William Morris Davis

Davis initially worked in Córdoba, Argentina as a meteorologist for three years and after working as an assistant to Nathaniel Shaler, he became an instructor in geology at Harvard, in 1879. The same year he married Ellen B. Warner from Springfield, Massachusetts. While Davis never completed his PhD, he was appointed to his first full professorship in 1890 and remained in academia and teaching throughout his life.

Davis was a tenacious, as well as keen observer of nature, a master of logical deduction, and a brilliant synthesizer of disparate observations and ideas.[4] From his own field observations and studies made by the original nineteenth-century surveyors of the western United States, he devised his most influential scientific contribution:the "geographical cycle". His theory first defined in his 1889 article, The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania,[1] which was a model of how rivers erode uplifted land to base level, was inspired by the work of Erasmus and Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and it had a strong evolutionary flavor. His cycle of erosion suggests that (larger) rivers have three main stages of development, generally divided into youthful, mature and old-age stages.[5] Each stage has distinct landforms and other properties associated with them, which can occur along the length of a river's upper, middle, and lower course.

Though the cycle of erosion was a crucial early contribution to the development of geomorphology, many of Davis' theories regarding landscape evolution, sometimes termed 'Davisian geomorphology', were heavily criticized by later geomorphologists. When Davis retired from Harvard in 1911, the study of landscape evolution was nearly monopolized by his theories. It was characteristic of Davis to react violently and disdainfully to criticism, particularly to the German criticism in the 1920s headed by Walther Penck; it was also his characteristic to choose to attack the most vulnerable points of that criticism.[6] Since that time, with a less dogmatic approach and greater knowledge, some authors note that Penck's and Davis' ideas have become more compatible and even complementary since the advent of modern tectonic theory. They claim that Davis' ideas are more applicable near active margins where tectonics are "cataclysmic", and Penck's ideas fit better in models of passive margins and continental platforms.[7]

He was a founder of the Association of American Geographers in 1904, and heavily involved with the National Geographic Society in its early years, writing a number of articles for the magazine. Davis retired from Harvard in 1911. He served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1911.[8][9] He was awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1919.[10]

His textbook, Elementary Physical Geography (1902), includes a chapter entitled "The Distribution of Plants, Animals, and Man," in which Davis details how the physical geography of landscapes influences "the progress of man from the savage toward the civilized state." Davis concludes that "the leading nations of [the European] race are the most advanced peoples in the world" and "few nations among [black, brown, and red] races have made important advances towards civilization."[11] This textbook chapter exemplifies how Davis promulgated theories of scientific racism, and was likely influenced by mentor and colleague Nathaniel Shaler, who published similar views on the subject. Davis borrowed from Darwinian biological concepts and applied these to physical landscapes and climates in a type of Social Darwinistic thought termed "environmental determinism". His work influenced geographer and writer Elsworth Huntington, a student of Davis at Harvard, who attempted to explain differences in human culture by climate and geography, for example comparing communities of British descent in Canada and the Bahamas and suggesting that Anglo Bahamians are slower because of climate and proximity to black people.[3]