David Lowenthal's Archipelago and Transatlantic Landscape will be featured

David Lowenthal's Archipelago and Transatlantic Landscape will be featured This editorial introduces the articles contained in a special issue by David Lowenthal. Begins with a biographical sketch of Hugh Clout. Trevor Barnes continues with an article on Lowenthal's concerns about geography and its history. Luca Muscarà provides additional biographical background in an article on the influence of Lowenthal's transatlantic relationship with the French geographer Jean Gottmann at the start of World War II. Kenneth R. In his paper, Olwig states that Lowenthal's influential father, lawyerThis editorial introduces the articles contained in a special issue by David Lowenthal. Begins with a biographical sketch of Hugh Clout. Trevor Barnes continues with an article on Lowenthal's concerns about geography and its history. Luca Muscarà provides additional biographical background in an article on the influence of Lowenthal's transatlantic relationship with the French geographer Jean Gottmann at the start of World War II. Kenneth R. In his paper, Olwig states that Lowenthal's influential father, lawyer and left-wing political activist Max Lowenthal, inspired Lowenthal's literary style and approach to reference. Lowenthal's conservation work is the subject of an essay by Laura Alice Watt. The one thread that ran through all of David's diverse interests was the islands; subject of Elizabeth Thomas-Hope's post. Sverker Sörlin concludes the essay at the beginning of Lowenthal's latest 2019 book, Search for the Unity of Knowledge, at the Stockholm Archipelago Lectures ? This special issue is "special" not only because it is devoted to a special topic, but also because it is dedicated to a scholar, the late David Lowenthal, who is very special. That's because it doesn't fit into a simple academic classification scheme, or its notions of landscape, perspective, heritage, conservation, islands and islands, or even geography. Also peculiar is his insistence on the importance of the "ordinary" and the fact that all people are ordinary on some basic level and that ordinary opinions should be respected. It is his "peculiar" nature as an independent "free" scholar that means he has made significant contributions to the transformation of the idea of ​​landscape, the founding of heritage studies, the development of island studies and also geography. . history and its humanistic twists. Readers of the introductory biographical sketch in this issue by Hugh Clout (2020, this issue) – “David Lowenthal, 1923–2018, renowned academic and public intellectual” – will note that although David is known as a geographer, he regularly teaches in various departments of geography, his Ph.D. it really is in history. In addition, during his time as a research fellow of the American Geographical Society (AGS) from 1956 to 1972, he also held: "attending professorships at nearly a dozen universities in North America, teaching in departments of geography, but also in schools of landscape architecture, political science, and psychology" (Clout 2020, this issue). In 1956-1957 he held a Fulbright Research Fellowship at the University College of the West Indies (UCWI) in Jamaica, where he taught history. Most notably, from 1972 to 1985 at University College London, he was a long-standing full-time professor of geography. Even then, he didn't spend much time with the department and its students, who were, Clout told us, more like anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, art historians, philosophers and planners, traveling around as visiting lecturers. For most of his career, David was not a full-fledged "academic" geographer in the sense of a college teacher and researcher. This explains why Clout added "public intellectual" to its title. To further complicate David's scholarship—as Trevor J. Barnes (2020, this issue) points out in his essay "David Lowenthal on Geography and Its Past"—the AGS is not a full-fledged academic institution in the same sense as the Association of American Geographers, which largely serves university academics and experts in the field of geography. The AGS was founded, like the Royal Geographical Society (UK), as a learned and educational society whose mission is to sponsor geographical exploration and the dissemination of geographical knowledge. By its very nature, AGS is the perfect home for the "public intellectual" and as such David has little need for the disciplinary procedures that life in a university department usually entails. However, it was in geography that David found different forms of institutional work and where he identified professionally, as Barnes shows. And landscape is arguably the main thread that runs through many of David's scholarly pursuits. But this is not only the scene of academics, but also of "ordinary" people. And it concerns not only the landscape of the cultural landscape, but also the landscape of nature, which has been destroyed and preserved as the environment of human society. And finally, it is also the landscape of the area, especially described on the islands. It is this broad vision of geography and landscape, as described by Barnes, that led him to play an important role in founding the Landscape Research Group (LRG), which publishes this journal. Together with the leading scholars and practitioners of his time, he established the LRG as a non-commercial organization that, while having scientific leadership, also cares, deals with and generally serves the interests of 'ordinary' people