelphia (1756), 60; restored to Presidency of the Board of Trustees, 60 Franklin, Temple: family of, 63 Franklin College: 70 Fraser, Peter: 126, 132–4, 136 Fredericksen, Martin: 32 Freeman, Edward A.: 152–3, 172, 175, 180, 182; background of, 172–4; History of Sicily from the Earliest Times (1891–4), 175, 178–9; History of the Norman Conquest of England, 178; lectures of, 177; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, 167, 172–3, 175, 177, 180–1; Sicily: Phoenician, Greek and Roman (1892), 175, 179; The Historical Geography of Europe (1881), 175– 7, 181, 301, 322, 333 Freeman, T. W.: 163; writings of, 128, 135, 251 Freshfield, Douglas: 137, 267; President of the Royal Geographical Society, 46 Fry, Jonathan: 82 Galinsky, Karl: 357–8 Galton, Francis: member of the Royal Geographical Society, 128; writings of, 129, 281 Gell, Sir William: 31–2, 35, 42, 45, 115, 143; background of, 33; death of (1836), 34; Ionia expedition (1811– 13), 33; member of Society of Dilettanti, 11, 33–4; The Topography and Ornaments of Pompeii (1817–18), 34; The Itinerary of Greece, with a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo, and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity (1810), 33, 34; The Topography of Troy and its Vicinity (1804), 33; Topography of Rome and its Vicinity with Map, 34, 194 general geography: concept of, 51–2, 64, 67, 86; importance at Harvard University, 309 Geographical Association: 190; members of, xviii, 188, 193, 197 George, Hereford B.: 126–7, 244, 249, 333; background of, 191–2; Historical Geography of the British Empire (1904), 191–2; The Relations of Geography and History (1901), 191; Tutor in History at New College, Oxford University, 191

Germany: 101, 211, 254, 329, 338; Berlin, 218; Black Forest, 1; Bonn, 218; Donaueschingen, 1–2; Furtwangen, 1–2; Glyptothek, 43, 218; Hamburg, 232; Heidelburg, 218; Immendingen, 2; Lake Constance, 2; Leipzig, 337; Munich, 43, 218; River Breg, 1– 2; River Brigach, 1–2; River Danube, 1–3, 48; Tuttlingen, 2 Gibbon, Edward: 29; History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 25, 110 Gilbert, E.W.: British Pioneers in Geography (1971), 135; Director of Oxford Honour School of Geography, 193, 270; ‘Human Geography of Roman Britain’, 270 Gildersleeve, Basil: 321; background of, 101; Greek chair at University of Virginia, 101–2; Johns Hopkins, 101–2, 321 Gilman, David Coit: 212, 322–3, 325, 327–8; Founding President of John Hopkins University, 321; lectures of, 315, 327; President of University of California, Berkeley, 314–5; Professor of Physical and Political Geography at Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School, 314 Gilmer, Francis Walker: 80, 90–1 Girardin, Louis: 88–9; academies of, 82, 88; Professor of Modern Languages, History and Geography at College of William and Mary, 83 Glacken, Clarence: Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 349 Gladstone, William Ewart: 143–4, 146– 9, 159, 161–2, 237; British Prime Minister, 141, 154, 160; criticisms of, 141–2, 149–50, 156–8; Homer (1878), 159–60; Homeric Synchronism: An Inquiry into the Time and Place of Homer (1876), 159; Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age (1869), 155–7, 159; Landmarks of Homeric Study (1890), 160; mental map of Homer’s ‘Outer Geography’ 149–52; Oxford lecture, 1890, 161; significance of Homeric studies, 141–2, 152, 161–2; Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858), 145–9 Godlewska, Anne: Geography Unbound, xvii–xviii, xx Goffart, Walter: 3–4, 361 Goode, Paul J.: lectures of, 335

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Goodwin, William Watson: 180, 228; aid to E. W. Freeman, 180; praise of H. W. Torrey, 231–2 Gordon, Patrick: Geographical Grammar (1743), 52–3, 55, 58, 307 Grant, Michael: The Ancient Mediterranean, 343 Greece: passim; Acropolis, 21, 221, 315; Aegina, 42; Argolid, 35, 172, 221, 222; Argos, 222; Athens, 17, 19, 21, 29, 36, 39, 41, 45, 152, 154, 172, 183, 218–21, 224, 258, 261, 327, 338; Attica, 33, 260; Bassae, 42; Boeotia, 247, 261; Chaeronea, 172, 221; Corinth, 223, 261, 327; Delphi, 172, 223; Eleusis, 33; Epidaurus, 327; Marathon, 172, 222, 249, 257; Morea, 34, 38–9; Mt Athos, 37, 123, 128–9; Mt Hymettus, 224, 261; Mt Olympus, 147; Mycenae, 147, 159, 172, 222, 261, 327; Olympia, 327; Parthenon, 21, 45; Plataea, 222, 247, 248–52, 261; Rhamnus, 33; Salamis, 222; Salonica, 37; Sparta, 42, 221, 262, 338; Thebes, 219, 223; Thermopylae, 219, 221–2, 247–9, 338; Thessaly, 261, 262; Tiryns, 327; Tower of the Winds, 21; War of Independence (1821–32), xxi, 38, 266 Green, J.R.: 124, 159–60, 167, 170–1, 174 Green, Peter: 43 Grey, Sir James: member of Society of Dilettanti, 19 Gros, Johann Daniel: 61, 66–7, 71; retirement of (1795), 67 Grove, George: 122, 220, 296; Geography (1877), 160, 296–7 Grundy, G. Beardoe: 119, 137, 248, 250, 252, 254, 255–8, 261, 297; background of, 246–7; Fifty-Five Years at Oxford (1945), 247, 257–8; lectures in the School of Geography, 252–3; The Great Persian War and its Preliminaries, 249–51; Thucydides and the History of his Age (1911), 251 Guillemard, F. H. H.: 200 Gurney, Ephraim: 234–5; death of (1886), 309 Guthrie, William: New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar (1774), 52–3, 307 Guyot, Arnold Henri: 53, 206, 212–13, 216, 221, 223–4, 226–7, 294, 314, 321; classical maps, 303; Earth and Man, 206, 212–14; family of, 220,

