The 1992 Charles Homer Haskins Lecture

The Haskins lecturer for 1992 was Donald W. Meinig, the Maxwell Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. Professor Meinig was educated at Georgetown University and the University of Washington. In addition, he has taught at the University of Utah, St. Andrews University in Scotland, and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Professor Meinig has also been a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Adelaide in Australia (1958) and a visiting professor at St. Andrews University, Scotland (1973) and at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1974). He has been a guest lecturer at more than 60 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and China. He is the author of numerous articles, most of which deal with the historical and cultural geography of the American West.

Professor Meinig has also been interested in the study and appreciation of landscape as expressions of history and culture. He served as Chief Editorial Consultant to the National Geographic Society for the 17-part series of maps on “The Making of Americans” published at intervals, 1983-88, and Chief Geographic Consultant for the NGS Centennial Project, Historical Atlas of the United States (1988). Professor Meinig represents a field, geography, that is not always considered one of the humanities disciplines. In addition, he is the first geographer to be selected to deliver a Haskins lecture. The lecture itself demonstrates both the deeply humanistic underpinnings of Meinig’s own scholarship and the fundamentally humanistic perspective that informs his discipline. The lecture is replete with characteristic virtues of Meinig’s other writings. It is modest, describing an extraordinary life of learning, and it covers the author’s intellectual autobiography free of pedantry and full of wit.