History of Geography (Not Identical to Historical Geography)

In their recent entry on the “History of Geography” for the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Michiel van eeteren and James Sidaway highlight the fact that, despite still being considered by several geographers as a relatively specialized subdisciplinary niche, the history of geography is showing a remarkable vibrancy (Van Meeteren and Sidaway 2020). The general relaunch of this field of study is accompanied by the close engagement of its scholars with wider debates in geography, as well as in the wider area of human and social sciences. These current conversations can be often associated to what historians of science call the periodical coming back of “old” ideas (such as environmental determinism, to give one of the most classical examples for geography), which reignite past debates under new forms and in new arenas. Historians of geography claim that they still have a lot to say on matters of natures-cultures, big data, the Anthropocene, and ideas on catastrophe especially referring to anxieties around climate change, to give just a short summary of the most recent scholarly and political debates in which authors and ideas which characterized geography’s pasts are explicitly or implicitly remobilized