303; lectures of, 204, 210–11, 213– 14, 217 Haggett, Peter: 133, 135–6 Hahn, Eduard: 317 Hakluyt, Richard: 80, 168; first Reader in Geography at Oxford University, 63 Hakluyt Society: founding of (1846), 198; members of, 199 Hall, G. Stanley: 321; Methods of Teaching History (1884), 235, 323; President of Clark University, 323, 329 Hamilton, Sir William: British Minister to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 46–7 Hanno the Carthaginian: 114 Harris, Eileen: 23–5 Harrison, Gessner: 103; background of, 100; retirement of (1859), 101; students of 101; The Geography of Ancient Italy and Southern Greece (1834– 5), 100 Harrower, John: Map of the Greekless Areas of Scotland (1912), 276–7 Hart, Albert Bushnell: Guide to the Study of American History (1896), 235, 239; opinion of Torrey, 232 Hartog, Francois: 162 Hartshorne, Richard: The Nature of Geography, 348 Harvard University: xii–xiii, 52–3, 59, 88–9, 208, 226–7, 232, 239, 307, 329; Cambridge Scientific Club, 207; faculty of, 88, 136, 180, 203–9, 212–14, 228–33, 274, 309–10, 319, 324, 339; Harvard College, 203, 307; Law School, 213; Lawrence Scientific School, 209, 212; students of, 52, 212–13, 226–7, 237–8 Haskins, Charles Homer: 238–9, 324 Haverfield, Francis J.: 254; background of, 184; death of (1919), 184–5, 267; lectures of, 256, 266–7; member of Oxford University Committee for Geography, 184, 266 Hehn, Victor: writings of, 333 Helmolt, H. F.: The World’s History, 193 Herbertson, Andrew: 186, 256, 266, 270, 282; death of, 187, 241, 243, 264–6, 270; Director of Oxford School of Geography, 185, 262 Herodotus: 6, 111–14, 142, 144–5, 166, 188, 198, 218, 220, 248–51, 262, 278, 317, 324, 355–6 Heylyn, Peter: Cosmography, 55 Hillard, George: 212, 219

444

INDEX

Himly, Auguste: Histoire de la Formation Territoriale des États de l’Europe Centrale, 333 historical geography: 9–10, 13, 15, 18, 47–8, 54, 119–20, 135–6, 170, 176, 180, 190–1, 237, 267, 270, 277, 335, 348, 352, 360; cognitive approach in, 142; concept of, 27, 112; themes within, 3, 170; study of, 63, 67, 121, 126, 181, 186, 191, 193, 197, 199, 203–4, 228–9, 232, 244, 253–4, 256, 259, 262, 265, 268–9, 290, 320–2, 324–7, 330–6, 344, 357; writings on, 171–2, 175, 177, 181, 196–7, 234–5, 268, 317–18, 323, 333 Hoar, George Frisbie: 206–8 Hogarth, David G.: 193; background of, 197; death of (1927), 198; Director of Ashmolean Museum, 197; lectures on ancient geography, 185, 267; Modern and Ancient Roads in Eastern Asia Minor (1893), 197; President of the Royal Geographical Society, 198 Holmes, George Frederick: 91 Homer: 6, 72, 144, 146, 148–50, 153–4, 161, 195, 219, 236, 278; description of nature, 40; Iliad, 24–6, 142, 145– 6, 153, 222–3, 226; mental map, 146–9, 156; Odyssey, 142, 145, 148, 152–3, 218, 221, 223 Hornberger, Theodore: 51, 53 Hudson, John: Geographiae Veteris Scriptores Graeci Minores, 81 Hughes, William: 98; Atlas of Scripture Geography (1840), 299; maps of, 98, 299 Hunnewell, Roy: 85 Hunter, Robert M. T.: political career of, 100 Huth Jr, Carl F.: 334 Hutton, C. A.: writings of, 22–3 Huxley, T. H.: 279; Physiography (1877), 160, 321 imperialism: 110; as organizing concept, 109 India: 107–9, 338; Bengal, 107 Inglis, Alexander: Principles of Secondary Education (1918), 285 Islam: 327 Italy: Church of Sts Cosmo and Damien, 47; Herculaneum, 34; Isernia, 47; Naples, 16, 18, 34, 42; Paestum, 16, 80; Pompeii, 34, 42, 80; Rome,

