Libraries as Armouries: Daniel Coit Oilman, Geography, and the Uses of a University

Abstract

The author builds on recent work on the history of geographical thought by focusing on the career of American geographer Daniel Coit Oilman, who was the first President of the Johns Hopkins University. It is argued that Oilman's influential work in professionalizing an instrumentalist approach to knowledge production in the new institution of the research university forms an important link between the philosophically oriented geography of Alexander von Humboldt and the geopolitics of Isaiah Bowman. The author extends work in the history of the discipline by showing how geographical knowledge came to be seen in instrumentalist terms not only in the institutional context of geographical societies and European imperial administration-the focus of much of the historical scholarship-but also within the context of an intellectual division of labor that emerged in the second half of the 19th century as the modern research university took shape. It is suggested that a full account of the way in which Humboldt's project was displaced by Oilman's may give us a better understanding of the role that geography might play in moving knowledge production beyond a purely instrumentalist orientation and into more liberatory projects of social justice.

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