Love this quote! Maps are powerful.

In conclusion, I will always applaud the goal of educating our children with an intent to share unbiased information. I think the author would agree that their intent was unbiased, but it's pretty clear to see today how biased the presentation was.  I also love the idea that you can learn a lot more from a map than from a written description. I picture is worth a thousand words.

Tables about free whites, free colored and sales.

In 1831, when this atlas was published, the Northwest passage had not yet been discovered. The ill-fated Franklin Expedition would only begin in 1845. 

@Minakshi 

 

Hard to know where to start with the racism and biases prevalent in this map. Probably the legend is best.

America, land of enlightened Christians and godless savages.

This table is about trying to make sense of (and categorize) race and religion in the world. It has the appearance of rationality, but the categories and their ordering demonstrates significant bias.

Hard to believe this map is called a "Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World." The author, William Woodbridge, was an esteemed educator, which tells you that the ideas expressed here were mainstream in their time.

Interesting that Italy and Greece are only Civilized, not Enlightened, like Europe, while Turkey is only Semi-Civilized. 

This is a startling and dangerous map.

This map of North America feels much more scientific than the prior one.

A map to give students some idea about animals in various locations. This is also racist in a subtle way, showing no pictures of Europeans or Americans of European descent, but the more savage people are shown interacting with animals.

The only human in North America is a native shooting an animal.

Back Bay not yet filled in!

Wisconsin and Minnesota are still territories. Missouri is a huge territory, as is Oregon. This is all well before the rest of the west was taken over from Mexico (and Spain i believe), in 1848.

Cool projection for this map. Use the rotate button on the right if you want to view it rotated.

Prussia and Germany look like a mish-mash here. This may be accurate.