DEFINITION AND HISTORY GEOGRAPHY

      Geography is the science that studies about the location as well as similarities and differences (variation) of spatial physical and human phenomena on the surface of the earth .The word geography comes from the Greek that is geo ("Earth") and graphein ("write", or "explain").

Geography is also the name of historic books on this subject, which is famous Geographiawriting Klaudios Ptolemaios ( second century ).
Geography is more than cartography , the study of maps . Geography is not just answer what and where on the face of the earth, but also why there and not elsewhere, sometimes referred to as "location in space." Geography study this, whether caused by nature or humans. Also studied the effect of the differences that occur due to that.

Historical Geography

   Nation Greece is the nation's first known to actively explore geography as a science andphilosophy , with its main thinkers Thales of Miletus, Herodotus , Eratosthenes , Hipparchus ,Aristotle , Dicaearchus of Messana, Strabo , and Ptolemy . Nations Rome gave a donation to the mapping as they explored new lands added new techniques. One technique is periplus , descriptions of ports and inland along the coastline which can be seen offshore sailors; first example is Hanno the Navigator of Carthaginia and one from Sea erythraea, the two survivors at sea using a technique periplus by recognizing the Red Sea coastline and the Persian Gulf.
   In the Middle Ages, Arabs such as al-Idrisi , Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun maintain and continue to build a legacy of the Greeks and Romans. By the way Marco Polo , geography spread throughout Europe . During the Renaissance and the centuries of the 16th and 17thgreat voyages undertaken to find the theoretical basis and details more accurately.Geographia generalis by Bernhardus Varenius and world map Gerardus Mercator is the biggest example.
After a century into the 18th , geography had become recognized as a discrete discipline and became part of the curriculum at universities in Europe (mainly in Paris and Berlin ), but not inthe UK where geography is taught only as a sub-discipline of other sciences. One of the great works of this era was Kosmos: a sketch of the physical description of the Universe , byAlexander vom Humboldt .
   For more than two centuries the quantity of knowledge and tools has exploded in Indonesia^{[ citation needed ]} . There is a strong relationship between geography with geology and botany , as well as economics , sociology and demography .
   In the west, during the 20th century , the discipline of geography through four major phases:environmental determinism , regional geography , the quantitative revolution and critical geography .
   Environmental determinism is the theory that human and cultural characteristics caused by the natural environment. Fanatical adherents deteriminisme environment is Carl Ritter , Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth Huntington . Popular hypotheses included "heat makes inhabitants of the tropics lazy" and "frequent changes in barometric pressure make inhabitants of latitude is more intelligent". Environmental determinist geographers try to make the study of an influential theory. Around the 1930's thought was widely repudiated as lacking any basis and being prone to generalization (often bigoted). Environmental determinism remains an embarrassment to many geographers contemporary, and led to skepticism among many geographers with claims of environmental influence on culture (such as the theories of Jared Diamond ).
   Regional Geography reaffirms topic of geography was space and place. Regional geographers focused on gathering descriptive information about places, as well as the appropriate method to divide the world into several regions. Philosophical basis of this study was introduced by Richard Hartshorne .
   The quantitative revolution was geography's attempt to redefine itself as a science (science), in the revival of interest in science following the launch of Sputnik. Quantitative revolutionaries, often referred to as "space cadets", states that the purpose of geography was to test the general agreement about the spatial arrangement of phenomena. They adopted the philosophy of positivism from the natural sciences and by using mathematics - especially thestatistics - as a way to test the hypothesis. The quantitative revolution laid the groundwork for the development of Geographic Information Systems .
   Although the approach of positivism and post-positivist remain important in geography, critical geography arose as a critique of positivism. The first is the emergence of human geography.Drawing on the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology , humanist geographers (such as Yi-Fu Tuan) focused on people and their relationship with the place. More influential was Marxist geography, which applied the social theories of Karl Marx and his followers to geographic phenomena. David Harvey and Richard Peet are well-known Marxist geographers.Feminist geography, as the name suggests, the use of ideas from feminism in geographic contexts. The most recent strain of critical geography is postmodernist geography, which employs the ideas of the theory of post-modernist and post-structuralist to explore the social construction of spatial relations.

Source : OENNY