Geography as the science of environmental influences: Ellen Semple and the search for disciplinary relevance

This chapter examines how one of Geography’s oldest yet most controversial ideas—that humans are indelibly shaped by their environmental circumstances—came to dominate the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. It takes as its focus the career of the pioneering woman geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and her efforts to promote Geography as a science based on the study of environmental influences. The chapter explores the intellectual contexts in which Semple’s ideas took shape, how she articulated a vision for the discipline through her fieldwork, teaching, and publications, and how that vision was responded to by her contemporaries. In tracing the adoption and subsequent rejection of Semple’s ideas, the chapter considers how efforts to make Geography matter hinge upon a particular understanding of the nature, scope, and purpose of the discipline.