World Atlas Page 70-71

[Harald Atta]

Unearthour ancient world, continent by continent, with this amazing kids atlas. Explore over 40 historical cultures, societies and civilizations from across the planet. Mind-blowing maps bring history to life and show the rise and fall of mighty empires over time. Plus discover where the remains of our planet's ancient history can be found today!

From the Persian Empire to Ancient China, the Stone Age to Ancient Egypt, this definitive guide to our ancient world takes kids on a tour across our historical planet and explains the movement of early humans; the first settlements; lost civilizations; archaeologists at work; technological innovations; writing systems and so much more. Bursting with vibrant imagery, photography, and original artwork, budding history buffs can use the awesome maps and timeline to navigate their way through our fascinating past.

- Comprehensive historical coverage for kids arranged continent by continent from the evolution of humans to extinct tribes, epic empires and even the world's first superpower

This is so simple! Every time you read a book (fiction or non-fiction) look up the places mentioned on the globe or in an atlas. Identify the country, its rivers and mountains, and its famous landmarks. Teach your child to pronounce and spell the locations properly.

If you have a world map hanging on the wall, consider putting a pin in each location you read about. In Five in a Row (a wonderful curriculum that is similar to the method in this blog post), the author suggests making tiny flags attached to push pins with the name of the book you read, and pinning them to the map.

Constant use of maps and globes familiarizes children with geography in a way that just memorizing lists of names and places never can. It gives meaning to the locations, unlike the disconnect in a seperate geography curriculum.

With these two categories of books, you can follow more rabbit trails by exploring just one of thousands of avenues: trees, animals, insects, astronomy, chemistry, physics, water, human anatomy, medicine, flying, and so much more.

I recommend using all sorts of books for this purpose. Copy hymns, poetry, scripture, dialogue, stories, science, and more. Not only do they get the mechanics of language as outlined above, but your children will read and copy a variety of writing styles. As they copy, point out the proper use of capitalization, punctuation, and creative uses of words.

Teach the use of dictionary and thesaurus by looking up new and strange words. Have your child keep a notebook of these words with their meanings. Consider adding synonyms from the thesaurus to this notebook.

The Bible itself is the best Bible study, and is an easy, free homeschooling program. If you have a study Bible at home, explore all of its features. It will probably have an introduction, some timelines, explanations of each book, maps, and a concordance. Get to know your study Bible and use it with your children. Read the Bible, verse by verse, as a family. Memorize verses and chapters together.

I suspect that many who first open Martin Gilbert's updated (note updated, not revised) atlas will be taken aback when seeing that all of the maps are in black, white, and gray. In an environment where especially textbook publishers seem to go all-out to produce books replete with stunning full-color illustrations, Gilbert's atlas seems at first glance to be too muted, too understated to draw much attention. Could the achromatic, two-dimensional (or planimetric, i.e., having no contours or relief) maps presented here have much to offer in today's world of thousands of shades of red, blue, and green? And would anyone (especially teachers and students, in keeping with the focus of this review) be enticed to venture beyond the stoic presentation? Under certain circumstances, as I will discuss in this review, I think the answers to these questions could be yes (or, at least, maybe). At the same time, I think the roughly $20.00 price along with sometimes quite obvious flaws in the atlas will lead many professors to leave Gilbert's atlas off their required book lists.

When pondering how to assess Gilbert's atlas, I considered several points, in particular the quality versus the price of the manufactured product as well as the range, depth, and accuracy of the topics covered. In addition, I considered how beneficial the atlas might be as an adjunct to history course texts, by which I mean under what circumstances the atlas would be useful, especially to teachers of survey courses. To assist in the assessment of the current edition, I utilized at random several other items: first, the original 1968 edition of Gilbert's atlas (a copy of which I found in my local public library); second, the lower-priced, but full-color, Rand McNally Atlas of American History, eighty pages and list priced at $6.95; and third, a combined edition of Out of Many: A History of the American People, list price about $75.00.[1] I included the latter as an example of the type of highly produced textbooks that entice professors with quality writing, numerous illustrations, and an abundance of support materials, including overheads, lecture outlines, and online student study-guide sites. Together, these works provide a comparison for Gilbert's maps and also serve as a way to judge whether and/or when Gilbert's work might prove useful for professors and students alike.

