Isaiah Bowman

D. (December 26, 1878, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada – January 6, 1950, Baltimore, Maryland), was an American geographer and President of the Johns Hopkins University, 1935–1948, controversial for his antisemitism and inaction in Jewish resettlement during WWII.

While at Yale, Bowman participated in three study expeditions to South America, in 1907, 1911 and 1913; on the third trip, he served as the leader of the group.

[3] Some of his more notable works include: When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Bowman placed the resources of the AGS at the government's service, and he was asked to "gather and prepare data" to assist with a future peace conference once the fighting stopped.

Bowman thus played a major role in determining distribution of land areas and national borders, especially in the Balkans, as part of the Paris Peace Conference.

[3] Bowman directed the American Geographical Society until 1935, when he was named the fifth president of the Johns Hopkins University, succeeding Joseph Sweetman Ames.

Continuing his government service, Bowman became a State Department adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War, spending part of each week in Washington, DC, and leaving the running of the university in the hands of Provost P. Stewart Macaulay.

This fuze aided greatly in repelling Japanese kamikaze attacks late in the war, and in the Ardennes region of Europe during the 1944 Battle of the Bulge.

He was briefly successful, but the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography was never able to attract a high-profile scholar to give it the prestige it needed.

[12] In 1941 he was awarded the British Royal Geographical Society's Patron's Medal for his travels in South America and his services to Geography.

[2] Archival research of private letters reveals Bowman intensely disliked the only tenured geography professor at Harvard, Derwent S. Whittlesey, for his scholarship and homosexuality.