16, 18–19, 23, 34–5, 41–2, 80–1, 96, 166, 170, 183, 215, 218; Venice, 16, 19 Ithaca: 33, 35, 152–4, 156, d’Ivernois, Francois: background of, 84; proposal to move University of Geneva faculty to U.S., 84 Jackson, William W.: Rector of Exeter College, 120, 137 Jameson, J. Franklin: 124, 322–4, 332– 3 Jardine, George: 275 Jebb, Richard: 43 Jefferson, Peter: 82; family of, 77–8 Jefferson, Thomas: 31, 49–50, 54, 69, 74–5, 84–5, 103–4, 106, 206, 235, 277, 312; background of, 76–7; ‘Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education’ (1817), 76; death of (1826), 76, 79, 93; family of, 77, 82, 88, 93; Governor of Virginia, 75, 82; ‘Instructions to Captain Lewis’ (1803), 30–1; libraries of, 76–81; Notes on the State of Virginia, 75, 103; plan for University of Virginia curriculum, 89–90; President of the United States, 82; Rector of University of Virginia, 90, 93–4, 96; ‘Rockfish Gap’ report (1818), 86–90, 96; US Minister to France, 84 Johns Hopkins University: xiii, 124, 212, 321–9, 332; chartered (1867), 313; Department of History and Political Science, 322; faculty of, 101, 228, 321–5; opening of (1876), 313, 321 Johnston, Keith: 301; Atlas of Classical Geography (1853), 150; School Atlas of Ancient Geography, 298 Johnston Jr, Christopher: lectures of, 325 Jordan, David Starr: first President of Stanford University, 330 Junto: founding of (1727), 57, 60; members of, 59 Kaufman, Edward: 15, 19; ‘Architecture and Travel in the Age of British Eclecticism’, 13 Keckermann, Bartholomaus: use of term of ‘General geography’, 51 Kelly, Jason: 10, 11, 46 Keltie, John Scott: Applied Geography (1890), 160; Inspector of Geograph

445

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

ical Education for the Royal Geographical Society (1886), 127, 246, 254, 300–1 Kemp, John: 61, 67, 71 Kendrew, W. G.: lectures of, 269–70 Kennett, Basil: Antiquities of Rome, 78 Kent, Charles W.: 103–4 Kepner, Tyler: 288 Kermack. W. R.: 277 Key, Thomas Hewitt: 94–6, 98–9, 295, 299; background of, 94; family of, 96 Kiepert, Heinrich: 300; Manual of Ancient Geography (1881), 290, 301 King’s College, London: 95, 265; Evening Division, 299 King’s College, New York: 51; curriculum of, 54; founding of (1754), 66 Kinnaird, William: background of, 42 Knight, Charles: publisher of Penny Cyclopaedia, 97; publisher of Penny Magazine, 97 Knight, Richard Payne: 47 Knowles, James: editor of Contemporary Review, 155 Knox, Dr Samuel: background of, 86–7 Kraitser, Charles: 91 Kruse, Friedrich: xx, 13; concept of ‘geographischen und topographischen’, 12–13; Hellas (1825), 17–18 Lawrence, Abbott: 209 Lawrence, T. E.: 198 Leake, William Martin: 31, 36–40, 122, 137, 143, 166, 248, 252, 299, 352; background of, 36; death of (1860), 38; founding member of the Royal Geographical Society, 36; Historical Outline of the Greek Revolution (1825), 38; member of African Association, 37; member of Society of Dilettanti, 11, 37; On Some Disputed Questions of Ancient Geography (1857), 38, 224; Researches in Greece (1814), 37; Topography of Athens (1821), 37–8, 171; Tour of Asia Minor (1824), 37; Travels in the Morea (1830), 38; Travels in Northern Greece (1835), 38 Lear, Edward: 117, 128, 249 Lebanon: Baalbek, 18, 24–5, 79–80 Le Rond d’Alembert, Jean: writings of, 87 le Roy, Alphonsus: 57 Le Roy, Julien-David: 20–1, 24; Ruins of Athens (1759), 79

Lechevalier, Jean-Baptiste: criticisms of, 128 Lee, Robert E.: President of Washington College, 99 Levine, Molly: 357–8 Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–6), 30–1, 75, 77, 93, 103 Library Company of Philadelphia: 57– 8 Livingstone, David: The Geographical Tradition (1992), 135 Livy: 63, 279 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh: xxi–xxii, 18; assessment of William Ewart Gladstone, 141 London Architectural Society: members of, 42 London International Geographical Congress (1895): 245; delegates to, 244 London School of Economics (LSE): faculty of, 198, 245 Long, George: 100, 103, 165, 289, 295– 6, 299–300; Classical Atlas (1854), 98, 229–300, 303; Classics Master at Brighton College, 99; faculty member at University of Virginia, 90–2, 94–7; founding member of the Royal Geographical Society, 98–9; lectures of, 92, 97; ‘On the Study of Geography’, 97, 239; University of London, 97–9; writings of, 97–9 (see also Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) Luce, J. V.: 162; Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes, 115 Lucian, of Samosata, xxii Ludwig of Bavaria, Crown Prince: 42–3 Lukermann, Fred: background of, 351 Macan, R. W.: 248 Macaulay, Rose: The Towers of Tebizond, 131 Macedonia: 277 Mackenzie, Alexander: North American expedition of (1790–1), 31 Mackinder, Halford: 126–7, 138–9 163, 167–8, 180–5, 244–6, 253, 256, 266– 7, 270, 331, 348; Britain and the British Seas, 251; Democratic Ideals and Reality, 243; lectures of, 185, 242, 253, 331; ‘On the Scope and Methods of Geography’, 167, 241–2; Reader in Geography at Oxford University, 191, 193–4, 241–7

