Title page
(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
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School geography books such as this one illustrate how Europeans and Euro-Americans in the 19th century felt it was important to classify and form hierarchies of all phenomena. This geography book taught geography through a system of "comparison and classification" of both landscapes and cultures. Each country and race of people described in the book is ranked according to its "Degrees of Civilization" much as the major rivers and mountains are classified in terms of their comparative size.

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