Description
Book SynopsisIn the eighteenth century a new subject emerged that was to capture the interest and imagination of scholars and the educated public for the next 150 years. Called 'ancient geography' or 'classical geography', its focus was the geographical study of the ancient Mediterranean, in particular the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. Geographers, explorers, classicists and historians all contributed to its rise, as it flourished in both Britain and America. Yet in the 1920s the subject began to decline, so that its story has been lost. This pioneering volume is the first full-length study to explore the emergence of classical geography and its role in both the geographical and classical traditions. The author begins with the expeditions sponsored or undertaken by the members of the Society of Dilettanti in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Expeditions by such figures as Richard Chandler, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Sir William Gell, Robert Wood an
Table of ContentsI Introduction: the Search for a Source Chapter 1 – The Society of Dilettanti and Ancient Geography Chapter 2 – Classical Geography in the Colonial and Post-Revolutionary American College Chapter 3 – Classical Geography in Thomas Jefferson’s University Chapter 4 – From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Professionalization Chapter 5 – William E. Gladstone and the Reconstruction of Bronze Age Geography Chapter 6 – British Historians, Classicists, and Classical Geography Chapter 7 – Classics, History and Geography in Nineteenth-Century Harvard Chapter 8 – Classical Geography in the Oxford School of Geography Chapter 9 – Classical Geography in the Nineteenth-Century Classroom Chapter 10 – Classical Geography in the New American Universities Epilogue – Anglo-American Classical Geography since the 1930s Index
