C. Barron McIntosh

C. Barron McIntosh, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, died recently following a long battle with cancer. Born in Edgemont, South Dakota in 1916, McIntosh graduated from Huron College in 1939 and taught in Sandhills high schools until 1949. He also served in the U.S. Navy. McIntosh was appointed Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Nebraska in 1958 and he remained there for the rest of his professional life.

McIntosh published a series of articles in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in the 1970s that established his reputation as an original and accomplished historical geographer. Meticulously working from the United States Land Office Records, he constructed maps of the Nebraska Sandhills that revealed new patterns of settlement. His later book, The Nebraska Sandhills: The Human Landscape (1996) became the definitive study of the
settlement of that region.

C. Baron McIntosh (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(7): 21

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Chor Pang Lo

Chor Pang “C.P.” Lo died on Sunday, December 30, 2007 at the age of 68 following a lengthy illness. Lo was Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia, where he had worked since March, 1984. He obtained his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Geography from the University of Hong Kong in 1963 and 1966, respectively, and his PhD from the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, in 1971.

Lo’s teaching and research interests included photogrammetry, the application of remote sensing to urban analysis, Geographic Information Systems, and the Geography of China, a subject on which he had published over 100 papers and seven books. His book on Applied Remote Sensing (Longman, 1986) was used by many English-speaking universities around the world as a textbook in the 1980s and early 1990s. His most recent book, Concepts and Techniques of Geographic Information Systems (co-authored with Albert K. W. Yeung) was published by Prentice Hall in August, 2006.

Lo pioneered the use of Landsat image data for land use and land cover mapping in China. He conducted research on population estimation using aerial photography, Large Format Camera photography, Landsat MSS, Landsat TM, SPOT, DMSP-OLS, and Shuttle Imaging Radar images for the city of Hong Kong as well as settlements in China and the United States. Lo was awarded the William A. Owens Award on Creative Research in the Social Sciences, given by the University of Georgia Research Foundation, in 2001; the Outstanding Contributions Award and Medal in Geographic Remote Sensing by the Remote Sensing Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 2001; the Research Honors Award by the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (SEDAAG); and the Lifetime Research Award and Lifetime Achievement Award by the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers in 2002 and 2005, respectively.

Chor Pang “C.P.” Lo (Necrology).2008. AAG Newsletter 43(2): 19.

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Norton Sidney Ginsburg

Geographer Norton Sidney Ginsburg, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, passed away recently of natural causes on July 30, 2007, at the age of 85. A native Chicagoan born August 24, 1921, he was an alumnus (BA, MA, and PhD) of the University of Chicago, earning his doctorate in 1949. Ginsburg was a former president of the Association of American Geographers, Senior Fellow and for a brief time Dean at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and Director of the Institute of Environment and Policy at the East-West Center.

Ginsburg served as a geographer in the U.S. Army Map Service during 1941-42 and in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942-46. He was a professor of geography at the University of Chicago from 1951 to 1986. In the 1960s, Ginsburg served as associate dean of the Social Science Division, and later as chairman of the Department of Geography (1978-1985). Following his retirement from the University he became Director of the Environment and Policy Institute of the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, a post he held for five years. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1983.

Ginsburg’s academic interests focused principally on the Far East. He was coauthor of The Pattern of Asia (1958), principal author of the Atlas of Economic Development (1960), and co-editor of seven multi-authored works on the economic development and urbanization of East and Southeast Asia. In 1990, a series of lectures he gave was published as The Urban Transition: Reflections on the American and Asian Experiences by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. Ginsburg provided editorial oversight for Southeast Asian volumes of area handbooks published for the Human Relations Area Files in the 1950s. He also contributed as editorial consultant to the Aldine Publishing Company and the Denoyer-Geppert map company in the 1970s, and the Ocean Yearbook in the 1980s and 90s.

Ginsburg was a long-time member of the AAG, serving as secretary from 1963–64 before becoming president in 1969–70. In 1959, he received the Association’s Meritorius Achievement Award. He was also the subject of two interviews recorded in Geographers on Film (1971 and 1995).

Norton S. Ginsburg (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(7): 20.

Norton Ginsburg, long-time professor at the University of Chicago, died on 30 July 2007. Perhaps best remembered for his scholarly work and professional activities on various aspects of Asia and its urban and economic geography, Norton was always a Chicago man. He began his life on the north side of Chicago where he was born to immigrant Jewish parents and began his distinguished academic career in the Chicago public schools.

Following the example of his older sister, he received a scholarship and entered the University of Chicago in 1937 at the age of sixteen. There he quickly came under the influence of Robert Platt and Chauncey Harris, whose interests in regional and urban studies provided an intellectual and scholarly framework on which to expand his early interest in maps and international studies. In 1941 Norton was awarded the BA degree in geography, after which he moved to Washington, D.C., and accepted a position with the Army Map Service.

In January 1943, Norton joined the Navy and was soon commissioned Ensign in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He was sent to the Advanced Navy Intelligence School and to Japanese language school at the University of Colorado in 1944. After duty in the Joint Intelligence Center of the Pacific Theatre, he was assigned to the Sixth Marine Division in North China as the war in the Pacific was coming to an end. During his service in China, he had the opportunity to travel and to visit other cities and regions and to enhance his growing interest in China, its culture, and its geography. In 1946, he was transferred to the Department of State as a map intelligence officer in Shanghai, where he served until he was discharged as a Lieutenant from the U.S. Naval Reserve.

After completing his military service, Norton returned to the University of Chicago and began graduate study in the Department of Geography. He received the MA in 1947 and was admitted to the PhD program, which he completed in 1949 with a dissertation on Japanese prewar trade and shipping flows in the Pacific Basin (Ginsburg 1949a).

Academic Finishing and Entering the Professoriate

Norton’s interest in Asia had been galvanized by his wartime service and his thinking about the future and what areas of the world would be most significant. The Chinese revolution in 1949 came to a communist dénouement, the consequences of which for the United States were the subject of endless and contentious debates and arguments among policymakers and politicians. Whatever the implications for American foreign policy, it was clear to Norton that China and its neighbors Japan and Southeast Asia were emerging as critical areas for future study and analysis. In 1950 he headed to Hong Kong and Malaya as a Fulbright Research Fellow where he remained for a year and where he continued his Chinese language study. His career trajectory as scholar and teacher was shaping up with a strong focus on East Asia and its neighbors.

