Human Geography and Ecological Sociology

Abstract

This article discusses how American geography and sociology began their university institutionalization in the 1890s with some very similar disciplinary points of origin and understanding of their subject matter but subsequently carved out their own fields by creating new or abandoning old disciplinary areas. Some of the disciplinary “catchment areas” were fought over until they came under the heading of human ecology around 1907/8, which, at least in the case of sociology, later became an influential but nevertheless transient perspective. It is argued that the unfolding of human ecology can best be understood against the background of the interaction between sociological and geographical streams of thought beginning in the 1890s.