Fred Kurt Schaefer (July 7, 1904 – June 6, 1953) was a
geographer. He is considered one of the pioneers of
quantitative revolution
The quantitative revolution (QR) was a paradigm shift that sought to develop a more rigorous and systematic methodology for the discipline of geography. It came as a response to the inadequacy of regional geography to explain general spatial dynam ...
.
Life
Fred K. Schaefer was born in
Berlin,
Germany in the family of metal worker. He was involved in politics as a member of Social Democratic party and after the rise of
fascism he fled from Nazi Germany. He attended the
University of Berlin pursuing both undergraduate and postgraduate studies from 1928 through 1932. As an undergraduate he studied economics, economic geography, and political geography. As a graduate student he studied mathematics and population statistics.
Later in the
United States he became an inaugural member of the Department of Geography at
Iowa.
In 1947 he married Mary Strub, a native of
Iowa City
Iowa City, offically the City of Iowa City is a city in Johnson County, Iowa, United States. It is the home of the University of Iowa and county seat of Johnson County, at the center of the Iowa City Metropolitan Statistical Area. At the time ...
. He died of a
heart attack on June 6, 1953.
Works
He is well known for his article in flagship American periodical, Annals, Association of American Geographers called ''Exceptionalism in geography: A Methodological Examination'' It was both a repudiation of
Richard Hartshorne
Richard Hartshorne (December 12, 1899 – November 5, 1992) was a prominent American geographer, and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specialized in economic and political geography and the philosophy of geography. He is know ...
's position in United States, and a call for a scientific approach to geography based upon the search for geographical laws (the ultimate form of a scientific generalization). Schaefer died before his article even appeared in print, and so he was never able to elaborate his argument, nor defend himself from Hartshorne's subsequent critique. But the article became a rallying point for the younger generation of
economic geographers who were intent on reinventing the discipline as a science, or ''spatial science'' as it was later dubbed. The subject has now been revived by
economists under the umbrella of the ''new economic geography''.
Other sources
Schaefer's papers were donated to the
American Geographical Society by his wife, Mary Strub Schaefer. They include at least two unpublished manuscripts by Schaefer, “Political Geography,” and “The Nature of Geography.”.
[Bunge (1979), p. 132.]
References
External links
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Economic geographers
Economic geography
American geographers
German geographers
1904 births
1953 deaths
20th-century geographers
German emigrants to the United States
Deaths from coronary artery disease
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