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    The Virtuous Circle of Facts and Values in the New Western History


    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

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    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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