Isaiah Bowman

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Isaiah Bowman, AB, Ph. D. (26 December 1878, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada6 January 1950, Baltimore, United States) was an American geographer. He was educated at Harvard and Yale where he taught from 1905 to 1915, after which time he became the director of the American Geographical Society, a position he held for 20 years from 1915 to 1935. He was chief territorial adviser to President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles conference and served the Department of State as territorial adviser in World War Two. Some of his more notable works include;

  • Forest Physiography (1911)
  • Well-Drilling Methods (1911)
  • South America (1915)
  • The Andes of Southern Peru (1916)
  • The New World-Problems in Political Geography (1921)

In 1916 he became associate editor of the Geographical Review. He was associate editor of the Journal of Geography in 1918-19 and editor in 1919-20. Bowman served as President of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1935 to 1948.

Beginning in 2005, the American Geographical Society has helped launch international collaborative research projects, called the Bowman Expeditions in Bowman's honor, in part to advise the U.S. government concerning future trends in the human terrain of other countries. The first project, in Mexico, is called Mexico Indigena.

[edit] Further reading

  • Smith, Neil (2003). American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23027-2.