THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE OF FACTS AND VALUES IN THE NEW WESTERN HISTORY

The relations between facts and values in the writing of historical ge ography need to be mutual and reinforcing. I explore this point by exa mining the work of a group of historians who have foregrounded the rel ations between facts and values. These New Western Historians take up themes such as social justice, regionalism, and environmentalism that have been central to the concerns of historical geographers, but they are more explicit than many historical geographers about both the poli tical motivations behind the questions they ask and their choice sf su bjects to study. I consider the work of two historians, William Cronon and Donald Worster, who have made environmentalism the core of their historical writing, and two others, Richard White and Patricia Limeric k, for whom questions of social justice :inform historical interpretat ion. I conclude by exploring how attention to the interplay between fa cts and values might rekindle the utopian dimension of explicitly poli tical historical geographies.