In the preface to the first edition, Gilbert prefers not to limit the purpose of the atlas, stating that his aim is "to provide a short but informative visual guide to American history," designing the maps so they may be used in the "widest possible way." He keeps these comments for the fourth edition, but adds that he hopes the maps "will be of interest and service to teachers, students, and the general reader." While succeeding on the first point, in the sense that general readers may find enough to interest them here, the atlas comes up a bit short on the second point, especially for academics looking for an accurate up-to-date reference book.

As to the quality of Gilbert's atlas, the manufacture seems good, although with a glued binding it is hard to say how the book will withstand repeated usage. Unfortunately, hands-free consulting is cumbersome, as the atlas needs considerable coaxing (in the form of a weight) to stay open at any particular page. The book measures 9 3/4" by 6 3/4" with one map per page, except for the doubled-up maps 70-71 and 94-95, and four-part map 135. There are a total of 149 maps.[2] The maps follow a mostly chronological order and, as with textbooks, some topics receive broad and sometimes inadequate treatment (for example, map 29, "Medicine and Public Health 1738-1886") and a few almost inexplicably detailed treatment (such as the nearly blow-by-blow account presented in map 6, "De Soto's March, 1539-1543").[3] As well, the initial 112 maps from the first edition have not been reworked and have a slightly cruder appearance than the later, cleaner-lined maps of subsequent editions. Nonetheless, most of the maps are well drawn and often present a wealth of information in a confined space, even if the maps at times appear bare-boned. Thus, while the black, white, and gray maps in Gilbert's atlas are at a disadvantage in terms of appearance when compared with the color renditions in the Rand McNally atlas and Out of Many, Gilbert generally presents more information and more commentary for each map than do the other two. Unfortunately, Gilbert's information is sometimes outdated, and occasionally incorrect, making the uphill climb for Gilbert's plainer approach that much more difficult.

Indeed, many of the problems with Gilbert's atlas arise because it is an updated, not a revised, edition. Despite Gilbert's statement that the second edition (1985) was a revised edition, as far as I could tell all of the 112 maps produced in the original edition are reproduced unchanged in the current version. The lack of revision does not have a great effect on the map renditions themselves, but it is noticeable, sometimes blatantly so, in some of the descriptors or inset comments used in conjunction with the maps. For example, the first map, "The Origin of Settlement in America, 50,000-1,000 B.C.," rightly places the future migrants in central and eastern Asia, but uses the outdated term "Mongoloid Peoples" to classify them. Similarly, the use of the word "Negro" with maps that deal with slavery and civil rights (maps 24, 51, 53, 57, 105, 106, 107, 108, and 109) is not only outdated, but is also inconsistent with the use of the term "black Americans" in post-first edition maps.

Outdated usage is also apparent in the otherwise intriguing "The Indian Tribes of North America Before 1492" (map 2), which names and positions the many dozens of First Nations peoples who occupied pre-contact North and Central America. Being familiar with Canadian history, I noticed several out-of-date names, such as Micmac instead of Mi=kmaq and Malecite now Maliseet, as well as the use of Eskimo where instead Inuit (now also subdivided into separate groups such Baffin Island Inuit, Labrador Inuit, Caribou Inuit, etc.) should be. Such imprecision hinders the atlas's appeal and usefulness and might well lead some professors to consider not using it. (One way around the problems with the earlier maps might be to have students analyze the changes in knowledge and terminology that have taken place since 1968, but this is really a band-aid approach.) Without belaboring the point, suffice it to say that while the first-edition maps appear in general to be accurate, there are instances where the terminology is outdated and, in a few instances, where the facts do not agree with currently held opinions. This latter point is evident in map 3, "The Vikings and America, 800-1015," in which Gilbert proposes rather extensive Viking explorations to North America and suggests that the "Vinland settlers may also have survived until about 1300." In 1968 this may have been considered a possibility, but today only one archeological site has received general acceptance, this being the briefly established L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. There is no evidence to suggest that the Vikings successfully established long-term settlements anywhere in North America.

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