In 1951 the faculty of the Geography Department at the University of Chicago invited Norton to join them as assistant professor. Norton flourished in the Department of Geography, where his hard work and emerging path-breaking scholarship on the urban and economic geography of Japan, Malaya, and China were being increasingly recognized. The 1950s were a period of intense scholarly work for Norton, as he published energetically in mainstream geography journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Geographical Review, and Economic Geography, as well as books and monographs. For example, in 1953 he published a monograph on Taiwan (or Formosa as it was then called) and in 1958 a book on Malaya with coauthor Chester Roberts.

The culmination and chef d’oeuvre of this period, however, was The Pattern of Asia (Ginsburg 1958), a more than 900-page textbook masterwork that Norton edited and to which he contributed a major section on Japan and Southeast Asia. This book, with its thematic treatment of the changing political and economic geography, aimed to elucidate the various problems and potentialities of the countries of Asia. Although appearing in only one edition, the book became the standard American textbook and a major reference source on Asia for a generation of graduate students during the 1960s and 1970s. Another important and well-recognized scholarly production was the Atlas of Economic Development published by the University of Chicago Press in 1960. This atlas, done at the behest of Bert Hoselitz and in which Brian Berry provided the statistical analysis, provided a broad spatial view of the varying levels and indicators of economic development of the countries of the world. As a pioneering effort at statistical mapping with a general focus on economic development indicators, it garnered a good bit of attention at the time of its publication.

Norton’s editorial competence and expertise was also moving in parallel with his scholarly output and reputation, and he was in demand as an editor and academic organizer. Norton was also increasingly drawn into writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica and for such outlets as the Area Handbook series that various branches of the U.S. government were producing for different parts of the world.

His academic career at Chicago progressed rapidly as he moved through the professorial ranks in short order: associate professor in 1956 and professor in 1960. In the late 1950s, as his talents for academic leadership and management began to emerge, he began to assume administrative responsibilities, first as assistant dean in the Social Sciences Division. Over the next two decades he would serve as associate dean of the College and the Social Sciences Division as well as chair of the Geography Department.

External Activities and Scholarly Leadership

In addition to his work at the University of Chicago, Norton took on active duties in a number of scholarly organizations. For example, he was very involved in the affairs of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), as review editor of the flagship journal, the Annals (1956–1960), and as the acting editor (1961–1962). In 1959 he received a citation from the AAG for “meritorious contributions to the field of geography.” From 1963 to 1966 he served as Secretary of the AAG. Norton was a member of the AAG Commission on College Geography from 1966 to 1969. In 1969 he was elected vice president of the AAG and succeeded to the presidency the following year (1970–1971). He also served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Asian Studies (1958–1961). His involvement with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) led to membership in the SSRC Committee on Urbanization (1958–1965) and to service as Secretary of the SSRC/ACLS Joint Committee on Contemporary China (1959–1963).

Norton had long-standing interests in both maps and Asia, as seen in his early academic and military work, and these help explain his intellectual commitment to geography. He was involved as a consulting editor on Asia for Denoyer-Geppert, and his name appears on a number of wall maps of Asia that Denoyer-Geppert produced for classroom use. In addition, he was a consulting editor for the Aldine University Atlas (1969), a widely used and popular college atlas. Perhaps his most significant cartographic effort was editing and republishing a very important work that had appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Herrmann’s Historical and Commercial Atlas of China. Norton served as general editor for a reissuing of parts of this atlas, An Historical Atlas of China, with a long prefatory essay by Paul Wheatley, that Aldine Publishing produced in 1966.

In 1967 Norton was appointed to the Executive Committee of the U.S. National Committee for UNESCO, a five-year appointment. He served as Chairman of its Committee on the Environment from 1970 to 1972. Also in 1967, he was appointed as Chairman of the Urban Development Seminar of the Southeast Asian Development Advisory Group (SEADAG), an arm of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). He served on the SEADAG Executive Committee for two years (1969–1970). In 1968 he was Fulbright lecturer at the University of Delhi. From 1973 to 1976 he served on the Committee on International Environmental Programs of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1971 Norton was presented with an unusual and very significant professional opportunity. The former charismatic and innovative president of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, invited Norton to join him and a group of distinguished scholars at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. Norton was asked to serve as Dean of the Academic Program as well as Senior Fellow in the Center. This three-year appointment was to prove very important both personally as well as professionally. It was during this period that Norton met his future wife, Diana, and they were married two years later in 1973. It was here that Norton also came into contact with the esteemed scholar Elizabeth Mann Borgese, with whom he began an important scholarly collaboration in editing the annual Ocean Yearbook, an activity that he continued for a number of years. Other noteworthy achievements in 1983 were the awards of a Fulbright Lectureship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the spring followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship for scholarly study.

After returning to Chicago, Norton renewed his strong interest in Hawaii, where he had served as Senior Specialist at the East-West Center in 1967. In 1979, 1980, and 1982 he visited the Center as a Fellow in the Environment and Policy Institute. In 1984 he was visiting distinguished professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. Following his retirement from the University of Chicago in 1986, Norton was appointed Director of the Environment and Policy Institute in the East-West Center and served in that capacity for five years.

During this period he organized a number of professional conferences and oversaw the work of the Institute in its effort to bring together scholars and policymakers from Asia, North America, and the Pacific Basin to address various pressing environmental and related concerns. Norton was generous in inviting his former students and colleagues who had appropriate expertise to participate in some of these conferences and studies. In this way he was able to ensure that a geographic perspective was part of the intellectual discourse in addressing environmental issues in the Pacific Basin.

Out of this period came the edited volume, The Extended Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia (Ginsburg, Koppel, and McGee 1991) that focused on models and processes of Asian urbanization drawn from his long and fruitful scholarly collaboration with Terry McGee. In this volume, Norton and Terry, along with other colleagues, expounded on the idea of a distinctive form and process of Asian urbanization in which particular spatial patterns and forms emerged to reflect the social and economic forces at work in densely inhabited alluvial plains and basins that were undergoing rapid growth, development, and urbanization.

Norton’s own ideas on this concept were distilled from his long experience in Asia and his scholarly focus on the processes and forces that underpinned the rapid urbanization and changes in urban morphology that he had witnessed and studied in China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. Those of us who were his students had listened to his lectures on this topic and had seen him at work in the field and in various conferences and seminars that he organized, where he often moderated and led serious discussions. Some of his thinking on the matter of the processes and dimensions of urban change in Asia were summarized in a comparative framework in a monograph published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, The Urban Transition: Reflections on the American and Asian Experiences (Ginsburg 1990). This monograph grew out of a series of lectures he presented at the Chinese University in the late 1980s. It was followed by another brief paper, Planning the Future of the Asian City (Ginsburg 1994), published by the Hong Kong Institute for Asia-Pacific Studies.

Support for Students and Colleagues

Norton was well known for his generosity and support for his students and colleagues and friends, which extended to both professional and personal associations, and enabled those who worked with him to realize they would have his full and enthusiastic support. Although he was often away and not always available to his students owing to his active engagements in numerous professional activities beyond Chicago, he could always be counted on to assist when deadlines were approaching, and he took a strong interest in the academic progress of his students and their accomplishments. Norton was a sometimes demanding and often rigorous classroom teacher. His assignments were long and sometimes daunting, but they were reasonable. He expected a seriousness of attitude and purpose coupled with hard work and he assumed that his students would demonstrate sufficient self-reliance and creativity to do their work in a timely and competent manner.

Many of Norton’s students did overseas field work. This commitment required additional time as well as financial resources to assist in the completion of foreign field research and sometimes language study. Norton was very skilled in working with students to direct them to appropriate funding agencies and to provide strong supporting letters and documents to help them compete for funding for overseas studies.

Norton’s association with and support for his students did not end after the completion of their formal studies and graduation. In fact, in many cases his friendship and support became greater after graduation. He was very helpful in assisting former students in job searches and advising on how best to manage an academic or other professional career. Once former students were advancing in their own careers, he was also exceptionally gracious and generous in offering critiques of their scholarly publications and in providing sage counsel on the advancement of a career.

He worked with a number of students from foreign countries, especially from various parts of Asia, and was known to all as a warm and sympathetic faculty supporter who could be counted on to give solid academic guidance as well as to provide a kind and friendly word for those who might have felt isolated and lonely in a faraway place. His commitment to foreign area studies and to assisting those from foreign places is seen in his lengthy and devoted service (1976–1985) on the Board of International House, a wonderful institution on the campus of the University of Chicago that serves as dormitory, cafeteria, recreational center, and meeting place for foreign and domestic students, dedicated to encouraging understanding and friendship among them.

Memorial Scholarship in Norton’s Memory

A memorial service was held for Norton in the library of the Quadrangle Club, the faculty club at the University of Chicago, on 1 December 2007. The setting was most fitting, as it was a place that Norton very much enjoyed and where he spent many pleasant hours on the tennis courts and with his colleagues. After testimonials from friends, colleagues, and former students, a University development officer announced the creation of an Odyssey Scholarship in Norton’s name to assist undergraduate scholarship students. This Odyssey Scholarship Challenge is a new scholarship fund at Chicago set up as a matching gift from an alumnus. It is most appropriate to honor Norton in this way, as he was a scholarship student at Chicago as an undergraduate and he was devoted, as noted earlier, to assisting his students by supporting their Chicago education. ¹ Norton’s family believes this is the most suitable memorial for a life that was devoted to improving the human condition through scholarly advancement and understanding. He is survived by his wife Diana, sons Jeremy and Alexander, daughter-in-law Cheryl, and brother Gilbert.

Norton Ginsburg will be remembered for almost half a century of distinguished scholarly work on the changing urban and economic geography of East and Southeast Asia, as well as for editing and guiding environmental and policy work focused on the Pacific Basin. He was a gifted teacher and mentor, and his colleagues and former students will recall him fondly as a caring and concerned person who served not only as a grand academic model, instructor, and advisor but as a close and supportive friend.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Norton’s widow, Diana, for her help in providing information and assisting with the accuracy of this narrative. Any errors are, of course, my responsibility. In preparing this memorial, a number of Norton’s former students and colleagues have offered thoughts and comments and for these I am most grateful. They include Baruch Boxer, Richard Edmonds, Gil Latz, Alec Murphy, James Osborn, Shue Tuck Wong, and Yue-man Yeung.

Notes

1. Those who wish to make a contribution to the Norton Ginsburg Odyssey Scholarship fund for a matching commitment should contact the Development Office at the University of Chicago (https://odyssey.uchicago.edu) or call 773-702-8884.

References

· 1. Borgese, Elisabeth Mann and Ginsburg, Norton, eds. 1979–1987. Ocean yearbook, Vol. 1–6, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 2. Borgese, Elisabeth Mann, Ginsburg, Norton and Morgan, Joseph, eds. 1989–1996. Ocean yearbook, Vol. 7–12, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 3. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1947. Ch’ang-ch’un. Economic Geography, 23: 290–307.

· 4. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1948. Ch’ing-tao. Economic Geography, 23: 181–200.

· 5. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1949a. Japanese prewar trade and shipping in the Oriental Triangle, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 6

· 6. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1949b. Manchurian Railway Development. The Far Eastern Quarterly, 9: 398–411.

· 7. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1951. China’s railway network. Geographical Review, 41: 470–74.

· 8. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1953. The economic resources and development of Formosa, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations.

· 9. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1955. The great city in Southeast Asia. American Journal of Sociology, 60: 455–62.

· 10. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1957. Natural resources and economic development. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 47: 197–212.

· 11. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1958. The pattern of Asia, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

· 12. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1960. Essays on geography and economic development by Brian Berry and others, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 62

· 13. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1961a. Atlas of economic development, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 14. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1961b. The dispersed metropolis: The case of Okayama. Toshi Mondai, 52: 631–40. [Municipal Problems]

· 15. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1965. “Urban geography and non-western areas”. In The study of urbanization, Edited by: Hauser, P. M. and Schnore, L. F. 311–46. New York: Wiley.

· 16. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1966. An historical atlas of China by Albert Herrmann, Chicago: Aldine.

· 17. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1969. Aldine university atlas, Edited by: Fullard, Harold and Darby, H. C. Chicago: George Philip, and Son, Aldine. Consulting ed.

· 18. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1972a. How China sees herself. The Center Magazine, 5: 1–6.

· 19. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1972b. The mission of a scholarly society. The Professional Geographer, 24: 1–6.

· 20. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1972c. “Planning the future of the Asian city”. In The city as a center of change in Asia, Edited by: Dwyer, D. J. 43–59. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

· 21. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1973. From colonialism to national development: Geographical perspectives on patterns and policies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 63: 1–21.

· 22. Ginsburg, Norton S., ed. 1975. Asia: Visual-relief Asia (map), Chicago: Denoyer-Geppert.

· 23. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1990. The urban transition: Reflections on the American and Asian experiences, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.

· 24. Ginsburg, Norton S. 1994. Planning the future of the Asian city: A twenty-five-year retrospective, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. Occasional Paper No. 36

· 25. Ginsburg, Norton, Holt, Sidney and Murdoch, William, eds. 1974. Pacem in Maribus III: The Mediterranean marine environment and the development of the region, Malta: University of Malta Press.

· 26. Ginsburg, Norton, Koppel, Bruce and McGee, T. G., eds. 1991. The extended metropolis: Settlement transition in Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

· 27. Ginsburg, Norton and Lalor, Bernard, eds. 1984. China: The 80s era, Boulder, CO: Westview.

· 28. Ginsburg, Norton, Osborn, James and Blank, Grant. 1986. Geographic perspectives on the wealth of nations, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 220

· 29. Ginsburg, Norton S. and Chester, F. Roberts Jr. 1958. Malaya, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

· 30. Ginsburg, Norton. 1990. Resources/environment: Perspectives on critical issues, Environment and Policy Institute, East-West Center. Working paper No. 24

· 31. Leung, C. K. and Ginsburg, Norton, eds. 1980. China: Urbanization and national development, Department of Geography, University of Chicago. Research Paper No. 196

Pannell, Clifton W. “Norton S. Ginsburg, 1921-2007: Teacher and Scholar of Asia, Mentor, Editor, Academic Administrator, and Director.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99, no. 4 (2009): 805-809.

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John Brush

John E. Brush, a leading human geographer during the last half of the 20th century, passed away on February 20, 2007, in Medford, New Jersey. Born on September 2, 1919, in Jefferson, Pennsylvania, Brush grew up in India, where his parents served as Baptist missionaries in Kharagpur, Bengal. His love of cartography began by mapping his boyhood hikes in the Himalayas. He earned both an MA (1947) and a PhD (1952) in geography from the University of Wisconsin. A Professor Emeritus of Geography at Rutgers University, Brush served on the faculty for 35 years, where he also served as department chair.

Brush’s research touched on Wisconsin, New Jersey, and the cities of India, but his professional and personal interests took him across a wider range of places, from Africa to the British Isles, China, France, Russia, and Scandinavia. His research awards included a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and several Senior Fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies for research in India.

John E. Brush (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(6): 15.

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Leslie Hepple

Professor Leslie Hepple, faculty member in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, passed away recently at the age of 59. He was one of the longest-serving faculty members at the school. Hepple’s areas of early work involved spatial autocorrelation and spatial econometrics. He extended that work through major ESRC-supported research programs on Bayesian spatial econometrics, developing both theory and algorithms. His command of theory led government officials to call upon him to attempt to resolve policy issues ranging from rate support grants to census undercounting.

In addition to spatial analysis, Hepple’s interests extended to a broader range of subjects and methods in human geography. A 1986 paper on the revival of geopolitics was recently celebrated in the Progress in Human Geography series “classics in human geography.” His undergraduate courses on both geopolitics and Central America were well-known at Bristol, and he pursued an interest in historical geography through studies of English landscape evolution much in the manner of those by H.G. Hoskins. One of his former students, Derek Gregory, remembered his former teacher as possessing “a wonderful gift for clear exposition combined with such good humour and gentleness.” At the time of his death, Hepple was working on a revised approach to spatial interaction models.

Leslie Hepple (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(3): 21.

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Allan R. Pred

Allan R. Pred, one of the leading humanist geographers of the past half century, passed away of lung cancer on January 5th in Berkeley, California. Pred retired last spring following a career of 44 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as the Chair of the Department of Geography between 1979 and 1988.

Pred graduated first in his class from Antioch College in 1957. Attracted by the cross-disciplinary nature of geography, he first attended Penn State and later the University of Chicago, where he completed his PhD in 1962. He then arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor of geography at the age of only 25.

A prolific author, Pred published 22 books and monographs during his career and more than 70 articles and book chapters. His international reputation as an acute observer, analyst, and theorist of American urbanism emerged largely from the publication of three books: The Spatial Dynamics of US Urban Industrial Growth 1800-1914 (1966), Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information, 1790-1840 (1973), and Urban Growth Theory and City Systems in the US, 1840-1860 (1980).

After 1980, Pred turned his attention to the dynamics of both the cities and culture of Sweden. He also readjusted his focus at the time toward investigations of the production of modernity. At the same time, he developed an unusual writing style that mixed ethnographical research with personal commentary. His studies of Sweden included Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late-Nineteenth Century Stockholm (1990), and Even in Sweden:Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination (2000). For his contributions to social science in Sweden, Pred was rewarded with an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in 1992, and later with the Willy Brandt Professorship.

Pred will be remembered in part for an idiosyncratic prose style at once poetic, stark, and rich—the creative result, at least in part, of the inspiration he found in the work of Walter Benjamin. He will also be remembered for his many contributions to campus life at Berkeley.

Pred received the Anders Retzius Medal from the Swedish Society for Geography and Anthropology in 1991. He was presented with Lifetime Achievement Honors by the Association of American Geographers in 2005.

Alan Pred (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(2): 20.

Allan Richard Pred, one of the world’s leading geographers and social scientists, died of acute lung cancer on 5 January 2007, at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, California. He had retired in May 2006 following forty-four years of service to the University of California, Berkeley. After he was diagnosed with lung cancer last summer at his summer home in Sweden, his condition deteriorated rapidly on his return to Berkeley for medical treatment. He was seventy years old.

To his colleagues and students, Allan Pred was a formidable intellectual, a brilliant thinker, a great humanist, a loyal and trusted friend, and a generous and engaged mentor. He was the central figure in the making of a distinctive Berkeley approach to geography over the last generation and he left an indelible stamp on the Geography Department, marked by his devotion to wide-open inquiry, critical thought, and a passion for truth and human freedom. “He made a big difference to the social life in the social sciences/humanities” said a colleague in the Anthropology Department, “his humanist qualities created a sense of meaningful intellectual exchange and moral optimism that may be fading on campus.” His immense charm and deep humanity will be sorely missed.

The arc of Allan Pred’s academic life is nothing short of remarkable. Born and raised in the Bronx, he entered Antioch College at sixteen. During the 1950s, Antioch was a nebula that fashioned a number of intellectual, political, and cultural stars, and Allan Pred was most definitely part of that galaxy. At the outset, his close friend and classmate Robert Krinsky recalls that for the better part of two years Allan was a B student—largely preoccupied with his record on the basketball court—and he struggled with his inclination toward procrastination (as hard as it might now be to fully understand this anxiety). At Antioch he was required to write an introspective College Aims papers during his freshman year, and senior papers at the end of his senior year. In his freshman paper Allan began by quoting a philosophy professor who had just retired from Antioch, M. N. Chatterjee: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Allan said that he wanted a varied curriculum and various jobs under Antioch’s work-study plan to find where he was going. He had already taken a few chemistry courses and decided that the hard sciences were not for him, although in his application to college he thought they might be.

It is not clear what precipitated his intellectual and academic growth after two faltering years, but bloom he did. He never received less than an A in any course from his third year at Antioch through his MA at Penn State, or through his PhD at Chicago. In his final paper at Antioch he mentions his work-study job as a copyboy at the Toledo Blade; the responsibility that gave him for managing his money so that he could contribute to his tuition; his taking advantage of whatever cultural activities there were in Toledo, and his realization that he had a desire for much more; his job at the Current Digest of the Soviet Press at Columbia and his becoming aware of the politics around that.

Allan graduated from Antioch in 1957 and then decamped to Pennsylvania State University to study geography. When asked in an interview why he chose geography, he replied that it offered an unmatched flexibility and cross-disciplinary landscape on which to operate. University Park was a way station en route to his ultimate destination, the University of Chicago. For a student interested in cities and urban geography in the mid-twentieth century, the University of Chicago was the Holy Grail: Home to a long line of urban theorists, by 1960 Chicago was the crucible within which a new quantitative and analytical geography was being forged. Completing his PhD in 1962, in a little over four years, Pred arrived at Berkeley at the tender age of 25. His ascent through the ranks of the professoriate was astonishing. Within five years he had obtained tenure. By 1971, aged thirty-four, he had been appointed full professor.

For the better part of four decades, Allan Pred has been at the forefront of human geography. His scholarship has radically shaped contemporary understanding of city development, landscape, modernity, and race. His productivity is legendary, including twenty-two books and monographs—translated into seven languages—and more than seventy articles and book chapters. He was always among the most cited scholars in the profession. At the time of his death he was completing a new book manuscript, continuing his interest in race, identity, and the making of the modern world. At his May 2006 retirement party, one colleague calculated that Allan Pred had penned on average about 350 words each day of his working life.

Allan Pred was born in the Bronx in 1936. His father was a high school French language teacher, his mother a housewife and musician. His grandparents had been Jewish immigrants from Poland. A child of the late Depression, he rarely looked back to New York after his departure for Antioch College in 1953. His new horizons were out in the Midwest and later across the Atlantic to Europe and what became a life-long love affair with Sweden. He first visited the country while a graduate student at Chicago, drawn, in part, by the theoretical and scientific innovations of Swedish geographers such as Torsten Hägerstrand. When he met his wife of forty-four years, Hjördis, in San Francisco in 1962—Allan overhead Hjördis, who was then an airline flight attendant, and her brother talking in Swedish in a Basque restaurant in North Beach and simply introduced himself on the grounds he need to practice his language skills—the die was cast. They lived between Berkeley and Sweden on a yearly basis, raising bilingual children. In the 1980s, they bought a summer home in Sörmland, Sweden, which was Allan’s sanctuary and passion; he treasured the physical work of building and working the land as much as he cherished burrowing into the books and archives.

Perhaps inevitably for a child raised in New York and educated in Chicago, Pred started his career as a theorist of the American city. His international reputation was made in three brilliant books on nineteenth-century U.S. urbanism, each marked by a magnificent control of historical sources and a profound sensitivity to the dynamics of historical transformation. Each proved to be enormously influential across disciplines and theoretically groundbreaking. In The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth 1800–1914 (1966), he challenged the new economic historians to take seriously the role of urban agglomeration in industrial growth. In Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information, 1970–1840 (1973), Pred linked national growth, mercantile expansion, and industrial innovation to the advance of communications networks across American cities. Finally, in Urban Growth Theory and City Systems in the United States, 1840–1860 (1980), he charted the way capitalist dynamics ramify across entire city systems, more than between cities and rural hinterlands. This classic trio of monographs remains indispensable for any understanding of the urban and economic history of the United States.

Beginning in the 1980s, Pred’s formidable intellect turned from the American to the Swedish city, and in the process his gaze turned from urban political economy to modernity as a way of life and mode of experience. Pred’s perseverance and his eye for historical sources yielded unexpected fruits in his new Swedish project. He discovered an archival goldmine, a treasure trove of neglected church and state papers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century life. What followed was an exhilarating series of projects designed to unearth the making of place, everyday life, and popular identities in the transit to what he called “Swedish modern.” He began with rural enclosures and peasant life in the nineteenth century, in Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden, 1975–1850(1985) and moved quickly to the world of Stockholm’s working classes at the fin de siècle in Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Everyday Language in Late-Nineteenth Century Stockholm (1990). Pred’s vision grew even bolder, taking on that apotheosis of modernity, the World’s Fair, as it took shape in Stockholm in three different forms over three generations, in Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present (1995). Inevitably he turned to contemporary Swedish life and to what he took to be the deafening silence surrounding the question of race and racism. In two powerful and controversial books—his stunning excoriation of cultural racism, memorably entitled Even in Sweden: Racisms, Racialized Spaces, and the Popular Geographical Imagination (2000) and The Past Is Not Dead: Facts, Fictions and Enduring Racial Stereotypes (2004)—Pred courageously exposed a deep vein of pain and shame. His final book, Violent Geographies edited with Derek Gregory (Gregory and Pred 2007)—was a customarily feisty foray into the nightmare of the current moment of American empire. At his death, Allan was working on a book on Josephine Baker and her relationship to modernity, race, and Swedish history.

In migrating across the Atlantic and addressing modern Swedish identity, Pred’s scholarship shifted radically in both conception and style. Deeply influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin and his theory of montage, Pred experimented with a distinctive prose style—at once poetic and stark—and a remarkable integration of image and text, of ethnography and commentary. For some this body of work resembled a postmodern turn, but Pred never neglected the hard-edged world of material life and capitalist economy even as he delved deeper into cultural and visual studies. What is incontestable is that this work was truly original and distinctive. Not surprisingly some took umbrage at his language—most memorably in a snide review in the New York Times Book Review (by Patricia Limerick)—but nobody doubted the erudition of his scholarship, the breadth of his analysis, or the willingness to take a chance on escaping the confines of conventional thought and banal didactics.

As his stature within the social sciences grew, the honors followed. He was awarded the Anders Retzius medal by the Swedish Society for Geography and Anthropology (sometimes called Geography’s Nobel Prize) in 1991. He was honored by the Polish Academy of Sciences several years later, and twice by the Association of American Geographers, in 1978 and 2005. He was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. For his contributions to Swedish social science, he was awarded the Willy Brandt Professorship in 2001 and an honorary doctorate from Uppsala in 1992. He held visiting appointments at the Écoles des Hautes Etudes and the University of Lund and, earlier in his career, served as a consultant to the Swedish and Australian governments. In recognition of his extraordinary achievements and contributions to campus life at Berkeley, he was made Professor of the Graduate School in 2005.

A tireless campaigner for geography as a field of study, Allan Pred always promoted the importance of space and place in everyday life. Space was, in his view, a sort of foundation stone for all of the human sciences. Seeing, measuring, perceiving, and creating space was, Pred wrote, central to the birth of modernity. An internationalist and advocate throughout his career, it was entirely appropriate that the Association of American Geographers awarded special honors to him in 2005 for his “stalwart leadership within the discipline” and “his outstanding intellectual and personal ambassadorship … throughout the international academy.” As he once said, not bad for a kid from the Bronx.

Allan came to Berkeley during the heydey of Sauerian geography. He and Jay Vance felt very much like an intellectual minority within the department, in their quite different ways promoting a new sort of urban and scientific geography that stood at an angle to the Berkeley School. He was never particularly close to Sauer and was never entirely convinced of the merits of the intellectual project or for that matter the sort of geography that it produced. He was a great admirer of Clarence Glacken, however. Allan was of course a key figure in the refiguring of Berkeley geography as many of the Sauer generation began to retire and new hires were made. His period as Chair was in this regard a key moment in the recent history of the department.

Pred was in every sense a fixture on the Berkeley campus. Arriving in the early days of the free speech movement, he was thrown headlong into the foment that consumed the decade. He never shied away from support for the students, for free thought, or for the rights of man—and woman. A great supporter of women students and colleagues, and a committed advocate of racial equality and affirmative action, he was, above all, a man of the people who never forgot his humble roots. An optimist in matters of human possibility, he nonetheless had few illusions about the workings of power and its corruptions. His favorite cartoon, pinned on the wall of his office through his years as department chair, pictured a baseball box score with the Realists scoring a run in every inning and the Utopians shutout until the end. The final score: Utopians 1, Realists 0.

Pred contributed to the Berkeley campus on many institutional fronts—the library, Graduate Council, Scandinavian Studies, tenure and promotion committees, affirmative action, and minority representation among them. He never shirked the thankless committee duties, and his knowledge of university affairs was voluminous. Most important, he served as the chair of the Department of Geography between 1979 and 1988 during a critical period of transformation and growth. All departmental chairs develop their own personal styles. His was chairing by stealth: a remarkable combination of administrative genius, healthy distrust of those in power, a ferocious determination, and a memory like an elephant (many have thought that he would have been a world-class labor negotiator). His wise counsel and sage advice was sought by many around campus. As a colleague his hallmarks were loyalty and honesty, a profound political acumen, and a great generosity of spirit. He was a consummate academic citizen.

A dedicated teacher and mentor, Allan Pred’s influence reached across the campus, especially into anthropology, literature, and sociology. His graduate seminars—always large, unruly, and overpopulated—drew ethnographers, historians, planners, and students of rhetoric and literature. He reveled in the work of graduate advising, and his door was seemingly always open. He became a sort of cult figure for some, the last thing he, of course, wanted to be. A speaker at his retirement colloquium put it well: Through his own work—his intellectual restlessness, his fearlessness in tackling the unstated and silenced, his ability to experiment and find a voice and a style of one’s own—Allan had blazed a path for all of us.

When he was diagnosed with serious lung cancer, Allan was typically fair minded and philosophical. He had, he said, lived a blessed life, full to the hilt, doing what he liked best: teaching, learning, living in Berkeley and Sweden. He had no regrets, and came by that as honestly as any man could. It was a life that was fiery and feisty—and always political. His graduation address in 2006 was Allan Pred at full bore: raging against a war machine—a secret geography of terror and intimidation—that drew strength from weak citizenship; he eyed the new graduates and asked, “What do YOU know? The clock is ticking. The train is rolling on.”

In May 2006 a retirement seminar—known locally as the Predfest—was held on campus (those interested can see the presentations by Derek Gregory, Katharyne Mitchell, Neil Smith, Gunnar Olsson, Dick Peet, Cindi Katz, and others on the Web site at https://geography.berkeley.edu/). It was an extraordinary occasion marked by Allan’s characteristic combination of good humor and intellectual rigor. He was deliriously happy; as one person put it, he was like an excited eleven-year-old boy cavorting around in a seventy-year-old body. Nobody who shared in those festivities could possibly have imagined a memorial service on the Berkeley campus six months later. Allan was, of course, a regular at the annual meetings and even in December he fully anticipated that he would be up and running and fully immersed in the San Francisco meetings.

On 28 January, in the magnificent Great Hall of the Men’s Faculty Club, a number of speakers reminisced about Allan’s life and work. What was so striking was the multifaceted nature of Allan—his children recalled his magnificent storytelling abilities, his colleagues remarked on his loyalty and honesty, his students on his deep humanity, and others on his political commitments.

Allan Pred is survived by his wife Hjördis, a woodworker, of Berkeley; a daughter Michele, an artist living in Berkeley; and a son Joseph, an emergency operations officer and consultant. He also leaves a brother Ralph, a philosopher living in British Columbia, and a sister Suzanne Pred Bass, a psychotherapist and theater producer living in New York City, as well as two nieces, Emily and Rebecca Bass, and a nephew, Noah Pred.

Publications

Books and Monographs

· 1. Pred, A. and Brian, J. L. Berry. 1961. Central place studies: A bibliography of theory and applications. , 2nd ed, Philadelphia: Regional Science Research Institute. Bibliography Series 1

· 2. Pred, A. 1962. The external relations of cities during “Industrial Revolution,” with a case study of Göteborg, Sweden: 1860–1890, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 3. Pred, A. 1966. The spatial dynamics of U.S. urban-industrial growth, 1800–1914: Theoretical and interpretive essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

· 4. Pred, A. 1967. Behavior and location: Foundations for a geographical and dynamic location theory, Part I Lund Studies in Geography, Ser. B. Human Geography 27

· 5. Pred, A. 1968. “Postscript and translation of Torsten Hägerstrand’s”. In Innovation diffusion as a spatial process, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

· 6. Pred, A. 1969. Behavior and location: Foundations for a geographical and dynamic location theory, Part II Lund Studies in Geography, Ser. B. Human Geography, 29

· 7. Pred, A. 1973a. “The growth and development of systems of cities in advanced economies”. In Systems of cities and information flows: Two essays, Lund Studies in Geography, Ser. B Edited by: Pred, Allan R. and Törnqvist, Gunnar E. Human Geography 38

· 8. Pred, A. 1973b. Urban growth and the circulation of information: The United States system of cities, 1790–1840, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

· 9. Pred, A. 1973c. Urbanization, domestic planning problems and Swedish geographic research. Progress in Geography, 5: 1–76.

· 10. Pred, A. 1974a. An evaluation and summary of human geography research projects funded by Statens Rad för Samhällsforskning (Mimeographed for circulation among Swedish government agencies.)

· 11. Pred, A. 1974b. Major job-providing organizations and systems of cities, Association of American Geographers, Commission on College Geography. Resource Paper 27

· 12. Pred, A. 1977a. City-systems in advanced economies: Past growth, present processes, and future development options, London: Hutchinson University Library.

· 13. Pred, A. 1977b. Planning-related geographic research in Sweden. Economic Geography, April

· 14. Pred, A. 1980. Urban growth and city-systems in the United States, 1840–1860, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

· 15. Pred, A., ed. 1981. Space and time in geography: Essays dedicated to Torsten Hägerstrand, Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup.

· 16. Pred, A. 1985. Place, practice, and structure: Social and spatial transformation in southern Sweden 1750–1850, New York: Barnes and Noble.

· 17. Pred, A. 1986. Practice, place and structure: Social and spatial transformation in Southern Sweden, 1750–1850, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

· 18. Pred, A. 1990. Lost words and lost worlds: Modernity and everyday language in late-nineteenth-century Stockholm, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

· 19. Pred, A. 1990. Making histories and constructing human geographies: Essays on the local transformation of practice, power relations and consciousness, Boulder, CO: Westview.

· 20. Pred, A. 1995. Recognizing European modernities: A montage of the present, London: Routledge.

· 21. Pred, A. 2000. Even in Sweden: Racisms, racialized spaces, and the popular geographical imagination, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

· 22. Pred, A. 2004. The past is not dead: (F)acts, fictions and enduring racial stereotypes, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

· 23. Pred, A. and Gregory, D., eds. 2007. Spaces of terror and violence, London: Routledge.

· 24. Pred, A. and Watts, M. 1992. Reworking modernity: Capitalisms and symbolic discontent, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Watts, Michael, and Richard Walker. “Allan Richard Pred, 1936-2007: Reflections on a Life.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, no. 2 (2008): 487-493.

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Adalberto Vallega

After a courageous struggle, International Geographical Union (IGU) President Adalberto Vallega succumbed to cancer on November 22, 2006, in Liguria, Italy. He was seventy-two. Vallega carried out his duties as IGU President with his habitual thoroughness and vigor throughout rigorous courses of surgery and chemotherapy in the eighteen months preceding his death. He represented the IGU at the Festival International de Géographie in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges at the end of September and remained actively engaged in IGU affairs until a few days before his demise.

Prior to his election as IGU President at the Glasgow International Geographical Congress in August 2004, Vallega served as a Vice President of the IGU from 1996 to 2000 and as First Vice President from 2000 to 2004. He had earlier founded the IGU Study Group on Marine Geography that later became the IGU Commission on Marine Geography. During his 1996-2000 tenure as an IGU Vice President, Vallega promoted the “Oceans 21—Science for the Sustainable Use of Ocean and Coastal Zones Program” in cooperation with the Intergovernmental Oceanic Commission of the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a program designed to promote interdisciplinary research on deep-ocean and coastal management. Vallega was instrumental in founding the Villa Celimontana—Home of Geography office in Rome, which houses the IGU’s archives and provides a meeting place for geographers. Among numerous other responsibilities he undertook for IGU, Vallega was its representative at the UNESCO World Conference on Science in 1999.

