The Racial Geopolitics of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Geography Textbooks

Harriet Beecher's first book, Primary Geography for Children, published in 1833, is barely known today, and neither is its thoroughly revised version, First Geography for Children, published in 1855. (1) These textbooks elucidate Stowe's stance on the civic futures of African Americans more explicitly than her novels do because they treat slavery and abolition as geopolitical concerns within a global context.' Thus, these neglected texts shed light on Stowe's abolitionist support for African colonization, one of the most vexed questions in Stowe scholarship.