The 4th edition Health and Medical Geography, by Michael Emch, Elisabeth Dowling Root, and Margaret Carrell is to appear soon (February, 2017), published by Guilford Press:

Departmental History

As some may have noted, this Monday’s OSU News mentioned a PhD student involved in Athletics: “Special teams safety Jarrod Barnes might be the only guy ever to play Ohio State football while earning his PhD. But he's also the only PhD student with an ambitious plan to turn the student-athlete standard on its head.”

This reminds us of a very significant name in the history of our department: Charles Clifford Huntington. He was an accomplished all-rounder. He played football on and off for the Buckeyes in the 1890s culminating in a final year of eligibility in 1903. He started his career as a faculty member here in 1909.

Charles Clifford Huntington (Jan. 12, 1873-Nov. 29, 1956) obtained a B.Sc. From Antioch in 1896, a Bachelor of Philosophy from OSU in 1902 and a M.A. from OSU in 1903.  He was then intermittently at Cornell where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1915.  His thesis, “A History of Banking and Currency in Ohio Before the Civil War,” was published by the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society in 1915. A copy is available here:

After receiving his Ph.D. degree, he became increasingly responsible for the geography courses being introduced among the offerings of the Department of Economics and Sociology.  At a meeting on 2/8/1922, “upon the recommendation of the President, the Department of Economics and Sociology was divided into the following departments, and the persons named were appointed heads of such departments:”

Department of Economics                                          M.B. Hammond

Department of Sociology                                            J.E. Haggerty

Department of Business Organization                                    C.O. Ruggles

Department of Economic and Social Geography                   C.C. Huntington

Department of Accounting                                         G.W. Eckelberry

(Record of Proceedings, BoT, 2/8/1922, page 79.)

He continued as the first Chairman of Geography when the Department was established [as a separate entity] in 1924.  He retired from the Chair in 1934, and from the University in 1943.  In 1957, his widow established a fund for an award to outstanding students in Geography. We award an undergraduate prize in his name.

Because of the marvelous work done nowadays by Google Books in digitizing older books, which might otherwise be forgotten, we are able to find quite a bit of Dr. Huntington’s work on line.
He wrote clear explanatory texts about the economy of the time. A photo of Dr. Huntington appears with the names of our past winners in the hallway outside the main office. He is much appreciated!

Focus on Graduates

Raju Das (PhD, 1996) worked with Kevin Cox, and wrote a dissertation entitled: Local Politics The State And Uneven Development: The Case of India. Raju is now an Associate Professor at York University (in Toronto) and has a forthcoming book entitled: Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Brill). This book is a critique of some of the influential radical theories of class, and presents an alternative approach to it.  This book critically discusses Analytical Marxist and Post-structuralist Marxist theories of class, and offers an alternative approach that is rooted in the ideas of Marx and Engels as well as Lenin and Trotsky.

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