Kearns, Gerard
(1998)
The Virtuous Circle of Facts and Values
in the New Western History.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88 (3).
pp. 377-409.
ISSN 0004-5608
Abstract
The relations between facts and values in the writing of historical geography need to bemutual and
reinforcing. I explore this point by examining the work of a group of historians who have
foregrounded the relations between facts and values. These New Western Historians take up themes
such as social justice, regionalism, and environmentalism that have been central to the concerns
of historical geographers, but they are more explicit than many historical geographers about both
the political motivations behind the questions they ask and their choice of subjects to study. I
consider the work of two historians, William Cronon and Donald Worster, who have made
environmentalism the core of their historical writing, and two others, Richard White and Patricia
Limerick, for whom questions of social justice inform historical interpretation. I conclude by
exploring how attention to the interplay between facts and values might rekindle the utopian
dimension of explicitly political historical geographies.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Keywords: |
Environmentalism; New Western
History; Social justice; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Geography |
| Item ID: |
8661 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00106 |
| Depositing User: |
Gerry Kearns
|
| Date Deposited: |
23 Aug 2017 12:19 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Annals of the Association of American Geographers |
| Publisher: |
Taylor & Francis |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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