446

INDEX

MacMunn, Nora: 255–6 Macvane, Silas E.: McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University, 231–2 Madison, James: 80, 82, 86, 94, 235, 291; President of the United States, 93–4, 235; Rector of University of Virginia, 93, 96 Magris, Claudio: 2, 48; Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, 1 Maps, Classical, British: 55, 78, 80, 98, 100, 106–9, 112–13, 115, 135, 139, 147–53, 157–8, 161–2, 166, 169, 184, 188, 195, 224, 248–50, 254–5, 258, 260, 262, 276–7, 279, 281, 297–9, 300–1, 303; American, 101, 109, 138, 224, 232–5, 285, 303, 310, 315, 323, 334, 354–6; Other: 60, 92, 95, 107–9, 112, 130, 135, 138, 235, 252, 274, 300–1, 310, 320, 323, 327, 335 Marett, R. R.: Fellow of Exeter College, 120 Markham, Sir Clements: 107, 116, 181–2, 194, 333; lectures of, 200–1; President of the Royal Geographical Society, 246 Marsh, George Perkins: 85, 317; Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), 170, 229–30, 259, 333; The Earth as Modified by Human Action, 229, 333; US Minister to Turkey and Italy, 229 Mason, Kenneth: 185, 187, 190, 193; Director of Oxford Honour School of Geography, 269–70 Massachusetts Board of Education: 207, 214 Massachusetts Historical Society: advisory committee of, 236; members of, 231 Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 102, 212 Maury, Matthew Fontaine: 102; Physical Geography of the Sea, 139 McCabe, Gordon: 101 Meitzen, August: 317 Mela, Pomponius: 78, 279; De Chorographia, 356 Mercer, Charles: 76 Merz, J. Theodore: 18, 47; History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 9–10 Mesopotamia: 23, 97, 115, 277, 333, 337–8

Meyers, Jeffrey: 93 Miers, Henry A.: member of Committee on Geography, 183 Mill, H. R.: Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, 99, 331–2 Miller, Samuel: 67, 108–9, 111; Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), 51 Milnes, Richard Monckton: 17–18, 28; criticisms of Society of Dilettanti, 16 Mitchell, Samuel Augustus, publisher: 302, 308; Ancient Atlas, 65–6, 302; Biblical and Sabbath School Geography, 294; New Ancient Geography, 294 Moll, Hermann: Compleat Geographer, 78; Geography, 55 Monroe, James: President of the United States, 93–4 Montenegro: 128 Morgan, Edmund: 53 Morison, Samuel Elliot: 228, 230, 232; retirement of (1955), 204 Morse, Reverend Jedidiah: 81, 292–3, 306–8; American Gazetteer, 79; family of, 291; Geography Made Easy (1784), 291; New American Geography (1787), 53, 79 Morse, Sidney Edwards: 79; Ancient Atlas, 291; family of, 291 Müller, Karl Ottfried: 132, 215, 297, 354; Geographi Graeci Minores (1855– 7), 297 Mumford, Lewis: The Brown Decades (1931), 333 Murphy, William: Comprehensive Classical Atlas (1832), 298–9 Murray, Gilbert: 185, 262–3 Murray, John, publisher: 296–7; Handbook for Travellers in Greece, 152 Murray, J. O.: 212–13 Myres, Sir John Linton: xviii–xix, 25, 161, 163–4, 180, 182–93, 242–4, 252, 261–4, 276, 282, 338, 341, 348; death of (1954), xviii; family of, xix, 187; first Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, 163, 187–8; Geographical History in Greek Lands (1954), xviii, 186, 190–1, 350; Herodotus: Father of History, 188; lectures of, 186, 188; member of Committee on Geography, 183; President of Geographical Association, xviii, 188; The Dawn of History (1911), 190

