Ellen Churchill Semple

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Ellen Churchill Semple (January 8, 1863, Louisville, Kentucky – May 8, 1932, West Palm Beach, Florida) was an American geographer. Ellen was the youngest of five children by Alexander Bonner Semple and Emerine Price. She is most closely associated with work in anthropogeography and environmentalism. In a series of books and papers she communicated certain aspects of the work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel to the Anglophone community. Standard disciplinary accounts often attribute to Semple a prevailing interest in environmental determinism, a theory that the physical environment determines culture. However, this attribution is questionable at best: much of Semple's research was in fact focused on a much milder form of geographical influences, or ways in which various geographies can potentially affect human society. This being said, the theory that she laid the groundwork for was in fact the basis for a great number of flawed studies looking to identify geographic features as the singular most important element of the human-environment relationship. Semple studied at Vassar College and the University of Leipzig. She taught at the University of Chicago and Clark University.

Ellen C. Semple Elementary School in Louisville is named after Semple.

[edit] References

"Semple, Ellen Churchill." Notable American Women. Vol. 2, 4th ed., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975
worldcat.org Accessed August 27, 2007