The social and historical study of humans in space received much less support in the United States than it did in Europe and Asia. Even the name “National Geographic Society” refers more to a magazine and project (supporting expeditions and photography) than to a professional association. Still, work on the American landscape coincided with other questions of the construction of national identity in important works by pioneering geogra phers Carl Sauer (see Land and Life, 1967) and J.B. Jackson (Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, 1997).

As with other social sciences, American geography later moved towards positivism and quantitative methods. Exemplified by the work of Brian Berry, this approach embraced putatively valuefree methods from demography and economics in the modeling and mapping of spatial systems (see The Changing Shape of Metropolitan America (1977).

Since the 1970s, however, the impact of European scholars like David Harvey and Neil Smith, as well as the work of American geographers in Marxist traditions, has made an impact across the social sciences and some humanities. Important departments have included Harvey’s position at Johns Hopkins, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Southern California (with Jennifer Wolch, Michael Dear and Edward Soja in Planning). American-based geographers have discussed issues of postmodernity (for example, Soja’s Thirdspace, 1996), identity (Yi-Fu Tuan’s Cosmos and Hearth, 1996) and social justice/social change (Wolch and Dears’ Landscapes of Despair, 1987; Smith’s The New Urban Frontier,, 1996). Their awareness of the impact of space and place on society and culture, in turn, has contributed in methods and theory to other fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, history and cultural studies.