Geography, Pedagogy, and Race: Schoolbooks and Ideology in the Antebellum United States.

This essay examines the media through which new ideas about race were disseminated in the antebellum period. Schoolbook authors, motivated both by pedagogical zeal and by the desire to sell more textbooks, began to organize geographical information according to categories such as 'Rivers,' 'Mountains,' and 'Races of Men,' rather than grouping such information under the heading of nations or regions. By encouraging students to conceptualize the world in new ways, these authors played a powerful role in predisposing Americans to accept new theories of race.