EditorialAmerican geography , social science and the Cold War American geography , social science and the Cold War Trevor

This article argues that the history of geography should be written from an externalist perspective; that is, its history should be directly related to the larger historical context in which it is embedded. My example is American human geography during the early Cold War period. The argument is that as a result of America’s experience during the Second World War, the USA mobilised its academy to help it win the Cold War. America drew not only on the physical sciences, but also the social sciences. Given the success of the physical sciences in winning the Second World War (especially the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb), the model for Cold War social sciences were the physical sciences. Therefore, like them, American social sciences increasingly carried out large, multi disciplinary projects, which were generously funded by the state, and which used formal, mathematical techniques and models to analyse big numerical data sets using the cutting-edge computing machines of the day. Because of some powerful individual gatekeepers, human geography initially resisted the kind of change that other American social sciences experienced. By the mid-to-late 1950s it could resist no longer. As exemplified by the work of William Warntz, American human geography also became another Cold War social science. Introduction ‘Every discipline, it seems, has its Cold War dirty laundry to air’ (Isaac, 2007, p. 736). While particular aspects of geography – distance, relative location, national boundaries, topography and ground surface cover – were central to the history of the Cold War, for the most part the Cold War has not been central to writings about the history of geography. This was partly due to a particular approach that until the last 20 years dominated the writing of geography’s disciplinary history called internalism. Internal histories conceived academic knowledge as the product of only an interior disciplinary logic. It was only what went on within a discipline that mattered. Consequently, the Cold War (or, in fact, any war) made no difference to a discipline’s historical trajectory. In contrast, an externalist approach to disciplinary history, and which increasingly has become the form in which geography’s history is now told (and the one favoured in this article), suggests that we must pay attention to what happens outside the discipline – that is, to the historical and geographical context in which the discipline is embedded. Writing an externalist history of geography involves delineating the interconnections, links and causal chains between larger external events and movements and the discipline’s internal intellectual character and constitution: its objects of analysis, its conceptual frameworks, its theories, its methods, and its philosophical underpinnings. An externalist history shuns timeless internal disciplinary logics, emphasising instead the continuing historical and geographical processes that produce, at least at a particular period and place, a temporarily stable and distinctive version of the discipline. From an externalist perspective it is impossible to ignore the Cold War. For more than 40 years it defined global post-War history, and for some it has not yet ended. Here my focus is on its first and possibly most potent phase, the so-called ‘High’ Cold War period that began in 1947 with the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine. This Doctrine represented the US foreign policy, and was designed to inhibit Soviet expansion. It ended in Centenary article