447

GEOGRAPHY AND THE CLASSICAL WORLD

National Education Association: Committee on the Secondary Curriculum, 295, 328, 331 Nationalism, American: 54, 73, 291 Neo-Hellenism: 13 Newbigin, Marion: 338; Mediterranean Lands (1924), 290 Newton, Charles: 41, 45; Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at British Museum, 43; member of Society of Dilettanti, 43; Professor of Archaeology at University of London, 44 Newton, William: 21 Niebuhr, B. G.: 122, 165, 170, 215; Dissertation on the Geography of Herodotus (1830), 116, 145; lectures of, 122–3, 290; travels of, 115 Nisbet, Charles: 70 Odysseus: 33, 35, 146, 152–3, 157–8, 162, 222 Ogilvie, R. M.: 41, 164 Oldham, Yule: 200–2, 331 Olney, Jesse: Modern and Ancient Atlas, 302 Ortelius, Abraham: 3–4, 60, 63, 80, 108, 344; Parergon, 3–4; Synonymia Geographica (1578), 3; Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), 3, 79 Osborn, James M.: 14, 32, 46; concept of ‘Romantic Hellenism’, 32; writings of, 13 Otto of Bavaria, Prince: selected as King of Greece (1832), 13 Ottoman Empire: 36, 128; Armenian Genocide (1915–23), 264; Constantinople, 20, 23, 36, 218, 265 (see also Turkey) Oxford University: 58, 119–21, 124–7, 161, 163–4, 180–2, 187, 193–4, 241– 6, 259–62, 269–71, 278, 305–6, 331, 338, 340; All Souls College, 161; Balliol College, 259–62; Brasenose College, 246–7; Christ Church College, 144, 161, 184–5, 192, 258, 275; Committee for Geography, 183–5, 193, 266–8, 271; Common University Fund, 183–4, 244, 247; Corpus Christi College, 127, 256–7; entrance requirements of, 95, 305– 6, Exeter College 117–20, 139, 167, 183, 196–7; faculty of Oxford University, 163–5, 170–93, 197, 243–4, 262, 269–70, 275; Hertford College, 193; Honour School of Geography,

163, 184–5, 187, 269–70; intercollegiate lectures, 120–1, 191; Magdalen College, 134, 185, 197, 305–6; meeting (1904) of Classical Association at Oxford, 306; Merton College, 126, 198, 244; New College, 127, 185, 189, 191, 193, 277; School of Geography, 119, 163, 182–5, 192–3, 199, 241, 244, 252–5, 257, 259, 262, 265–71; School of Literae Humaniores, 117, 119, 123, 125–7, 133, 181, 243, 246, 253, 256, 267–9; School of Modern History, 126, 180– 1, 191, 243–6, 267–8; St John’s College, 196; students of, 123–4, 127, 133, 188, 305–6; Trinity College, 183, 246; University College, 117, 170-1, 248; Wadham College, 123 Palestine: 24, 36, 160, 171, 196, 215, 234, 254, 277, 299, 307, 325, 327 Parr, Samuel: 80 Pars, William: 29; role in Chandler Ionia expedition (1764–6), 27 Pausanias: xvii, 6, 16, 29, 31–3, 37–9, 79, 121–2, 124, 127, 142, 160, 199, 226, 320, 355; Descriptio Graecae, 38, 78, 355 Peirce, Benjamin: 209, 211 Pelham, Henry: 119, 164, 183–5, 187, 243, 246, 249; background of, 183; death of (1907), 184; member of Committee on Geography, 183 Penrose, Francis C.: background of, 45; Investigations of the Principles of Ancient Architecture: Optical Refinements in the Construction of Ancient Buildings in Athens (1851), 45; sponsored by Society of Dilettanti, 45 Periegetes, Dionysius: 63, 78–80; Description of the World, 54 Pillans, James: 195–6; writings of, 276 Pinkerton, John: Modern Geography, 78, 82 Plato: 160–1, 226–7, 278; Crito, 219; Phaedo, 219 Playfair, James: writings of, 298 Pliny: Natural History, 55 Poe, Edgar Allan: 93; writings of, 92 Polybius: 114, 169, 317, 355 Pope, Alexander: 25, 72, 221–2 Porter, James: member of Society of Dilettanti, 20; Minister at Constantinople, 20 Powell, Fredrick York: 174; member of Committee on Geography, 183; Re-

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gius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, 192 Priene: excavation of temple of Athena Polias (1869), 44–5 Priestley, Joseph: 50, 63; Lectures on History and General Policy, 85 Princeton University: 213–14, 315, 322, 354; formerly College of New Jersey, 53–4, 210, 310 Ptolemy, Claudius: 31, 79, 124, 133, 195, 282, 349; Cosmographia, 4; Geographia, 356 Pullan, Richard Popplewell: 45; death of (1888), 43; excavations conducted by, 44 Putz, Wilhelm: 65; Handbook of Mediaeval Geography, 294; Manual of Ancient Geography and History, 290 Quesnay de Beaurepaire, Chevalier Alexandre-Marie: background of, 83–4; proposal for founding of academy, 83–4 Ramsay, William Mitchell: 119, 192, 196, 296; Lincoln and Merton Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University, 197; President of Geographical Association, xviii, 197; The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890), 197 Randolph, Bernard: Present State of the Morea, 78 Randolph, Thomas Jefferson: family of, 82, 88 Ratzel, Friedrich: 317, 333, 336–7; ‘Man as a Life Phenomenon on the Earth’s Surface’, 193 Redford, Bruce: 11, 18, 30–1 Rennell, Major James: 105–6, 110, 113– 14, 117, 131, 139; background of, 106–7; Bengal Atlas (1780), 107–8; death of (1830), 114; family of, 106, 116; ‘On the Rate of Travelling, as Performed by Camels’, (1791), 108, 111; The Geographical System of Herodotus examined and explained by a comparison with those of other Ancient Authors and with Modern Geography (1800/1830 [2nd ed]), 111–14, 116, 144; Treatise on the Comparative Geography of Western Asia, 111, 116; works on, 107; writings of, 111, 114–15 Republicanism: 50–1, 66; relationship with Christianity, 69

