On manipulating the evidence: a response to lowenthal

In his review of a 2004 anthology of essays on the history of historic preservation in the U.S. for the Journal of American History, historian Richard Striner (2005, 1016) of Westminster College wrote, "The least satisfactory essay in the book is the essay by the geographer David Lowenthal ... [who] indulges in sloppy overgeneralizations, either-or pronouncements, and inaccurate claims.... Moreover, he seems to be averse to the documentary side of historical scholarship--whether the subject matter happens to be architectural history or any other kind of history." Similar unfortunate traits are embedded in his recent "Geographical Review Essay, Marsh and Sauer: Reexamining the Rediscovery" (Lowenthal 2013). A number of Lowenthal's comments, in my view, qualify for Rollin Salisbury's famous phrase, "Perfectly true, perfectly general, perfectly meaningless" (Salisbury, quoted in Visher 1953, 6). This is exemplified in Lowenthal's misleading comment on Nathaniel Southgate Shaler's continuing interest in Marsh's ideas. Lowenthal suggests that Shaler's interest could not have continued, simply because he doesn't directly cite Marsh after 1876. Yet David Livingstone, Shaler's biographer, refers to Marsh as one "with whose work Shaler was familiar," and refers the reader to his own paper "Nature and Man in America," in which Livingstone states that Marsh's 1874 revision (with its new title) was "of fundamental importance" to Shaler, linking it to Shaler's own Nature and Man in America (1891). Later in his book, Livingstone again comments on Shaler's familiarity with Marsh's work, making the point I elaborated in my article: "Although the modern rediscovery of Marsh is attributed to Lewis Mumford, whose essay in The Brown Decades reputedly prompted Carl Sauer to resurrect Marsh's contributions, Shaler and other early conservationists were familiar with it during the latter part of the nineteenth century;" that is, after 1876 and continuing at least until 1891, if not later (Livingstone 1987, 322, note 23). Lowenthal does not mention the fact that most of Shaler's studies of human geography, right through Man and the Earth (1905), do not carry citations of any kind. In their absence, Livingstone had to rely on close readings of Shaler's texts, which he does admirably (Livingstone 1980, 1987). Lowenthal dismisses the content of Ralph Tarr's chapter on "Man and Nature" and obfuscates the importance of the reference to Marsh's book at the end of this chapter by claiming that Tarr "merely noncommittally lists The Earth as Modified by Human Action as one of well over a hundred 'Reference Books'." That may be that number in the entire book; I haven't counted them. However, Lowenthal's misleading phrasing suggests that Tarr lumped them together in a common bibliography, which is untrue. Rather, Tarr carefully separates his references and places those germane to any chapter at the end of each chapter, so that each has only those books relating to that chapter. This does not suggest a "noncommittal" listing; rather, it was clearly the author's purposeful decision. Most of Tarr's chapters concern physical geography; the text is, after all, an Elementary Physical Geography. He lists only three books at the end of his "Man and Nature" chapter: Shaler's Nature and Man in America (1891), Guyot's Earth and Man (1849), and the final edition of Marsh's Earth as Modified by Human Action (1885). Lowenthal's statement lumping them all together into a nonexistent collective bibliography of "well over a hundred" books deliberately diminishes the importance of Tarr's intention in his selection of the three he listed for further reading in his "Man and Nature" chapter. That sleight-of-hand maneuver of substituting "well over a hundred" for the three Tarr selected suggests we may need to expand Rollin Salisbury's famous phrase "perfectly true, perfectly general, perfectly meaningless" by adding such categories as "perfectly irrelevant" and "perfectly misleading" (Tarr [1895], 1905, 407, 419; Lowenthal 2013, 410). …