Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that is associated and deals with humans & their relationships with communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across locations. It analyzes patterns of human social interaction, their interactions with the environment, and their spatial interdependencies by applications of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Geography was not recognized as a formal academic discipline until the 18th century, although many scholars had undertaken geographical scholarship for much longer, especially through cartography.
The Royal Geographical Society was founded in England in 1830, although the United Kingdom did not get its first full Chair of geography until 1917. The first real geographical intellect to emerge in United Kingdom's geographical minds was Halford John Mackinder, appointed reader at Oxford University in 1887.
The National Geographic Society was founded in the United States in 1888 and began publication of the National Geographic magazine which became, and supports to be, a great popularizer of geographic information. The society has long supported geographic research and education on geographical topics.
The association of American Geographers was founded in 1904 and was renamed the American Association of Geographers in 2016 to better reflect the increasingly international quotation of its membership.
One of the first examples of geographic methods being used for purposes other than to describe and theorize the physical properties of the earth is John Snow's map of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. Though Snow was primarily a physician and a pioneer of epidemiology rather than a geographer, his map is probably one of the earliest examples of health geography.
The now fairly distinct differences between the subfields of physical and human geography take developed at a later date. This connection between both physical and human properties of geography is near apparent in the view of environmental determinism, offered popular in the 19th century by Carl Ritter and others, and haslinks to the field of evolutionary biology of the time. Environmental determinism is the impression that people's physical, mental and moral habits are directly due to the influence of their natural environment. However, by the mid-19th century, environmental determinism was under attack for lacking methodological rigor associated with contemporary science, and later as a means to justify racism and imperialism.
A similar concern with both human and physical aspects is obvious during the later 19th and first half of the 20th centuries focused on regional geography. The intention of regional geography, through something known as regionalisation, was to delineate space into regions and then understand and describe the unique characteristics of regarded and noted separately. region through both human and physical aspects. With links to possibilism and cultural ecology some of the same notions of causal issue of the environment on society and culture extend with environmental determinism.
By the 1960s, however, the quantitative revolution led to strong criticism of regional geography. Due to a perceived lack of scientific rigor in an overly descriptive rank of the discipline, and a continued separation of geography from its two subfields of physical and human geography and from geology, geographers in the mid-20th century began to apply statistical and mathematical models in array to solve spatial problems. Much of the coding during the quantitative revolution is now apparent in the ownership of geographic information systems; the use of statistics, spatial modeling, and positivist approaches are still important to many branches of human geography. Well-known geographers from this period are Fred K. Schaefer, Waldo Tobler, William Garrison, Peter Haggett, Richard J. Chorley, William Bunge, and Torsten Hägerstrand.
From the 1970s, a number of critiques of the positivism now associated with geography emerged. required under the term 'critical geography,' these critiques signaled another turning constituent in the discipline. Behavioral geography emerged for some time as a means to understand how people presents perceived spaces and places, and made locational decisions. The more influential 'radical geography' emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. It draws heavily on Marxist's theory and techniques, and is associated with geographers such as David Harvey and Richard Peet. Radical geographers seek to say meaningful things approximately problems recognized through quantitative methods, dispense explanations rather than descriptions, put forward alternatives and solutions, and be politically engaged, rather than using the detachment associated with positivists. The detachment and objectivity of the quantitative revolution was itself critiqued by radical geographers as being a tool of capital. Radical geography and the links to Marxism and related theories proceed an important factor of advanced human geography See: Antipode. Critical geography also saw the introduction of 'humanistic geography', associated with the take of Yi-Fu Tuan, which pushed for a much more qualitative approach in methodology.
The reorganize under critical geography have led to contemporary approaches in the discipline such(a) as new cultural geography, settlement geography, "demonic" geographies, and the engagement with postmodern and post-structural theories and philosophies.