Reveley, Willey: 21 Revett, Nicholas: 21–4, 28, 30, 38, 40– 1, 44, 58; Antiquities of Athens, 20, 24, 29, 41, 58, 79–80; Antiquities of Ionia, 29, 33–4; Greek expedition of, 10, 16–20; role in Chandler Ionia expedition (1764–6), 27; writings of, 20, 24 Richard, Carl J.: The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States, xix, 205 Rickman, Geoffrey: Corn Supply of Ancient Rome, 343 Rittenhouse, Benjamin: 63–4; family of, 64; Vice-Provost and Professor of Astronomy at the University of the State of Pennsylvania, 64 Ritter, Karl: 116, 130, 138, 204, 210, 213–15, 217–18, 223, 226, 314, 319; lectures of, 10; Erdkunde, 130, 196, 322 Rogers, William Barton: founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 102, 212; Natural Philosophy chair at University of Virginia, 102 Rollin, Charles: 55, 57, 92; Professor of Ancient History at the Sorbonne, 87; Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles-Lettres (1726–8), 55, 87; writings of, 80 Roper, Henry W.: lectures of, 330 Royal Geographical Society (RGS): xviii, 126–7, 132, 181, 191, 193, 212, 241–2, 246–7, 250, 254, 258, 267–8, 281, 300, 338; Copley Medal, 108; Council of, 194–5, 243– 4; Fellows of, 127; Geographical Journal, 133, 137, 190, 202, 250, 258, 268, 331; Gold Medal, 198; Hints to Travellers, 129; members of, 36, 38, 46, 98–9, 127–8, 183, 191, 194–5, 198, 246, 254, 300, 331; Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 166, 181; Victoria Medal, 188, 197 Rush, Benjamin: 49–50, 55, 59, 69–70, 72; background of, 68–9; plans for reform of high education in Pennsylvania, 70 Ruskin, John: 105, 121, 123 Russo-Turkish War (1877–8), 129 Salisbury, Rollin: 316, 334–5; Professor of Geographical Geology at University of Chicago, 331

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Sandys, George: Travels, 55, 78 Sandys, John E.: 36 Sauer, Carl O.: xii, 167, 316–18, 325, 336, 344–5; family of, 316; use of term ‘archaeogeography’, 14 Schliemann, Heinrich: 158, 161; Hisarlik excavation, 159 Schmidt, Henry Immanuel: Course of Ancient Geography (1857), 294 Schmitz, Leonhard: 296, 298; foundereditor of Classical Museum, 171; International Atlas, 303; Manual of Ancient Geography (1857), 290, 294; Translator of B. G. Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geography (1854), 290 Scientific Lazzaroni: members of, 205, 209 Scott, Jonathan: 10–11, 43 Second World War (1939–45): 33, 190, 201, 312, 330, 350 Sedgwick, Adam: 199 Semple, Ellen Churchill: xiii, 190, 193, 336–41, 343–4, 349; death of (1932), 345, 348, 350; Influences of Geographic Environment, 318, 336, 340, 342; lectures of, 336, 339–40; students of, 336, 340, 345; The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History, xii, 201, 318, 342, 347; writings of, 338, 340–1 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate: 309, 319, 324 Sicily: 37, 42, 177–80, 234, 254, 327; Agrigento, 42; Greek, 21, 172, 358 Siljestrom, P. J.: 67, 286 Small, William, William and Mary College: 82 Smith, Ben: American Geographers, 1784– 1812, 54–5, 75 Smith, George Adam: xxi, 325; Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1917), 196; The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894), 135, 196 Smith, William, compiler and editor: 98, 122, 295–7; Atlas of Ancient Geography (1875), 124, 220, 254, 296–7; Atlas of the Bible (1875), 296; criticisms of William Ewart Gladstone, 149; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1842), 295; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1857), 121, 194, 220, 295–6; Dictionary of the Bible Comprising its

Antiquities, Biography, Geography and Natural History (1860–3), 296; History of Greece (1854), 219–20, 296 Smith, William, Provost of the College of Philadelphia: 60–1, 63; A General View of the College of Mirania (1753), 61; background of, 61 Snow, Louis M.: 51 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK): formation of (1826), 97; map series of, 98, 100, 168, 299; Penny Cyclopaedia, 97–8, 289, 295; Quarterly Journal of Education, 97, 165, 289; sponsorship of publications of, 97; suspension of operations (1846), 97 Society for Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 133: establishment of (1879), 41; Journal of Hellenic Studies, 133 Society of Dilettanti: 10–12, 14–15, 17– 18, 31–2, 40–1, 46–7, 54, 58, 106, 164, 168, 215, 278, 344, 352; Antiquities of Ionia (1797), 29, 37, 43, 45; Committee on Publications, 43; criticisms of, 16; establishment of (1732), 7; expedition to Ionia (1764), 11, 26–8, 30; expedition to Ionia (1811–13), 33; Ionian Antiquities, 24, 28–9; Ionian Committee, 43; The Unedited Antiquities of Attica (1817), 33, 43 Socrates: 219; writings on, 59, 226–7 Sophocles: 221, 279; Oedipus [at] Colonus, 278; Hill of Colonus, description of, 221 Spain: 234, 254 Sparks, Jared, Harvard University: 207, 229–30, 239; President, 203, 212, 228 special geography: 67; concept of, 52 Spence, Joseph: founder of Society of Dilettanti, 11 Spencer, Terence: 22–3, 26, 35–6, 39–40 Spon, Jacob: 10, 13; expedition to Greece (1676), 6, 78; use of ‘archaeographia’, 12 Spruner, Jacob: Atlas Antiquus, 124 Stanford University: Department of Geography, 330; faculty of, 330; Greek Department, 330; School of Humanities, 330 Stanislawski, Dan: writings of, 350 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn: 117, 121, 123, 132, 135, 167, 172, 215; background of, 171; ‘Greek Topography’

