East and West are terms in constant use, pregnant with meaning but hard to define. We speak of individuals or groups as 'Oriental' or Western' in character. We hear of an Asian viewpoint, unaccept- able to the West of a Western colonialism causing resentment in the East. East is East, we remember reading, and never the twain shall meet. 'But they must meet l' say the idealists, and so the deba…
Cultural geography is not a new subject. This generalization holds true whether we define subject" to mean a recognized scholarly discipline or simply a point of view. In the latter sense of the word, cultural geography was well established in antiquity in the former sense, its roots are as deep as those of academic geography as a whole. To verify these points it is sufficient to recall the co…
History does not move at an even speed. There are decades in which it appears to stand still and in which the changes are gradual and, so to speak, underground. But there are other periods, of which the twentieth century is one, when, to quote a phrase used in the 1920s, History is galloping like a frightened horse." Historians and, perhaps more important, statesmen as different as Bismarck, Le…