Four Centuries of Special Geography


Book Description

Geography as an academic discipline dates back to the last few decades of the nineteenth century. However, during the preceding centuries a large body of English-language literature relevant to the field of special geography was published. Four Centuries of Special Geography lists all the works published before 1888 and includes descriptions of each entry and notes on later editions.




The Athenaeum


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School of Racism


Book Description

Exposing the history of racism in Canada’s classrooms Winner of the prestigious Clio-Quebec, Lionel-Groulx, and Canadian History of Education Association awards In School of Racism, Catherine Larochelle demonstrates how Quebec’s school system has, from its inception and for decades, taught and endorsed colonial domination and racism. This English translation of the award-winning book extends its crucial lesson to readers across the country, bridging English- and French-Canadian histories to deliver a better understanding of Canada’s past and present identity. Using postcolonial, antiracist, and feminist theories and methodologies, Larochelle examines late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century classroom materials used in Quebec’s public and private schools. Many of these textbooks, and others like them, made their way into curricula across Canada. Larochelle’s innovative analysis illuminates how textual and visual representations found in these archives constructed Indigenous, Black, Arab, and Asian peoples as “the Other” while reinforcing the collective identity of Quebec, and Canada more broadly, as white. Uncovering the origins and persistence of individual and systemic racism against people of colour, Larochelle shows how Otherness was presented to—and utilized by—young Canadians for almost a century. School of Racism names the ways in which Canada’s education system has supported and sustained ideologies of white supremacy—ideologies so deeply embedded that they still linger in school texts and programming today. The book offers new insights into how Canadian and Québécois concepts of nationalism and racism overlap, helps educators confront racism in their classrooms, and deepens urgent discussions about race and colonialism throughout Canada.







The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence


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The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence is a pioneering study of the export of books from Britain to early-independent Spanish America, which considers all phases of production, distribution, reading, and re-writing of British books in the region, and explores the role that these works played in the formation of national identities in the new countries. Analysing in particular the publishing house of Rudolph Ackermann, which dominated the export of British books in Spanish to the former colonies in the 1820s, it discusses the ways in which the printed form of these publications affected the knowledge conveyed by them. After a survey of the peculiar characteristics of print culture in early-independent Spanish America and the trends in the import of European books in the region, the author examines the operation of Ackermann's publishing enterprise. She shows how the collaborative nature of this enterprise, involving a number of Spanish American diplomats as sponsors and Spanish exiles as writers and translators, shaped the characteristics of its publications, and how the notion of 'useful knowledge' conveyed by them was deployed in the service of both commercial and educational concerns. The hitherto unexplored mechanisms of book import, distribution, wholesale and retailing in Spanish America in the 1820s are also analysed as is the way in which the significance of the knowledge transmitted by those books shifted in the course of their production and distribution. The author examines how the question-and-answer form of Ackermann's textbooks constrained both publishers and writers and oriented their readers' relation with the texts. She then looks at the various ways in which foreign knowledge was appropriated in the construction of individual, social, national, and continental identities; this is done through the study of a number of individual reading experiences and through the analysis of the editions and adaptations of Ackermann's textbooks during the nineteenth century.




The Athenæum


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