This report takes as its prompt John K. Wright’s 1925 ‘plea for the history of geography’ – an early call for an inclusive account of geographical thought and practice, embracing both professional and amateur ways of knowing. In reflecting on the extent to which contemporary histories of geography realize the scope of Wright’s ambition, the paper considers how external pressures, such as neoliberalism and academia’s audit culture, function to shape and constrain the writing of those histories. The paper argues for the value of ‘slow’ scholarship as an act of political resistance and as a sine qua non of nuanced and comprehensive historiography. The report concludes by examining how biographical and genealogical approaches to narrating geography’s histories have important implications for the decisions made about inclusion and exclusion, about what and who counts in geography.