The Journal of Cultural Geography owes its establishment to the vision and activism of two individuals, Ray and Pat Browne. Beginning in the late 1960s, Ray, a professor of English at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), played a leading role in the movement to broaden the focus of American Studies from what he saw as its fixation on elite culture. He believed that cultural studies necessarily encompassed all lifeways, whether elite or vernacular. In 1967 he created the Journal of Popular Culture, but many in the academic community questioned his efforts to create this new subfield because popular music, literature, and film, for example, were not considered subjects of serious scholarship. Both the Popular Culture Association (PCA) and the American Culture Association (ACA) grew out of these developments, and sponsored geography sessions at their annual meetings. This helped to build a close connection between geography and cultural studies from the outset.

By the late 1970s geographers and others who had been involved with the PCA and ACA began to share ideas about establishing a journal that would promote awareness of cultural geography particularly outside the academic geography community. Ray and his wife Pat, the business manager of Popular Press at BGSU, asked Alvar Carlson, a geography professor also at BGSU, if he would serve as the editor of the Journal of Cultural Geography. In 1979 the journal was established, and the following year the first issue was produced. Alvar served as editor until his retirement in 1996 when the editorship passed to Lou Seig at Oklahoma State University (OSU). For more than two decades Popular Press at BGSU published the journal. However, in November of 2001 BGSU closed Popular Press, and management of the journal was transferred to the Geography Department at OSU that December. In anticipation of these changes JCG Press was created within the Department of Geography in order to manage publication of the journal. Since June of 2002, when Lou stepped down, Alyson Greiner has edited the journal.