Land and Life : A Selection From the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer

Carl Sauer probably needs no introduction to many of the readers of this book. To others a few biographical facts may be useful. He was born in Warrenton, Missouri, December 24, 1889, the son of a teacher in Central Wesleyan College, a now defunct German Methodist college in Warrenton. In his boyhood his parents placed him in a school at Calw, a town in western Württemberg at the eastern foot of the Schwarzwald. In this school he received better instruction than did most of his midwestern contemporaries. The advantage he gained from this instruction enabled him to earn the A.B. degree at Central Wesleyan before his nineteenth birthday, and the Ph.D. in geography at the University of Chicago before his twenty-sixth. The next phase of his academic career was similarly accelerated: he advanced from the rank of instructor to that of professor at the University of Michigan in the seven years from 1915 to 1922. In 1923 he came to the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of geography, which position he held until his retirement in 1957. During most of this time he was chairman of the Department of Geography at Berkeley. Soon after coming to California he began his scholarly exploration of Mexico, and in the course of time pushed his investigations still farther into the American lands south of the United States. When Sauer was a graduate student, the University of Chicago provided the only significant graduate program in geography in the United States. It was a good program, directed by R. D. Salisbury, whose memory Sauer cherishes, like all who studied under Salisbury. Salisbury was a geologist and geomorphologist, but by the time when Sauer was a student the program in geography at Chicago had already assumed the form, including work in economic and human geography, that became a model for other and younger American departments. In later years many American academic departments of geography have almost or entirely abandoned interest in the physical earth. Most of Sauer's scholarly work has been done in human geography, but he has never permitted his feet, or those of his students, to lose contact with the sustaining surface of the earth. The instruction he received at Chicago included much more than courses in geography; the ideas derived from outside the department in which he was inscribed that recur most frequently in his writings are from plant ecology, which he studied under H. C. Cowles. His reconstructions of past relations of man to vegetation, for example, represented in the papers grouped as Part III of this volume, rest on interpretations of the ecology of plants. Moreover, he makes This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived