Marvin W. Mikesell, 1929–2017

Marvin W. Mikesell occupies a prominent position in the history of mid-to-late twentieth-century U.S. cultural geography. One of the most distinguished doctoral students of Carl Sauer at Berkeley, Mikesell, early in his career, joined with Philip Wagner in developing a book that defined the field for a generation (Readings in Cultural Geography; Wagner and Mikesell 1962). He went on to produce a rich body of scholarly work on issues lying at the interface between culture and environment and later between culture and politics. He was a beneficiary and prime representative of the major new emphasis in U.S. higher education on foreign area studies following World War II, and he took a leading role in urging geographers to modernize and redouble their historic commitment to global ecology and its implications for society. During his term as president of the Association of American Geographers (1975–1976), he put cultural geography in the spotlight and devoted his presidential address to a searching assessment of “tradition and innovation” in the subdiscipline (Mikesell 1977). A somewhat reserved man in person, he was an inspiring lecturer, exposing generations of University of Chicago students to the fundamentals of cultural geography, to questions of nature and culture, to the physical and cultural character of North Africa and the Middle East, and to issues lying at the intersection of culture, ethnicity, and nationalism. During a teaching career spanning close to six decades, he also served as principal advisor to thirty-seven master’s and seventeen doctoral students, a number of whom went on to carve out significant careers as professional geographers in their own right.

Marvin W. Mikesell died unexpectedly of heart failure on the morning of 26 April 2017, at the University of Chicago Hospital in Hyde Park. He was eighty-eight. At the time of his death he was teaching a seminar on problems in the human geography of the Middle East. His remarkably long career resulted, in the end, from a refusal to give up what he enjoyed most: going to his office, reviewing his day’s to-do list, teaching his classes, crafting his professional correspondence, ruminating over the composition of letters of recommendation, seeing students, and, after the last one had left, dipping into newly delivered geographical journals. He was a thoughtful, engaging teacher, colleague, and friend right up until the end.

The Early Years

The roots of Marvin Wray Mikesell’s family reach back to the old German farming settlements of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, established in the eighteenth century. Successive moves over the generations led one branch of the family from farm to farm through western Pennsylvania and out to eastern Kansas and central Missouri, before finally becoming, in the early twentieth century, urban in Kansas City, Missouri. Son of an electrician, Marvin Mikesell was born there to Loy George and Clara Wade Mikesell on 16 June 1929. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1934, and for most of his youth, Wray, as he was known in his school days, lived with his parents and a brother, seven years older, in a succession of modest bungalows on the city’s southwest side. Toward the end of World War II his brother, a bomber pilot, was shot down and killed over Merseburg, Germany, a loss that deeply affected Marvin.

Graduating from Inglewood High School in 1947, he entered Pepperdine College, close to home, where geography and French soon tugged at his interest. After two years he transferred to UCLA where he obtained his BA degree in January 1952, with a major in geography. Here, taking a couple of speech classes, he also developed a talent for debating and went on to win several statewide competitions, honing an intellectual skill he would deploy consistently in later life. He continued at UCLA for a master’s degree, and he wrote a 184-page thesis on the historical geography of Santa Barbara, which led to his first pair of professional publications as a graduate student—rather notable for those days (Mikesell 1954, 1955a). This confirmed his desire to pursue an academic career, and, moving up the state’s pyramid of educational prestige as it was then, he set his sights on studying under arguably the most celebrated geographer of the day, and he was admitted for doctoral study to the University of California at Berkeley.

By the early 1950s, Carl Ortwin Sauer was a well-established force of nature in U.S. cultural and historical geography, having trained a retinue of precocious students who then filled the cultural teaching slots of geography departments around the country. Mikesell had to work to be accepted into this elite environment, and he did so by molding himself as closely as any student had to the inward interests and outward contours of his mentor. Most important, Mikesell espoused Sauer’s fascination with non-Anglo cultural settings and absorbed his reflexive commitment to intensive fieldwork. Superficially, too, he adopted Sauer’s pipe-smoking habit as the epitome of academic behavioral sophistication. He warmed quickly to the “diffusionist” framework of cultural evolution propounded in Sauer’s recently published Bowman Lectures on global agricultural origins and dispersals, and he successfully converted a seminar paper on the spread of the dromedary into an academic publication (Mikesell 1955b), which became itself a well-cited contribution to the literature.

Even though Mikesell entered the Berkeley program in 1953 with a prior master’s degree and a substantial base of geographical study, he packed into his first two years a full load of graduate courses, seventeen in all, sprawling across the spectrum of the discipline (including a seminar in physical geography). In later decades, he would recall how magical the cultural seminars with Sauer were, many held in his home, as much for the competition among students to impress the master as for his ex cathedra reflections. Following his mentor’s lead, Mikesell chose a distinct field of foreign-area study—in his case, Spanish, or northern, Morocco—where he could add new perspectives on some of the larger questions in cultural geography through personal immersion in local societies on the ground. Morocco made abundant sense: For an electrician’s kid from southwest Los Angeles it was indeed foreign; his command of French would give him access to the country’s official literature and professional contacts, and the region’s colonial past with its Berber heritage connected it timelessly with Iberia and exposed him to the more isolated reaches of mountain peoples. The choice sat well with Sauer. Mikesell would study the region’s rural settlement, environmental history, and cultural change.

Supported by a robust Ford Foundation grant, Mikesell spent two years (1955–1957) touring northern Morocco from end to end in a gray Volkswagen beetle. He was often anxious that the arbitrary nature of travel restrictions in force at the time, along with gasoline rationing and periodic petty extortion, would interfere with his work. The fieldwork covered several thousand miles in all, by car, on muleback, and on foot, examining Berber settlements and the zuccos or tribal markets and traversing the Atlas and Rif Mountains and the Great Western Erg or Sand Sea, fortified villages, and many Saharan oases. He also succeeded in visiting some of the holy cities where, until shortly before, no non-Muslims had been permitted entry. At one point, Sauer personally dropped in on Marvin’s fieldwork, and the aspiring student had the benefit of seeing his Berber subjects and landscapes through his advisor’s inimitable eyes. As Mikesell acknowledged in the preface to the monograph that resulted from the dissertation, he chose not to stress areas of European influence and urbanization but rather the rural areas “where the most important goals are independence and self-sufficiency” (Mikesell 1961, Preface). What is most striking, to read the study more than a half-century later, is the absence of serious reflection on the political collapse of the Spanish Protectorate of northern Morocco and the declaration of national Moroccan independence—events taking place during Mikesell’s fieldwork that were also concurrent with the regional reverberations rippling out from the international Suez Canal crisis. Yet the larger winds of geopolitical change were not the object of Mikesell’s study, and despite the administrative inconveniences thrown up by mostly external events, he kept his focus on the vernacular ways of life he chose to examine.

It is not every doctoral candidate, even in geography, who goes off for fieldwork in far-off climes single and returns, without prior intent, married. During his second year of research Mikesell fell sick in the mountains and returned to Tangier to recuperate. It was while there, at a 1956 Christmas party at the U.S. legation, that Marvin first met Reine-Marie de France, a French-born linguist from Lille studying in Spain, whose travel with friends around Morocco was temporarily restricted, and before long a romance blossomed. They married in Tangier, on 1 April 1957. When Mikesell’s two-year period of research came to an end, they traveled to California, where Mikesell returned to Berkeley to begin writing his dissertation.

Once back at home base, the dissertation slowly took shape over the following year, although it would not be submitted for approval until June 1959. Dissertation writing accelerated an intensive period of intellectual maturation, during which Mikesell also added to his record of publications an article for the prestigious Geographical Review, the first of many, this one on the tribal markets of Morocco and their role in the region’s urban retardation (Mikesell 1958). Thus, while still a graduate student, Mikesell could lay claim to four full-length and significant articles in academic journals, including one in anthropology—which itself was quickly reprinted in a French journal (Mikesell 1955b)—and a dissertation that was, by custom at Berkeley, destined to appear as a monograph in the University of California Publications in Geography series, issued by the University Press (Mikesell 1961). When the University of Chicago Department of Geography in 1958 came looking for an additional cultural geographer (Philip L. Wagner, an earlier Sauer student was already at Chicago), the inquiry essentially shone a light on Mikesell, and he was hired there, still ABD, as an instructor.

The Golden Years, 1958–1977

Following a common academic pattern at the time, Mikesell plunged into teaching at Chicago while completing his writing and by the end of his first year submitted the dissertation to Berkeley in June 1959. With degree in hand, he was immediately promoted to assistant professor—setting him up for a twenty-year period that, in many respects, was the most productive and consequential of his career. His rise to prominence was remarkably rapid. In his first two years as an assistant professor, in addition to turning his doctoral study into a published monograph, he wrote an insightful piece on deforestation in northern Morocco for Science (Mikesell 1960b), and he produced a slew of shorter articles in the Geographical Review and other outlets that drew on his Moroccan fieldwork. He also ventured beyond the particularities of his PhD research, commenting in print on economic development in nonindustrial societies (Mikesell 1959) and writing a significant article for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers on frontier history (Mikesell 1960a). These later works reflect Mikesell’s lifelong interest in reaching beyond case studies to examine the geographical implications for culture and society of large historical processes.

At that time, the University of Chicago Press was pioneering a new type of scholarly book publishing format, the academic “reader,” a collection of seminal essays drawn from the specialist literature of a discipline with commentaries, for which it sought suitable editors among established and up-and-coming members of the university’s faculty. Buoyed by the immediate success of Readings in Urban Geography (1959), edited by departmental colleague Harold Mayer, the Press turned to Philip Wagner and Marvin Mikesell for a similar overview of concepts and case studies in cultural geography (Wagner and Mikesell 1962). Wagner and Mikesell scoured hundreds of journals from around the world, selected thirty-five articles for the book, translated by themselves those that were written in foreign languages, organized the articles into five sections (on culture, culture area, cultural landscape, cultural history, and cultural ecology), and wrote substantial introductions to each section. The essays introducing the sections were remarkable scholarly contributions in themselves—knitting together, and drawing larger lessons from, the chapters that followed.

Readings in Cultural Geography staked out an impressive terrain for the subdiscipline ranging from material to nonmaterial elements of culture, from recent developments to the distant past and from the Western to the non-Western world. It symbolized a distinctly nonparochial cultural geography that was rooted in empirically grounded field studies focused on questions of cultural ecology, cultural diffusion, and the relationship between culture and place. The book had a significant scholarly impact, but its pedagogic impact was even greater; it was adopted as a core text in countless cultural geography classes in North America and beyond, just as the Press had hoped.

Sustained by the successes of his early scholarly forays—and committed to the approaches to cultural geography highlighted in his Readings volume—Mikesell headed back into the field in 1962 and 1963, working in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, and in Turkey the following year. The earlier of these two bouts of new fieldwork led to a particularly probing piece on the deforestation of Mount Lebanon (Mikesell 1969b), but already by the mid-1960s Mikesell found himself increasingly drawn to synthetic scholarly commentaries, writing pieces on such matters as the geography discipline’s relationship to anthropology, the concept of landscape, and the nature of geography as a formal intellectual field of inquiry (Mikesell 1967, 1968, 1969a).

Mikesell’s influence as a graduate advisor grew during the 1960s as well. His first doctoral student, Douglas McManis, after a career at Columbia Teachers College in New York, went on to edit the Geographical Review for seventeen years. By the end of the 1960s, a dozen master’s students had completed their degrees under Mikesell’s direction. Several proceeded to doctoral degrees under his tutelage in the early 1970s, including Sarah Myers, who also served a number of years as editor of the Geographical Review. Mikesell’s pedagogic influence extended beyond the University of Chicago as well. He had visiting appointments at Berkeley in 1961 and at the University of Washington in 1962. Anne Buttimer, who developed into one of the most distinguished humanistic geographers of her generation, took one of Mikesell’s classes during his Washington visit at a time when she was questioning whether geography was the right path for her to pursue. She always gave Mikesell credit for inspiring her to stay the course.

By the end of the 1960s—just eleven years beyond graduate school—Mikesell was among the best known names in U.S. cultural geography circles. The invitations and accolades he received during that decade are a testament to his rapid rise. As a third-year assistant professor (in 1962) he was asked to serve as Assistant Editor of the Annals; a few years later he became editor of the AAG’s Monograph series. By the middle of the 1960s, Mikesell was regularly receiving invitations to lecture at major North American universities. In 1969 the American Geographical Society bestowed on Mikesell one of its prestigious Honorary Fellow designations for his “sensitive articulation of both science and humanism in cultural geography.” The latter spoke to one of Mikesell’s defining attributes: his ability to render complex ideas in clear, accessible prose.

As the decade turned, Mikesell found himself on the cusp of the most professionally active period of his career. On the scholarly front, he put together (with Ian Manners) a high-profile volume calling on geographers to address, and help shape, growing public interest in environmental issues (Manners and Mikesell 1974). As for professional service, he was invited to join several editorial boards, he served on the AAG’s Commission on College Geography, and he was named the organization’s official delegate to UNESCO. At the University of Chicago, Mikesell assumed the position of chair of the Department of Geography from 1969 to 1974, simultaneously sitting on the Executive Committee of the University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and playing a very active role on the Council of the University Senate and its Executive Committee.

Capping this enormously active period, Mikesell was elected to the position of AAG National Councilor in 1972 and then Vice President in 1974, which, according to statute, led to his serving as AAG President in 1975 and 1976. A mere seventeen years out of graduate school, Mikesell remains to this day one of the youngest career geographers to have assumed that position. One of the most significant actions he took as president was to steer the association through the challenges posed by the rise of political activism in the academy, and he succeeded in ensuring that the national organization remained committed to the pursuit of scientific investigation and scholarship without regard to political partisanship.

Throughout this period of intense professional and scholarly engagement, Mikesell’s commitment to his classes and his students remained strong. In his lectures he had an extraordinary ability to articulate the larger conceptual significance of circumstances found in individual cases. He was also committed to reaching beyond the usual linguistically constrained Anglo-American canon; one of his regular course offerings was titled “Readings in the Geographical Literature in French.” Outside the classroom, he was a private person, but his door was always open. He had strong opinions, but he dealt with his students in a fundamentally caring, compassionate way, and he was an incredibly responsive, reliable advisor. No thesis chapter or other piece of writing sat on his desk very long, and the careful, thoughtful comments he provided were invariably helpful. Decades later, his students would reminisce about his flexible, supportive mentorship (he was open to students working on almost any topic that interested them) but also about his insistence on sound thinking, careful analysis, and good writing. During the period from 1970 to 1977, seven master’s students and ten doctoral students completed their degrees under his supervision—the most productive seven-year period of his career.

The Middle Years, 1977–1987

Mikesell completed his term as AAG Past President in the summer of 1977, and he sometimes described the moment as being analogous to falling off a cliff. What he meant was that he experienced a rapid shift from a period of high professional visibility and activity to one that was distinctly more quiescent and less overtly prominent. The reasons for this shift are complex, but they likely reflect a combination of circumstances: the sudden end of his most visible professional commitments in the late 1970s, the rise of a new cultural geography that represented a significant departure from the kind of work he had long championed, a larger shift in human geography away from more field-oriented studies to ones that favored extensive (in his view armchair) theorizing, and Mikesell’s own rather reserved nature, which kept him from aggressively pursuing alternative professional platforms.

Whatever the catalysts, shortly after his AAG presidency ended, Mikesell came to think of himself as occupying a position that lay somewhat outside the professional mainstream—including in the scholarly realm. He was interested in certain strands of work emerging in cultural geography, but he was not about to abandon the ideas and approaches that defined his early career. Indeed, he was decidedly not the kind of person who was susceptible to influence by the latest intellectual fad du jour. As such, during the 1980s he stood mostly aside from the strong theoretical currents affecting cultural geography and the wider discipline. He was not so much antitheory; rather, he was impatient with what he saw as the narrow Anglo-American presentist preoccupations of much of the theory of the period.

Mikesell also resisted the turn toward what he viewed as increasingly arcane, inaccessible prose in the writings of human geographers—seeing in it an abdication of a responsibility to reach beyond narrow academic cliques. With a twinkle in his eye, he would tell you about the time he won an informal contest put together by a group of AAG stalwarts to take the sentence “Minnesota barns have roofs” and render it in abstruse academese. Here was his version (minus the footnote that dealt with the problem of objectification):

During a recent empirical investigation of the functional components of spatial organization in an a priori politically-defined sample frame (Minnesota), it was observed that rural occupational units devoted to storage form a conspicuous feature of material infrastructure and that the seasonal stress conditions of the co-extensive environment requires that the design of such units include provision for horizontal, as well as vertical, closure.

As for Mikesell’s own scholarly contributions in the years immediately following his major AAG involvements, he received and responded to a few invitations to comment on the state of the discipline (Mikesell 1979, 1981a) and he wrote introductory essays for projects of a geographical nature (e.g., Mikesell 1981b). In a more substantive vein, his interests began to veer away from the culture–environment interface to what he termed “cultural conflict.” By this he meant the tensions that result from the disconnect between the political organization of space and more complicated patterns of ethnonational identity.

Mikesell’s interest in such matters was likely spurred by a 1981 visiting position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and associated fieldwork in Israel and the West Bank. He coined the term “political–cultural geography” to reflect what he saw as an important meeting point between two of geography’s major subfields. In 1983 he published an article in the Journal of Geography, “The Myth of the Nation-State,” which to this day remains one of the most accessible, yet perspicacious, overviews of what he sometimes called the “culture-nationality” problem (Mikesell 1983; see also Mikesell 1986a). Mikesell was certainly not the only human geographer interested in the challenges facing ethnonational minorities, but he helped to build interest in the issue across the discipline.

By the latter portion of what we are calling Mikesell’s middle period, he had cut back significantly on travel and he was primarily focused on his work at the University of Chicago. He took on another stint as chair of the Department of Geography from 1984 to 1986, and he served on the university’s Board of Continuing Education. His greatest passion was teaching, however. Building on his newfound interest in questions of culture and nationality, he launched a new class on the topic. He also began attracting graduate students with interests lying at the intersection of political and cultural geography, and his last three doctoral students all worked on issues pertaining to cultural conflict. One of them (the second author of this piece) joined Mikesell in writing the last substantive scholarly article of his career: an exposition of a framework for the comparative study of minority group relations that was published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Mikesell and Murphy 1991).

Rather than starting from a presumption that aggrieved ethnonational minorities share cultural, socioeconomic, or structural characteristics—an empirically problematic proposition—Mikesell and Murphy took the position that comparative analysis should start from the one thing these groups all share in common: opposition to the dominant political-territorial order. From that starting point, the key issue becomes how different groups perceive their circumstances in relation to a modern state system rooted in the nation-state idea—a perception that Mikesell captured in a set of diagnostic terms he developed (recognition, access, participation, separation, autonomy, independence). The resulting article acquired the distinction of being one of Mikesell’s most cited publications, but he derived particular satisfaction from the fact that it became widely used in geography courses across the United States and beyond.

At the end of Mikesell’s middle period, he had come to assume in the discipline of geography at large something of the role of an elder statesman. At his home institution, however, geography’s position at the University of Chicago was being threatened in a way that would severely alter the trajectory of his career. Ironically, that, in turn, coincided with invitations to contribute to studies of the discipline’s history. He wrote the North American chapter for a survey of post–World War II geographical thought and practice (Mikesell 1984), a look back at the first year of the Geographical Review (Mikesell 1986c), and a fascinating commentary on his graduate advisor, Carl Sauer (Mikesell 1986b), which, despite his obvious respect for the man, raised some questions about the preoccupation of some geographers with what he called Sauerology.

A Redirected Life, 1987–2017

The last distinct phase of Marvin Mikesell’s professional life was the longest in years, but it can only be described as one of the most trying that he could have imagined, as the historic emphasis of the University of Chicago on graduate training brought budgetary pressures that were felt particularly in some small departments and graduate programs. Mikesell, conscripted to a second term as departmental chair in 1984, found himself defending the discipline as various programs became targets for elimination. Although some were indeed terminated, sufficient support for geography around the university existed that the discipline survived in reduced form, reconstituted in the Social Sciences Division in 1987 as a “Committee on Geographical Studies.” Somewhat later, the Committee lost its graduate training function, but geography is still a major available to students in the undergraduate college (now the Committee on Geographical Sciences).

Under these changed circumstances, Mikesell remade himself as an undergraduate teacher, illustrated most notably in his introductory course and his open office door. He undertook to craft a beginning course in geographical study by combining his keen knowledge of the history of U.S. geography as a discipline with a highly practical sense of what undergraduates new to the field needed to develop as young geographers. After early sessions in which he reviewed the key conceptual developments that had animated the discipline over its century of university development, he had each student pick a leading international geographical journal to characterize and critically review over at least a year’s worth of its full contents. Then he asked students to select a monograph among the nearly 250 volumes in the University of Chicago Geography Research Papers series and critically place it in a proper interdisciplinary and international context as a product of the period in which it was published. This was cleverly effective in not only giving majors an inkling of, and pride in, the impressive history of geography at Chicago within the wider discipline over the longer term but also challenging them to push their own limits at their level. As a final project, students were to choose a special theme in geography that interested them and draw together the relevant literature, mostly in the discipline but including overlapping ideas from neighboring fields. By giving wide latitude in exploring geographical writing, Mikesell encouraged the students to discover for themselves the robust and distinctive intellectual enterprise that is geography. Not a few individuals who passed through Mikesell’s introductory class displayed by their senior year a sort of crusader-like enthusiasm for defending their choice of major and eagerness to see where it might lead beyond their college degree.

The other circumstance that worked well was Mikesell’s open-door policy. His office fronted a busy corridor, but his door remained mostly open, and it was plain to passersby how often students could be seen sitting across from him at his desk, quietly engaged in rapt conversation. In a period when the University of Chicago began shifting its emphasis from overwhelmingly graduate education to a more normal university profile with a rapidly growing undergraduate quotient—and with it an increased intermediation of teaching assistants and preceptors—it was not lost on Mikesell’s students that they had easy access to this available full professor. Even as he grew visibly old, still teaching full-time in his eighty-eighth year, his knowledge and quiet authority drew respect and an audience from those who recognized their value.

Mikesell’s later years were also marked professionally by continued recognition of his long-term contributions to the discipline he loved. In 1995 the AAG presented Mikesell with its top academic Honors Award, “for clarity of insights into the work of geographers, influential research in culture and cultural-political geography, excellence in teaching at the University of Chicago, and long and exemplary service to the discipline.” A few years later, Mikesell was presented with another testimonial to his influence—a scholarly Festschrift. Entitled Cultural Encounters with the Environment, it was no grab-bag of adulatory reminiscences by former students but a serious effort to compose a book of original chapters on articulated themes in human geography and its interface with the physical world designed also to have teaching value (Murphy and Johnson 2000). Organized around the metaconcepts of constructing cultural spaces, remaking natural environments, and transforming space into place, the collection brought together past and continuing colleagues, former doctoral recipients under Mikesell’s guidance, and three long-admired leaders in U.S. geography with strong ties to the honoree (Philip Wagner, Ann Buttimer, and David Lowenthal). The breadth of subject matter, weaving together commanding themes with diverse case study detail, suitably mirrors Mikesell’s own panoptic view of cultural geography. Few among those who attended the celebratory dinner at which the Festschrift was presented to Mikesell will forget the amazingly precise recall he displayed of his students over the decades, as if they had just left his office yesterday.

Mikesell in Retrospect

How best to remember this scholar and teacher across the shifting sands of time and experience? He might be among the last of a rare and dying breed—that of the one-job geographers, blessed with the stability to mature in continuous employment at a single institution. Marvin Mikesell was not a sentimentalist in the ordinary sense. He was gentle in manner but sharp, practical, and economical in purpose. He cared deeply about expression, and he crafted his writing with a touch of classical formality and gravitas. He believed in the power of understated example, and he consistently favored substance over spectacle. He reserved clear admiration for his doctoral advisor but not at the cost of suspending criticism, distancing himself from those he labeled Sauerologists. He sought to teach in the mold of his mentor while rejecting the view that his own students were third-generation Sauerians, yet he claimed no kudos as the progenitor of an independent school of thought. Did his students display a Mikesellian character? He would have said this was the wrong question; they became their own thinkers, and quite a few became prominent in geographical centers of training on their own merit, and that was enough. As the twentieth century wound down, Mikesell remained undemonstratively “old-school” during an era of growing competition to display abstract theorizing, often bereft of field experience. He kept close to the observable facts that underlay the geographical patterns he examined, and he believed that scholars should write well within and not at the margins of their own grasp of what they claimed to study. His preferred portrait, included here, conveys intellect, wry humor, and perhaps a touch of reserve.

Marvin W. Mikesell is survived by his wife of sixty years, Reine Mikesell, who has donated his professional papers to the archives of the University of Chicago Library Special Collections.

After listening to papers delivered in a memorial session organized in Mikesell’s honor at the AAG meetings in New Orleans, a former Chicago undergraduate who studied under Mikesell (and who went on to doctoral work in geography elsewhere) wrote a blog post about the vivid memories of Mikesell the presentations evoked for him (Brandt 2018). They centered on Mikesell’s realism and curiosity (“studying real people in the real world”); his integration of culture, history, politics, society, and environment within the framework of landscape; his support of field experience; and his sheer capacity for verbal clarity—as well as his perennial advice always to find a short title for best effect. Master of the succinct phrase, and circumventing swathes of turgid literature defining the profundity of the discipline, the purpose of geography for Mikesell was, and is, quite simply, to account for “the why of where.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael P. Conzen

MICHAEL P. CONZEN is a Professor of Geography in the Committee on Geographical Sciences at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. E-mail: [email protected]. A longtime colleague of Marvin Mikesell in Chicago, his research interests include the cultural and historical geography of the United States, comparative urban morphology, and the history of cartography.

Alexander B. Murphy

ALEXANDER B. MURPHY is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. E-mail: [email protected]. A former student of Marvin Mikesell, his research interests include the relationship between political-territorial arrangements and patterns of ethnonational identity.