Culture includes mentifacts like religion and language, artifacts like books and movies, and social facts such as gender identity. Culture helps create identity, meaning, and continuity in human society. In human geography, culture is not just limited to cultural geography. Therefore, cultural geography can be seen as a fundamental part of human geography. This is because, if we want to understand a human society, we naturally must first ask what ethnicity or ethnicities it includes, what languages are spoken, and what religions are practiced. Without cultural geography, it is largely impossible to interpret even data like population or income. So, you will see that in almost every geographical study, culture is key to understanding.US cultural geography grew out of Carl Sauer's rejection of Environmental Determinism (more on this below). Sauer (1889-1975), a geographer at the University of California-Berkeley, was the "godfather" of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography. His students, and their students, fanned out across the geography departments of the US, diffusing "Sauerian" cultural geography far and wide. Sauer advocated the study of cultural landscapes over time to understand the imprint societies have on the physical landscape. His most famous article on this topic was 'The Morphology of Landscape'.