As IGU President, Vallega’s priorities were the establishment of the Mediterranean Renaissance Program, a cooperative multinational research and instructional program focused on problems and questions specific to the Mediterranean and adjacent areas, and the IGU’s Cultures and Civilizations for Human Development (CCHD) initiative, which he conceived, designed, and launched. The goals of the CCHD initiative are 1) to adopt approaches and undertake actions for valuing cultural identities and encouraging inter-cultural and inter-civilizational cooperation, with a view toward pursuing the Millennium goals concerned with social concerns, and helping the operation of UNESCO conventions pertaining to intangible cultural heritage, cultural identities and manifestations of cultural diversity; and 2) to propose to the United Nations the proclamation of an international year on inter-cultural and inter-civilizational collaboration for human development.

Vallega was professor of urban and regional geography at the University of Genoa, Italy. His teaching encompassed human, urban, and regional geography, including coastal management and cultural geography. In addition to his role as professor, Vallega served as Director of the university’s Institute of Geographical Sciences and the Department of Urban, Regional and Landscape Planning. He was also head of the Faculty of Education. Vallega held leadership roles in several geographic organizations, serving as president of the Association of Italian Geographers (1983-85), a member of the executive committee member of the Italian Geographical Society (1985-97), and chairman of the Italian Committee for the International Geographical Union (IGU).

In 1992 Vallega was the scientific coordinator of the “International Conference on Ocean Management in Global Change,” held in Italy with the cooperation of the United Nations as part of the Celebrations for the Discovery of the Americas. In 1993 he designed and promoted the establishment of the International Centre for Coastal and Ocean Policy Study (ICCOPS), which was accredited to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, recognised as a non-governmental organisation of the United Nations Environment Programme/Mediterranean Action Plan (UNEP/MAP) and given observer status with regard to the Barcelona Convention. In 1998 he served as scientific coordinator of the “International Conference on Education and Training in Integrated Coastal Area Management” held in Italy to celebrate the 1998 International Year of the Ocean with the co-operation of UNESCO, IOC, the United Nations International Development Organisation (UNIDO), and (UNEP/MAP) and with the support of the European Commission.

Vallega was a respected member of many scientific organizations and institutions, including the Academia Europæa, and was a scientific consultant to the Italian navy. The University of Nantes recognized Vallega’s work on ocean and coastal zone management with its Laurea Honoris Causa in 2001. The University of Bucharest designated him Doctor Honoris Causa in March 2006. He was the author of more than twenty books, in Italian, French, English, and Spanish, and more than 300 journal articles and papers. Further details of his accomplishments and publications are available at www.vallega.it

Messages of condolence to Adalberto’s wife Bruna and the family may be addressed in care of the IGU Home of Geography in Rome ([email protected]). Donations in Adalberto’s memory may be made to the IGU Promotion and Solidarity Fund at the IGU Secretariat. The fund provides travel grants and research awards to young geographers and those from developing countries. Details regarding wire transfers to the Promotion and Solidarity Fund are available from the secretariat.

Adalberto Vallega (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(1): 26.

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Benjamin Moulton

Benjamin Moulton, longtime chair of the Department of Geography and Geology at Indiana State University died September 30, 2006 at age eighty-nine in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Professor Moulton graduated from Clark University in 1939, earned a master’s from Butler University in 1941 and a second master’s from Indiana University in 1945. He received a PhD from Indiana University in 1950. Before joining the faculty at Indiana State University in 1961, he taught at Butler University, University of Florida, Florida State University, Western Reserve University, Flint Community College, and Eastern Michigan University. He served as professor and chairman of the Department of Geography and Geology from 1964 to 1983. He founded the master’s programs in geography and geology and the PhD program in geography at Indiana State University. The graduate programs were founded with a focus on satellite remote sensing and computer spatial analysis and set the new graduate program apart from others. When he retired in 1983, thirty-five graduate students were in residence.

Professor Moulton published seventeen articles, reviewed more than forty books, taught graduate courses in geography at six colleges and universities, directed twelve field courses to Alaska and the northwestern United States, led annual field trips throughout Indiana, served on more than twenty-five Indiana State University committees, and directed in-service institutes for teachers of earth science. He worked with fourteen science fairs in Michigan and Indiana and was a judge in ten others. He was honored by the National Council for Geographic Education for his outstanding contributions to undergraduate and graduate education in geography and for his excellence in mentoring students. Upon his retirement, the Benjamin Moulton Award was established at Indiana State University for students demonstrating excellence in graduate academic prowess. Moulton remained an active participant in departmental functions throughout his emeritus years.

Benjamin Moulton (Necrology). 2006. AAG Newsletter 41(11): 22.

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Virgil Baker

Virgil Baker died January 13, 2006 in Port Angeles, Washington at the age of ninety-one. He was born April 24, 1914 in North Platte, Nebraska.

Baker earned his bachelor’s (1936) and master’s (1940) in geography from the University of Nebraska, and a PhD in geography (1954) from the University of Utah. Though he taught at Bowling Green, Westminster, and Fresno State College, Baker spent the bulk of his career teaching at Arizona State University (1954-61 and 1966-78).

He was trained as a physical geographer.

Virgil Baker (Necrology). 2006. AAG Newsletter 41(4): 11.

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William Withington

Longtime AAG member William A. Withington died January 5, 2006 at the age of eighty-one. He was born in Hawaii on February 17, 1924.

Withington obtained his PhD from Northwestern University in 1955. He accepted a faculty position at the University of Kentucky in 1955 where he spent thirty-four years, retiring in 1989. Withington’s research and teaching interests centered on urban and regional development in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Upon his retirement Bill and his wife Anne established the Withington Endowment in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky, the proceeds of which are utilized to underwrite graduate student travel to professional meetings and to conduct field research, especially in foreign locales.

Withington joined the Association of American Geographers in 1947.

William A. Withington (Necrology). 2007. AAG Newsletter 42(1): 27.

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