Vast Employment Opportunities For Geography Grads
If you decide to study geography in college, your opportunities after graduation are vast. Many geography grads go into urban and regional planning, a field that is growing fast. Other geographers work in environmental management and consulting and can have a direct impact in the fight against climate change. Also, the skills learned during a geography degree, such as cartography, data representation, and research writing, transfer well into the workforce and can make you a standout applicant!
The Importance Of Geography In History
Arguably, you cannot understand the past without understanding geography. Human events do not happen in a vacuum. They always occur at a particular time, and in a particular place. The geography of history is focused on understanding the place.
Geography can help address the human characteristics that were important for the events . It can help to understand the geographical environment that the events occurred within . Were there any weather events that influenced the events? Importantly, it can help to uncover the human-environmental relationships that may have influenced the event. For example, what influence did the people have on their environment? And how did the geographical area influence the events that took place?
A good example of geography affecting history is Ancient Egypt. The River Nile was vitally important to Ancient Egyptians and almost the entire empire was situated along its banks. The river provided them with food and water, a place to bathe, a way of easily transporting their goods. Its regular flooding in September made the land fertile, allowing for agriculture in the middle of a desert.
History And Present Social Life
The segregation which kills the vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past is the history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery, explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward, of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it is to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of formation makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open to comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific achievement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle is that the way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the process of its making, – to follow it through the successive stages of its growth. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past, is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be separated from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems.
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Learning To Think The World
One of the wonders of our era is that for the first time in history, people everywhere in the world can experience the same event almost simultaneously. A spectacular example of this is the world-wide celebrations that greeted the New Year in 2000. The planet revolved through the time zones, midnight struck again and again, and the festivities broke out in rapid, rolling sequence around the planet. Among the first to celebrate were the people of the Kiribati and Marshall Islands, which lie in the South Pacific just west of the International Date Line. From there, the New Year swept on to Sydney, Beijing, New Delhi, Jerusalem, Lagos, London, Caracas, Seattle, and, at last, Honolulu. Those who had the stamina to watch TV long enough could see the entire relay of parties, prayers, and fireworks displays, for twenty-four straight hours. This spectacle was a compelling reminder of the unity of humankind as inhabitants of a single tiny “marble” suspended in the universe. Also remarkable is that millions of people could consciously witness the world-wide commemoration and reflect upon it in real time.
| Wikimedia Commons |
Put The News In Context
How are you supposed to understand the news if you dont know geography? Knowing geography helps put current events in context.
For example, knowing that Hong Kong is a city in southern China can begin to help a person understand why it is politically different from the rest of China and why there were recent protests there: its geographically isolated.
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What Was The Most Important Development In The Study Of Geography To Date
Until about 1500 China was the most prosperous civilization on Earth. The Chinese were scientifically advanced especially in the field of astronomy. Around 1000 they also achieved one of the most important developments in the history of geography: They were the first to use the compass for navigational purposes.
Theres More To Geography Than You Think
When you think of geography, what comes to mind? Memorizing maps and capitals? Thats not all geography is! Its actually much more. Geography is the study of humans and people through space, throughout time, and how those spaces have shaped history. Its a fascinating field of study, and important too. Why is geography important? Lets find out!
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Why Is Geography Important In Primary School
More and better geography in our primary school can fix the deficiency. Citizens who study geography will be able to comprehend and act on some of the worlds most pressing concerns and crises, such as energy and environmental consumption. Globalization, international relations, and wars and natural disasters.
In a world of complicated culture and environmental relations, any nations judgment requires geographic knowledge to sustain moral, political, and financial influence.
What Are The Three Main Uses Of Geography
Answer and Explanation: There are many more than three uses for geography, but the main benefits of this study are 1) learning about places or features in the world, 2) understanding where you are in relation to the rest of the planet, and 3) learning how borders, countries, and people have changed over time.
