The Western World – Daily Readings on Geography (Quam and Campbell)

This text is designed as a “intellectual devotional” -daily brief readings on essential geographic subjects to help students better understand the world in a fun, engaging way. This essay collection is organized by matrix. One side of the matrix consists of five regions: North America, Pacific Realm, Europe, Latin American and Caribbean (LACAR), and the Russian Domain. The other side of the matrix has eight topical categories of Geography: cultural, economic, historical, physical, political, population, regional, and urban. Each essay is written to help students develop a fundamental understanding of the chosen topic. This book includes maps developed by COD Geographical Information Systems students and contributed essays by scholars from a variety fields such as political science, anthropology, psychology, and more.

Two full-time Geography professors at College of DuPage have written a particular format of textbook for our course Geography of the Western World. One key feature of the textbook is that it is an open source textbook, online and free for our students (and potentially, for anyone). The other noteworthy feature of the textbook is its format as a series of essays on topical/regional geographic subjects. Given that the textbook is a free and open source textbook, there is no money to be made writing the book. My colleague and I wrote the textbook in order to contest the often exorbitant cost of regular textbooks and to create a base of knowledge that we want our students to have without the need of sifting through longer chapters. Read this and know this.

The essays are organized by matrix. One side of the matrix consists of five regions – North America, Pacific Realm, Europe, Latin American and Caribbean (LACAR), and the Russian Domain. The other side has eight topical categories of Geography – cultural, economic, historical, physical, political, population, regional, and urban. There are other elements of the textbook too, but this is the core. Therefore, essays are created under the headings of pairs of the matrix – an essay on some aspect of political geography in Europe, another on an aspect of physical geography in the Russian Domain. Notice that this does not mean we are covering the whole physical geography of the Russian Domain.

Far from it. Instead we are covering one topic at a time in the physical geography of the Russian Domain, so that the student gains a flavor of the idea of physical geography and gains a fundamental understanding of one topic in that category for the Russian Domain. For instance, one essay that has been written covers the topic of Kamchatka – physical geography in the Russian Domain. Another addresses the city Tallinn – urban geography in Europe. One essay explains the phenomenon of favelas in Brazil – urban geography in Latin America. Another explains the Cyrillic alphabet – cultural geography in the Russian Domain. Each pair in the matrix produces two or more essays in that matched category.