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4 Geography and the Other Social Sciences Of the other disciplines considered social sciences during the early twentieth century, only geography developed a cadre of academic specialists on Latin America who regularly conducted research and taught courses on the region. By contrast, in political science, sociology, and economics, a few individuals studied Latin America, but they did not constitute a group that was identified with, and sought to advance, scholarship about the region. In part this discrepancy was due to the relatively late emergence of the latter three as more or less discrete disciplines with distinctive methodologies and concerns.The American Economic Association was founded in 1885, but the American Political Science Association (APSA) was not founded until 1903, and the American Sociological Society was launched two years later. Disciplinary boundaries dividing these fields from one another and from history long remained blurred, however, and individuals trained in one might well teach and publish in another. Bernard Moses, for example, though trained as a historian, introduced political science to the University of California in 1880 and was a founding member of the APSA. A survey of 401 colleges and universities by the APSA ten years after its founding showed that only 38 had separate departments of political science.1 In most institutions, political science was part of departments of history, philosophy, economics, sociology, or some combination of these. Many institutions offered no courses in the field at all. Students of economics and sociology and to a lesser extent political science directed their energies overwhelmingly to domestic topics, with little attention given to international problems and issues that did not concern the United States. The aforementioned APSA survey showed that a few institutions offered courses in English or comparative government, with the latter limited to Europe . In fact, the committee that conducted the survey recommended that the content of comparative government courses be expanded to include other im- 74 Chapter 4. portant areas, among them South America. The organs of the various associations carried few articles devoted to Latin America, which was represented slightly, if at all, on the programs of their annual meetings. Geography differed from these social sciences in several respects. Its study, if only by amateurs, had a long history in the United States. In addition, as the field was redefined and professionalized in the early twentieth century, the importance of regions in the conceptual framework espoused by scholars created a situation wherein parts of Latin America were deemed appropriate sites for research . The early linkage of geography with departments of business and economics at a time of increased trade and investment in Latin America contributed to this orientation. Finally, the study of geography with a Latin American focus undoubtedly acquired prestige because of the eminence of many of the early scholars in the field—Isaiah Bowman and Carl O. Sauer, to name but two—who reached the very top rungs of their profession. Latin Americanist Geography in Ascendance Americans had long been concerned with geography in its most primitive sense, which they defined as the description and mapping of the earth, and supported exploratory expeditions to fill in the many blank spaces that still remained on maps.These concerns prompted the organization of the American Geographical Society in New York in 1851. South America and its exploration were among the topics that interested its early members, and those who attended the first public meeting of the society in 1852 heard a paper by the American diplomat and promoter Edward A. Hopkins titled “The Geography, History, Productions, and Trade of Paraguay.”2 As an academic discipline geography was still in its infancy at the turn of the twentieth century. The first geography department was established at the University of Chicago in 1903, but at Yale and many other institutions, geography remained part of the Department of Geology or was linked to programs in economics and business, as at the University of Pennsylvania. These linkages reflected strains and uncertainty in the conceptualization of the field, in particular the relationship between the physical environment and human development . In the early years of the century, practitioners frequently embraced environmental determinism, which treated culture and socioeconomic processes as the products of conditions in the natural world. Geographers never fully resolved these ambiguities, but by 1924, state universities , as well as private colleges and universities, offered nearly five hundred courses in the field. In 1904 the Association of American Geographers was founded to promote research by professional geographers; membership was Geography and the...

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