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(1844), 171–2; Oxford University, 170–1; Sinai and Palestine (1856), 170, 296 Stedman, Algernon M.M.: Oxford: Its Social and Intellectual Life, 123–4 Sterrett, J. R. S.: 320 Stillman, W. J.: 315; lectures of, 324–5 Stoddart, D. R.: 30; On Geography (1986), 135 Stoneman, Richard: 16–17, 32, 34, 39– 40 Strabo: xvii–xviii, 6, 16, 25, 29, 78–80, 121–2, 124, 126, 130, 133, 142, 162, 199, 317, 349, 355; Geography, 166, 356; writings on, 125, 190, 356 Stray, Christopher: 273–4; Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960, xix, 273 Stuart, James: 19, 22–3, 38, 41; Antiquities of Athens, 20–1, 24, 29, 41–2, 58, 79–80; death of, 21; Greek expedition of, 10, 16–20; writings of, 20, 24 Stubbs, William: Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, 177 Suess, Eduard: 6; President of Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2 Surface, George T.: ‘Thomas Jefferson: A Pioneer Student of American Geography’ (1909), 75 Syria: 23, 36, 98, 299; Damascus, 24; Palmyra, 18, 24–5 Tacitus: xxi, 278 Taney, Roger B.: Chief Justice of the United States, 71–3 Tanner, Henry S.: 302; Atlas Classica (1840), 301 Taylor, Eva G. R.: 199, 201 Teos: excavation of temple of Dionysus (1862), 44 Textbooks, Classical Geography, British: 55, 58, 92, 124–5, 132–5, 139, 155–60, 201, 219–20, 257, 289–90, 307, 321, 343, 350; American, 53, 96–7, 100, 201, 284, 286, 288, 291– 4, 307–8, 321, 334, 342, 347–8; Other geography textbooks, 17, 51– 3, 55, 61, 63, 78–9, 81–2, 98, 135, 160, 175–7, 181, 191–2, 196, 199, 245, 268, 273–4, 279, 290–1, 296, 322–3, 333, 336, 341, 345 Thompson, J. Oliver: History of Ancient Geography (1948), 350

Thucydides: xx–xxi, 63, 124, 165, 167– 8, 172, 180, 251, 278, 324, 359 Ticknor, George: 79–80, 90, 212, 229; visit to Rome (1818), 35 Tillinghast, William Hopkins: 238; writings of, 236–9 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America, 229 Torrey, Henry Warren: 230–7; background of, 231; family of, 230; Harvard University, 204, 228, 230, 232; retirement of (1886), 233, 309 Toynbee, Arnold J.: 185, 254, 259–62, 266, 270–1, 279; Hannibal’s Legacy, 264; lectures of, 263–6; Nationality and the War (1914), 264 Tozer, Henry Fanshawe: xv, 105, 120, 122, 130–2, 134–7, 170–1, 297; background of, 117; Classical Geography (1877), 124, 160, 323; death of, 126, 137; family of, 117, 119; Fellow of Exeter College, 119; History of Ancient Geography (1897), 132–5, 139; lectures of, 119–23, 135; Lectures on the Geography of Greece (1873), 119– 23, 135; Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, 127–8, 140; Selections from Strabo (1893), 124–6; The Church and the Eastern Empire (1888), 134; The Islands of the Aegean (1890), 131–2; Turkish Armenia and Eastern Asia Minor (1881), 129–31, 140; Vice-President of Society for Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 133 Trinity College, Dublin: students of, 154 Troad: 25–9, 33, 35, 226; excavation of temple of Apollo Smintheus (1866), 44 (see also Turkey, Plain of Troy) Tucker, George: 91, 100; writings of, 98 Turkey: 28, 36, 99, 128, 132, 230, 339; Amasia, 130; Anatolia, 36; border of, 251; Ionia, 11, 26–8, 33, 359; Halicarnassus, 44; Istanbul, 130; Izmir (Smyrna), 23, 28; Pergamon, 23; River Meander, 28–9; Sardis, 23; Plain of Troy, 11, 23, 28, 99, 114, 127–8, 156, 277 (see also Ottoman Empire) Tutwiler, Henry: 100, 300 United Kingdom (UK): passim; British Museum, 21, 41, 43, 45, 217–18; Endowed Schools Act (1869), 282–3; Indian Civil Service Examination, 283; London Architectural Society, 42

