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.

Geography, of course, has its educative influence in a counterpart
connection of natural facts with social events and their consequences.
The classic definition of geography as an account of the earth as the
home of man expresses the educational reality. But it is easier to give
this definition than it is to present specific geographical subject
matter in its vital human bearings. The residence, pursuits, successes,
and failures of men are the things that give the geographic data their
reason for inclusion in the material of instruction. But to hold the two
together requires an informed and cultivated imagination. When the ties
are broken, geography presents itself as that hodge-podge of unrelated
fragments too often found. It appears as a veritable rag-bag of
intellectual odds and ends: the height of a mountain here, the course
of a river there, the quantity of shingles produced in this town, the
tonnage of the shipping in that, the boundary of a county, the capital
of a state. The earth as the home of man is humanizing and unified; the
earth viewed as a miscellany of facts is scattering and imaginatively
inert. Geography is a topic that originally appeals to imagination--even
to the r