The discovery of this function must be employed as a
criterion for trying and sifting the facts taught and the methods
used.
The function of historical and geographical subject matter has
been stated; it is to enrich and liberate the more direct and
personal contacts of life by furnishing their context, their
background and outlook. While geography emphasizes the physical
side and history the social, these are only emphases in a common
topic, namely, the associated life of men. For this associated
life, with its experiments, its ways and means, its achievements
and failures, does not go on in the sky nor yet in a vacuum. It
takes place on the earth. This setting of nature does not bear
to social activities the relation that the scenery of a
theatrical performance bears to a dramatic representation; it
enters into the very make-up of the social happenings that form
history. Nature is the medium of social occurrences. It
furnishes original stimuli; it supplies obstacles and resources.
Civilization is the progressive mastery of its varied energies.
When this interdependence of the study of history, representing
the human emphasis, with the study of geography, representing the
natural, is ignored, history sinks to a listing of dates with an
appended inventory of events, labeled "important"; or else it
becomes a literary phantasy -- for in purely literary history the
natural environment is but stage scenery.
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