Chloe Leal current event

The Woman Who Transformed How We Teach Geography - Smithsonian
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Zonia Baber was a geologist and geographer whose progressive ideas of how geography should be taught were just one of the many incredible stances she took and advocated. Geography had long been used to bolster national pride and imperialist agendas of European countries and the United States, which Baber publicly denounced in her journals and essays and illustrated (in her view,) the role which geographic information played in early imperialistic nations’ conquering of pre and post-Columbian civilizations. She accomplished many things which set her apart from other contemporary geographers. She wanted to use geography as a means to connect the world, rather than to dominate it
geography, by seeing it not as a means of colonization but of connection and understanding between cultures.


The opportunity for a woman to be so vastly educated in geography was a result of a post-revolution America which placed in the hands of women a duty to pass on knowledge and patriotic beliefs. Geography appealed to American republican values of utility, nationalism, and self-improvement. As mentioned above, Baber had progressive views of the role which geography played in the imperialistic history of the world. She believed that European colonizers took the geography and advanced cartography of indigenous people and used the information they provided to colonize them. In the case of the Peruvians, she wrote, “[t]hey possessed relief and political maps of their country which were of great value to their destroyers.” This is relevant to the US Imperialism that we are studying right now and informs us of such an incredible, revolutionary, and accomplished active critic of imperialism. Of course there is a sort of slant or bias in her teachings because often did the activist, reformer, and teacher within her intertwine in her works, but the degree in which all of them radiated within her is admirable enough to not invalidate her progressive and revolutionary ideas and acknowledge the amazing contributions she undoubtedly made to numerous geographic organizations, to the more modern outlook on imperialism, and countless other things which are more connected to us than we may initially think.