Carl O. Sauer’s Uses of Geography’s Past

Abstract

Carl Sauer’s experience of family and school in the “Missouri Rhineland” conditioned him to look retrospectively upon reality. When he became a geographer, he conceptualized the earth and humanity in historical terms. After Sauer moved to California, historical knowing and thinking became the unshakable foundation of his kind of geography. By endorsing a process-oriented view of geography, he became entangled in the German-derived “two cultures debate” in which historical knowledge competed against natural-scientific knowledge. Sauer henceforth used the past of the discipline—its classical figures, achievements, and ideas—to promulgate a time-dependent view of his field, to instruct his disciples in the intellectual heritage of geography, and to memorialize events and personalities from earlier times. Typically, these uses of disciplinary history were complexly combined in a single utterance. Sauer drew heavily upon the “monuments” of geography’s past and thus created and tirelessly justified a distinctive culture of historical geography that conflicted with a series of received American geographies. In published and unpublished form, he challenged throughout his later life the naturalistic, synchronistic, and mechanistic perspectives that arose in American geography.