Unit 1: People Flashcards
Carl O. Sauer
general idea
(!!) Known for cultural landscapes (!!) The former University of California at Berkeley professor human geographer who is most closely identified with the concept of cultural landscape (the visible imprint of human activity on the landscape). He thinks cultural landscapes are comprised of the “forms superimposed on the physical landscape” by human activity. Sauer also focused his attention on how ideas, specifically the innovation of agriculture, spread in “Agricultural Origins and Dispersals”. Based on geography and archaeological evidence, Sauer established that MesoAmerica independently invented agriculture, adding it to the hearths of agriculture in Europe, Africa, and Asia. When ideas, people, or goods move across space, this process of dissemination is called cultural diffusion.
Peter Gould
Peter Gould was a geographer who, along with Rodney White, asked college students in California and Pennsylvania, “If you could move to any place of your choice, without any of the usual financial and other obstacles, where would you like to live?” Through their research, they discovered a (!!) strong bias for their home regions (!!) (most likely developed through their sense of place) and negative perceptions of the South, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Utah (most likely developed through their perception of places).
Peirce Lewis
focused on layers
(Known for cultural landscape) A geographer at Penn. SU who is known for his book on the human landscape “Axioms for Reading the Landscape (1979)” in which he explained, “Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting out tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form.” He recommended looking for layers of history and cultural practices in cultural landscapes, adding that most major changes in the cultural landscapes occur after a major event, such as war, an invention, or an economic depression.
Alfred Wegener
A climatologist-geographer who used his spatial view of the world to make a key contribution in discovering Earth’s past. Viewing the increasingly accurate maps of the opposite coastlines of the North and South Atlantic oceans, he proposed a hypothesis that would account for the close “fit” of the shapes of the facing continents, which, he argued, would be unlikely to be a matter of chance. His continental drift hypothesis required the preexistence of a supercontinent, which he called (!!) PANGAEA (!!), that broke apart into the fragments we now know as Africa, the Americas, Eurasia, and Australia. His hypothesis engendered the later theory of plate tectonics and crustal spreading, and scientists now know that Pangaea and its fragmentation were only the latest episodes in a cycle of continental coalescence and splintering that spans billions of years. This latest Pangaean breakup, however, began only 180 million years ago and continues to this day.
Dr. Snow
Maps can be used in medical geography as mapping the distribution of a disease is the first step to finding its cause. Dr. Jon Snow was a noted anesthesiologist who (!!) mapped cases of cholera in London’s Soho District (!!) in 1854. Through marking all the areas water pumps with a P and marking the residence of each person who died from cholera with a dot, Snow noticed the coloration between water and the spread of the disease. After removing the handle from the water pump so people could not get the water, the death toll fell to almost zero and Snow was able to advise people to boil their water and wash their hands with soap to help prevent the spread of the disease.
Wilbur Zelinksy
A cultural geographer who tackled the complex task of (!!) defining and delimiting the perceptual regions of the United States and southern Canada (!!). In an article titled “North America’s Vernacular Regions,” he identified 12 major perceptual regions on a series of maps. When you examine the summarized map with all his research, you will notice some of the regions overlap in certain places. The general terms like “the west” or “the south” incorporate more specific regions (PNW). To deal with the problem of defining and delimiting perceptual regions, Zelinsky analyzed the telephone directories of 276 metropolitan areas in the U.S. and Canada, noting the frequency with which businesses and other enterprises use regional or locational terms (Southern printing co. and Western printing) in their listings. The resulting maps show a close similarity between these perceptual regions and culture regions identified by geographers.
Torsten Hagerstrand
Torsten Hagerstrand was a Swedish geographer who published pioneering research on the (!!) role of time in the diffusion process (!!) in the 70s. His research discovered that time, as well as distance, affects human behavior and the process of diffusion of people and ideas. His and Sauer’s work attracted many geographers to study the diffusion process and his work helped to create the idea of time-distance decay.
Derwent Whittlesey
In 1929, Whittlesey proposed the term “sequent occupance” (!!) to refer to the sequential imprints of occupants, whose impacts are layered one on top of the other.
