Dr. Martin Lewis is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford, a member of the Breakthrough Institute.

He has numerous publications under his belt and also runs the fascinating website, geoccurrence.

Did I leave anything out, Dr. Lewis?

Oh, that sounds very accurate.

Let's start with the quote on your geoccurrence blog and tell us about the meaning it has

for you and the blog.

It says, history without geography, like a dead carcass, has neither life nor motion.

History, therefore, and geography, like two fires or meteors, which philosophers call Castor and Pollux,

have joined together, crown our reading with delight and profits.

If parted, threaten both with a certain shipwreck, and that's from the 17th century.

So I find that very poignant. Can you start us off there?

Yeah, well, thank you for bringing that to everyone's attention.

I had actually forgotten that I had that on my blog. It is one of my favorite quotes.

I like the flowery language, but I particularly like the way that it joins history and geography together.

I've always been fascinated in both subjects, and I really don't think you can do one without the other.

You can do geography with no history, but I don't think you can offer any explanations.

It just becomes a static vision without showing what's behind everything. And you

really can't do history at all without geography. You can pretend that a country exists on the

head of a pin, and sometimes historians do that, but I think you miss most of what important in doing

so. So time and space are two dimensions and geography is a little bit more concerned with space

and history obviously with time, but I sort of see them as one whole subject, really.

And let's get into that because I remember growing up, I think in many in schools, they often

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