Post Classical Period:
Period
• Felt the need of professionally accepted paradigm to serve as a
guide for the study Of Geography.
• As other disciplines during this time-mid nineteenth century-
were under the influence of materialistic, scientific and
mechanical information.
• Emerging scholars came up with their own definition of
Geography, thus contributing to the geographical thinking.
• This gave Geography as an academic status, thus established
Geography as permanent and independent discipline.
• The emergence of this new Geography is credited to the works
of : Oscar Paschal, Ferdinand Von Richthofen, Fredrick Ratzel,
Alfred Hettener, Albrecht Pench.
1. Oscar Paschal:
- Gave Geography a new outlook, orientation and
dimensions that was conflicting to the Humboldt-Ritterian
tradition.
- Recognised dualism in Geography and excluded man from
his study.
2. Ferdinand Von Richthofen:
- He was German traveller, geographer, and scientist. He
is noted for coining the terms ""Silk Route(s)" in 1877.
- He also standardized the practices of chorography (art of
describing or mapping a region or district) and chorology
( the study of the spatial distribution
of organisms (biogeography).
- Carried forward scientific spirit initiated by Oscar
Paschal.
- According to him the main objective of Geographyis to
search for human relations with physical earth and
biological feature.
- First German GEOGRAPHOR who had differentiated
between general and regional Geography.
- General Geography is related to spatial distribution.
- Regional Geography should be descriptive to highlight the
key feature of the area.
- Richthofen distinguished area of different size:
- 1. Erdteile : Major division of world.
- 2. Lander : Major region.
- 3. Landschaften : Landscape or small region.
- 4. Ortlich keiten : Localities.
- He attempted to revive the close connection of Geography
to natural science
3. Fredrick Ratzel:
- was a German geographer and ethnographer ( kind of
social research ) notable for first using the
term Lebensraum ("living space").
- He produced a written account of his travels in 1876
“Profile of Cities and Cultures in North America” which
would help establish the field of cultural geography.
According to Ratzel, cities are the best place to study
people because life is "blended, compressed, and
accelerated" in cities, and they bring out the "greatest,
best, most typical aspects of people". Ratzel had travelled
to cities such as New
York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Charl
eston, New Orleans, and San Francisco.
- Ratzel produced the foundations of “ human
geography” in his two-volume Anthropogeographie in
1882 and 1891.
- . He published his work on political geography, Politische
Geographie, in 1897.
- It was in this work that Ratzel introduced concepts that
contributed to Lebensraum and Social Darwinism.
- His three volume work The History of Mankind was
published in English in 1896 and contained over 1100
excellent engravings and remarkable chromolithography
( unique method for making multi-colour prints).
4. Alfred Hettener:
- He is known for his concept of chorology, the study of
places and regions, a concept that influenced both Carl O.
Sauer and Richard Hartshorne.
- Apart from Europe, his fieldwork concentrated
mainlyon Colombia, Chile and Russia.
Alfred Hettnerwas a pupil of Ferdinand von
Richthofen and Friedrich Ratzel.
- His book Europe was published in 1907.
- According to him, geography is a chorological science or
it is a study of regions.
- Hettner rejected the view that geography could be either
general or regional.
- Geography like other fields of learning must deal in both
the unique things (regional geography) and with universal
(general geography).
- study of regions — especially in the form of
his Länderkunde approach — is the main field of
geography.
- The German term means “the study of geographic,
regional and cultural aspect of country”.
5. Albrecht Penck:
- He dedicated himself
to geomorphology and climatology and raised the
international profile of the "Vienna School of physical
geography”.
- geographer, who exercised a major influence on
the development of modern German geography,
and geologist.
- who founded Pleistocene stratigraphy (the study
of Ice Age Earth strata), a favoured starting place
for the study of man’s prehistory.
- he conducted research in the valleys of
the Bavarian Alps that confirmed the four periods
of Pleistocene glaciation.
- Penck also originated and promoted the
1:1,000,000-scale map of the Earth and published
a pioneer work on geomorphology (the study of the
Earth’s surface features), a term he is believed to
have introduced.
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