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Critical Review: Historical Geographies Of Imperialisms
Historical geographies of imperialism emphasize the complexity of imperialism in space. By exploring colonial encounters, recent research reveals imperialism as a complex lived event and colonial authority as ambiguous. Diverse views about difference, superiority, belonging, and identity complicated encounters and relations among people. By increasing mobility and migration, and thus throwing peoples together in new ways, imperialisms developed hybrid identities, contested spaces, and network connectivity. Imperial projects generated new locales inscribed as expressions of power and domination but often these formed within localities where imperial authorities competed with other forms of governance so that their power was negotiated and challenged. Even the racist and sexist representations that imagined and sustained empires were themselves resisted and reworked, whether in the metropolitan centers or the imperial peripheries. By researching the contact zones, networks, traces, and surveys of imperial encounters historical geographers are remapping the bounds of empire and challenging synoptic views of empires as homogenous territories.
M. Tanskanen, in, 2009
Why Is Geography Important For The Future
Knowing geography is a key to nations peoples and individuals being able to develop a coherent understanding of the causes meanings and effects of the physical and human events that occurand are likely to occur in the futureon Earth. Geographic context plays an integral role in creating the world of the future.
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Development Of The Discipline
In its early days, historical geography was difficult to define as a subject. A textbook from the 1950s cites a previous definition as an ‘unsound attempt by geographers to explain history’. Its author, J. B. Mitchell, came down firmly on the side of geography: ‘the historical geographer is a geographer first last and all the time’. By 1975 the first number of the Journal of Historical Geography had widened the discipline to a broader church: ‘the writings of scholars of any disciplinary provenance who have something to say about matters of geographical interest relating to past time’.
This sub-branch of human geography is closely related to history, environmental history, and historical ecology.
Why Are Maps Important In Understanding Geography And Its History
Maps present information about the world in a simple, visual way. They teach about the world by showing sizes and shapes of countries, locations of features, and distances between places. Maps can show distributions of things over Earth, such as settlement patterns.
How does geography help with history?
The geographic perspective can enrich the study of history by helping students to grasp the significance of location, the inevitability of change, and the importance of human perceptions at given times in the past.
What is geography according to geographers?
Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. Geographers explore both the physical properties of Earths surface and the human societies spread across it. Geography seeks to understand where things are found, why they are there, and how they develop and change over time.
What is the connection between geography and history?
History and Geography are very closely related.Geography is an areal science that deals with lands,oceans,atmosphere,people,cultures and earth phenomena,with reference to space and time.History is the study of past with the help of written documents. Many Historical events have geographical
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The Importance Of Geography In Human Life
Many of the reasons why geography is important in education are the same reasons why it is important for human life. Geography provides a different perspective on the world and its events, both spatially and on different scales. This allows, for example, global events and news to be placed in context based on the geographical area and how it relates to the rest of the world.
Beyond this, geography is important for an understanding of globalization. In the modern world, globalization is becoming more and more important, as countries and their people can connect instantaneously. An understanding of different cultures based on their geographical area is key to being able to relate as part of the global community. On the opposite end of the scale, geography allows local events to be placed in the particular context that they require.
An understanding of geography can also be important on an individual level. For example, when traveling to a different country, an understanding of the geographic area and the particularities of the culture can allow for a more meaningful trip and shows a greater respect to the area and its people.
History Bewares Us Of Warning Signs
Some of the most terrible and devastating events in history have been preceded by small, seemingly unimportant events warning signs. We ignore these warning signs at our own risk.
Mostly, in the long term like climate change, we can learn from our past mistakes to prevent them to repeat them in the future.
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Make Sense Of Different Cultures
Human culture is fundamentally place-based: the land determines or influences the cuisine, clothing, architecture, even social relationships. Every aspect of a culture is affected by its geography.
Geography helps you understand and appreciate the incredible diversity of cultures around the world. Like with news, geography puts culture in context. To understand a people, you have to know something about their land.
Teaching Global History And Geography Using The Indian Ocean As A Unit Of Analysis
Ingrid SankeyEnglishFrançaisPDF
1The units of analysis historians and geographers use enable them to identify key questions about the past and the present which, in turn, determine which stories are told and, eventually, what patterns emerge. This is why units of analysis can be regarded as framing tools that help scholars identify patterns at different scales in their analysis of global processes. By focusing on seas and ocean basins, one can bring out the processes of interaction that have connected peoples living in the various regions around a sea and ocean basin up to the present day.