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United States of America (USA): passim; American Revolution (1775–83), 49, 51, 66–8, 74, 83, 89, 284, 306; Civil War (1861–5), 101, 203, 301–2, 308, 315; Library of Congress, 78 University College London: 99, 135; faculty of, 97, 295; origins of, 95; students of, 99 University of Aberdeen: faculty of, 195, 197, 276–7; students of, 61, 195, 197 University of California, Berkeley: 14, 313–15; College of Commerce, 315; faculty of, 259, 262, 314–18, 345; students of, 315 University of Chicago: 330, 332–4, 337–8, 354; Department of Geography, 331–2, 334–6; Department of History, 324, 332–4; faculty of, 331– 7 University of Edinburgh: faculty of, 195–6, 338; students of, 61, 69 University of Geneva: faculty of, 84 University of Liverpool: 184, 186–7; Department of Geography, 187 University of London: 245; faculty of, 44, 96–9, 135; opening of (1828), 95–6; students of, 96, 98–9, 295 University of Pennsylvania: 51, 57, 59– 60, 66, 68, 71, 73, 89, 333, 335; entrance requirements of, 65–6, 310; restoration of property and charter (1789), 60–1, 64 University of Reading: 245, 270; faculty of, 192, 198 University of St Andrews: 281 University of the State of Pennsylvania: 50–1, 61, 63–4, 73; faculty of, 63–4 University of Virginia: 74, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85, 300, 321; Board of Visitors, 86–7, 89–91, 94, 96, 100–2; curriculum of, 103–4; faculty of, 90–1, 101–3; School of Ancient Languages, 90–2, 100–1, 103; School of Economics and Political Science, 102; School of Geography, 102; School of Natural History and Geology, 102; students of, 80, 92–4, 100–1, 103–4; Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs, 102–3 Van Paassen, Christiaan: The Classical Tradition of Geography, (1957), 355 Van Valkenburg, Samuel: xii, 340; lectures of, 345

Varenius, Bernhard: 63; concept of ‘general geography’, 64, 67, 86; Geographia Generalis (1650), 51–2, 61 Vaughan, Henry Halford: Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, 180 Vermeer, Johannes: The Astronomer, (1668), 4; The Geographer (1669), 4 Vining, James: American Geographers, 1784–1812, 54–5, 75 Virgil: Aeneid, 285 Von Engeln, O. D.: 319 Von Humboldt, Alexander: 22, 75, 105, 123, 213–15, 217–18, 221, 226, 229, 295, 314, 317, 319; Personal Narrative, 88, 93; writings of, 79 Von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf, Ulrich: 36, 40 Wace, Alan J. B.: 258, 261–2 Wagstaff, Malcolm: 38–9, 351–2 Walker, James: President of Harvard University, 229, 233 Walpole, Horace: criticisms of Society of Dilettanti, 16 Warmington, Eric: 201–2; The Ancient Explorers (1929), 201 Warntz, William: 51, 65 Waterhouse, Helen: writings of, 17 Wheler, George: 13; expedition to Greece (1676), 6, 78 White, Andrew Dickson: 320; founding President of Cornell University, 314, 319 Whitefield, George: 59 Wilkins, William: 42; travels of, 43 Willard, Emma: 292, 294, 301; Ancient Geography, as Connected with Chronology and Preparatory to the Study of Ancient History (1822), 293; founder of Emma Willard School, 292; Universal Geography, Ancient and Modern (1824), 293 Winchester College: 259, 277, 279 Winsor, Justin: 233, 236–8; Narrative and Critical History of America, 236, 238 Winterer, Caroline: The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910, xix, 205 Wood, Robert: 11, 18, 24, 30, 40, 72, 143; death of (1771), 29; Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1767), 26; role in Chandler

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Ionia expedition (1764–6), 27, 30; Ruins of Balbec (1757), 24–5, 79–80; Ruins of Palmyra (1753), 24–5, 80; travels of, 18, 22–6 Woodbridge, William: 292–4, 301, 308; Universal Geography, Ancient and Modern (1824), 293 Woods, Joseph: editor of Vol. 4 of Antiquities of Athens, 41–2 Woody, Thomas: 287–8 Worcester, Joseph: 286, 301; Ancient and Modern Geography, 307–8; Elements of Ancient, Classical and Scripture Geography, 292; Elements of Geography, Ancient and Modern, 292; History Atlas, 228 Wordsworth, Christopher: Athens and Attica, 171; Greece: Pictorial, Descriptive and Historical, 134, 171

Wright, John Kirtland: 147, 237–9, 274, 355; family of, 237–8; Geographical lore of the Time of the Crusades (1925), 148, 238, 324; Presidential Address to the Association of American Geographers (1946), 238 Wythe, George: 77–8, 81 Xenophon: 59, 130–1, 133; Anabasis, 97, 115–16, 129, 166, 308 Yale University: 53, 62; faculty of, 75, 314; Sheffield Scientific School, 314, 325; students of, 212, 314–15 Zante/Zakynthos: 153 Zimmern, Alfred: 187; background of, 260; The Greek Commonwealth (1911), 254, 260

453