Bowman, Isaiah

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Bowman, Isaiah

Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950), a leading American geographer of his time, was born in Waterloo, Ontario, the third of eight children in a large farm family. Shortly after his birth his parents moved to eastern Michigan, and there Bowman grew up. After a decision “to study geography professionally” he enrolled in Michigan State Normal College at Ypsilanti, studying under Mark Jefferson, who interested him in the human side of geography and encouraged him to go to Harvard to study under William Morris Davis, then a well-known physical geographer. After obtaining his B.A. from Harvard in 1905, Bowman went to Yale, where he taught for the next ten years, receiving his doctorate there in 1909. In 1915 he left Yale and went to New York to become director of the American Geographical Society, a research institution founded in 1851. He remained with the society until 1935, when he was appointed president of The Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1948.

Bowman made original contributions not only to physical and human geography but also to the type of regional geography in which the two are blended, as in The Andes of Southern Peru (1916) and Desert Trails of Atacama (1924). These studies reflect his participation in three expeditions to South America, in 1907, 1911, and 1913, in the first and third of which he acted as leader.

His classic in physical regional geography of the United States, Forest Physiography (1911), came about as the result of a physiography course he taught in the Yale forestry school. The book was a synthesis of hundreds of papers and monographs; its generalizations followed the Davisian erosional-cycle theory of land formation.

Bowman became chief territorial specialist on President Wilson’s staff at the Paris Peace Conference, after leading a research team called the Inquiry for a year. The Inquiry was organized by Colonel House to provide geographical background materials for the negotiators at Paris; the value of its work has been questioned (Gelfand 1963).

His experience with the Inquiry gave Bowman the inspiration and practical experience for his writings on political geography and for his advisory positions in the State Department during World War II. His book The New World: Problems in Political Geography (1921) treated international relations on a regional basis. It was very successful: a special reprinting was necessary to fulfill the demand for it for armed-services training units studying the background to World War II.

In the early 1930s Bowman presented his “pioneer fringe” thesis that new human settlements should be made only after a scientific evaluation of the proposed environment and of the social and political processes involved. Support and funds for this work came from the National Research Council and from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Bowman’s Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences (1934) was Volume 5 of the 16-volume Report of the Commission on the Social Studies in the Schools of the American Historical Association and grew out of an earlier conference of the SSRC. Bowman believed that the subject matter of geography had to be decided by individual geographers and asserted that his book contained no quotable definition of geography. He did, however, describe the role of the geographer: “Besides being an explorer, a measurer, a describer, and an interpreter of the features of the earth, the geographer is a synthesizer of the data of his subject according to those realities of experience called regions, and this brings him to fraternize with the historian, the economist, and the sociologist” (1934, pp. 2–3).

Bowman was one of the founders of the Council on Foreign Relations and served on the editorial advisory board of its organ, Foreign Affairs, for over two decades. He served as president of the Association of American Geographers, the International Geographical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1930.

George A. Knadler

[Directly related are the entriesGeography; Region.]

WORKS BY BOWMAN

1911 Forest Physiography: Physiography of the United States and Principles of Soils in Relation to Forestry. New York: Wiley.

(1916) 1920 The Andes of Southern Peru: Geographical Reconnaissance Along the Seventy-third Meridian. London: Constable.

(1921) 1928 The New World: Problems in Political Geography. 4th ed. New York: World.

1924 Desert Trails of Atacama. New York: American Geographical Society.

1931 The Pioneer Fringe. New York: American Geographical Society.

1934 Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences. New York: Scribner.

1936 A Design for Scholarship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

1937 Limits of Land Settlement: A Report on Present Day Possibilities. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.

1939 The Graduate School in American Democracy. U.S. Office of Education, Bulletin No. 10. Washington: Government Printing Office.

WORKS ABOUT BOWMAN

Knadler, George A. 1959 Isaiah Bowman: Backgrounds of His Contribution to Thought. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana Univ.

Wright, John K.; and Carter, George F. 1959 Isaiah Bowman, December 26, 1878–January 6, 1950. Volume 33, pages 39–64 in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs. Washington: Government Printing Office.

Wrigley, Gladys M. 1951 Isaiah Bowman. Geographical Review 41:7–65.