2To illustrate this recent development in the fields of History and Geography, one may recall the pioneering work of French historian Fernand Braudel who was the first to use the large-scale unit of analysis of the Mediterranean Sea as a framework for his study of the reign of Philip II of Spain, originally published in 1949. In a paper published in the Journal of Modern History in 1972, Braudel wrote:
I contemplated the Mediterranean, tête à tête, for years on end and my vision of History took its definitive form without my being entirely aware of it, partly as a direct intellectual response to a spectacle the Mediterranean which no traditional historical account seemed capable of encompassing.
Figure 1. The Indian Ocean floor, by NatGeo dated 1967
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The Complementary Nature Of History And Geography
The function of historical and geographical subject matter has been stated it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their background and outlook. While geography emphasizes the physical side and history the social, these are only emphases in a common topic, namely, the associated life of men. For this associated life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its achievements and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum. It takes place on the earth. This setting of nature does not bear to social activities the relation that the scenery of a theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation it enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form history. Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It furnishes original stimuli it supplies obstacles and resources. Civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies. When this interdependence of the study of history, representing the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing the natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an appended inventory of events, labeled “important” or else it becomes a literary phantasy – for in purely literary history the natural environment is but stage scenery.
Some Important Geographical Terms
To “think world history” in a way that makes room for all peoples requires that we see the spherical surface of the planet as the primary place where history happened. Students need, therefore, to have a basic knowledge of what the World History for Us All model curriculum has called Big Geography, that is, the largest-scale features of the earths physical and natural environment. These are the patterns of topography, vegetation, climate, and weather that cut across particular nations or cultural groups and that give the world as a whole its distinctive “face.” Attention to Big Geography prepares students to explore particular events, time periods, and regions in a way that encourages making connections between whatever subject matter they are learning and the world-scale context. This site uses some geographical terms that may not be familiar to teachers and students.
Afroeurasia
America, the Americas
Australasia
The continent of Australia, plus New Guinea, New Zealand, Tasmania, and other islands that neighbor Australia make up Australasia. During the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania constituted a single landmass known as Sahul. Human settlement of Australasia began as many as 60,000 years ago, though Polynesian mariners did not reach New Zealand until about 1000 CE.
Eurasia
Great Arid Zone
Indo-Mediterranea
Inner Eurasia
Oceania
Southwest Asia
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Studying History Helps You Bag Great Jobs
Studying history looks boring but in fact, it can help you land a good job and start your career in full swing. Yes! The techniques and methods help understand ancient times and their details. Moreover, it will help you with critical thinking and better research forms this, in turn, helps you in higher education and starting a career.
History Develops Understanding Of Present Issues
As mentioned above, the mistakes in the past help improve our today. Thats what will help us to go forward and create a better for coming generations. In every aspect, from social reform to climate change we cannot succeed in the future if we do not rectify our past mistakes. History helps us go through it. And provide us a detailed picture or clues about it.
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The Importance Of Geography In Education
While geography is not generally considered a core subject in the same way that English, math, and science are, it can be a vital component of a well-rounded education. Geography helps students to understand the physical world, such as land, air, water, and ecology. It also helps them to understand human environments, such as societies and communities. This also includes economics, social and cultural issues, and sometimes morals and ethics.
Beyond this, it helps students to learn about the interdependence between humans and their environment, particularly in terms of trade, migration, and climate change. This gives students a sense of place and space as well as of scale, with a recognition of the importance of local, regional, national, international, and global focuses.
The importance of geography in education extends out beyond the subject itself. Geography allows students to integrate their learning across different subjects, such as those in the sciences, humanities, and the arts. Geography helps to increase students scientific literacy which can be useful throughout life, for example through applying critical thinking to medical news or decisions.
It also provides a bridge to the pure sciences by providing an engaging and tangible way of applying its principles, which can open up this area to students who may have otherwise not pursued it. It also provides students with a sense of global citizenship, which they can apply throughout their lives and careers.