Smith's Geography - 1845
8/13/24 (updated 12/15/25)Roswell C. Smith’s “Geography” is a 19th‑century school textbook that teaches world geography to children and general learners. It combines maps, descriptive text, and question‑and‑answer exercises to train students to “produce” geographic knowledge rather than just memorize lists.Main purposeSmith’s geography books were designed for use in schools, academies, and families, presenting geography as a systematic course of study rather than a travelogue. They introduce physical and political geography, including continents, countries, major cities, rivers, and mountains, along with brief notes on climate, resources, and peoples.The “productive system”The subtitle “Geography on the Productive System” refers to a pedagogical method in which students answer structured questions on maps and short texts so that they “produce” the lesson’s facts themselves. Lessons are often arranged as:Map questions (locating places, tracing rivers, etc.).Short, concise descriptions of each region.Review questions to reinforce memory and reasoning.This approach distinguishes the work from purely catechetical geographies by emphasizing observation, comparison, and active recall.Content and structureTypical editions cover:General definitions (globe, zones, latitude/longitude, oceans, continents).A progression from world overview to specific regions: the United States and its states, then other parts of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and “Oceanica.”Brief cultural and economic notes that reflect contemporary American and Eurocentric views, including value‑laden rankings of “states of society” and “forms of government,” and often problematic racial and civilizational hierarchies by modern standards.So, in short, Smith’s “Geography” is a mid‑19th‑century didactic geography textbook series, using maps, guided questions, and concise descriptions to teach basic physical and political geography with a strongly moralized, hierarchical view of world cultures characteristic of its period.Source: Perplexity.ai-- G. Ly
