This handbook presents a broad and comprehensive overview of research and practices in geography education at primary and secondary levels (from birth to about age 18). It summarizes the current state of knowledge in this sub-discipline of geography. Including authors representative of many geography education traditions, the book pays equal attention to learning and teaching and to respect student voices, and includes rich in case studies, evidence-based research, and specific examples. I...

The whole world in the palm of your handEver wonder how you can have a rainforest on one side of a mountain and a desert on the other? Or zoom around the globe with Google Maps and wonder how everything got to where it is now? The answer is…geography.In Geography For Dummies, you’ll discover that geography is more than just cool trivia—it explains tons about the world around us. From understanding the basics—like how to read maps and geographic coo...

This book focuses on how current and prospective teachers worldwide are prepared for the significant task of teaching geography, given the important role of teachers. It eschews a traditional career-centric framework (pre-service, in-service teaching) in favor of a topical approach toward issues that all teachers face. The book updates thinking on geography education subfields such as GI education and fieldwork and traces important contemporary discourses such as digitalization and sustain...

Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005 with devastating consequences. Almost all analyses of the disaster have been dedicated to the way the hurricane affected New Orleans. This volume examines the impact of Katrina on southern Mississippi. While communities along Mississippi's Gulf Coast shared the impact, their socioeconomic and demographic compositions varied widely, leading to different types and rates of recovery. This volume furthers our understanding of the pac...

Most commonly accepted economic "facts" are wrong Here's the unvarnished, politically incorrect truth. The liberal media and propagandists masquerading as educators have filled the world--and deformed public policy--with politically correct errors about capitalism and economics in general. In The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to Capitalism, myth-busting professor Robert P. Murphy, a scholar and frequent speaker at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, cuts through all their nonsense, ...

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler's provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social benefits and so hostile to them in principle, even though they receive them? The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for its inability to convey how much it has accomplished for ordinary citizens. Mettler argues that this difficulty is not merely a failure of communication; rather i...

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor—and how racism helped bring this about.The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Te...

This book presents the fullest account yet written of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in a wealth of oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty-five-thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. James Patterson Smith...

The factor that makes some communities rebound quickly from disasters while others fall apart: "A fascinating book on an important topic."—E.L. Hirsch, in ChoiceEach year, natural disasters threaten the strength and stability of communities worldwide. Yet responses to the challenges of recovery vary greatly and in ways that aren't explained by the magnitude of the catastrophe or the amount of aid provided by national governments or the international commun...

As the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain began to pour into New Orleans, people began asking the big question--could any of this have been avoided? How much of the damage from Hurricane Katrina was bad luck, and how much was poor city planning? Steinberg's Acts of God is a provocative history of natural disasters in the United States. This revised edition features a new chapter analyzing the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, a disaster Steinberg warned cou...

In recent years, the number of presidential declarations of “major disasters” has skyrocketed. Such declarations make stricken areas eligible for federal emergency relief funds that greatly reduce their costs. But is federalizing the costs of disasters helping to lighten the overall burden of disasters or is it making matters worse? Does it remove incentives for individuals and local communities to take measures to protect themselves? Are people more likely to invest in property in hazardo...

The first decade of the 21st century saw a remarkable number of large-scale disasters. Earthquakes in Haiti and Sumatra underscored the serious economic consequences that catastrophic events can have on developing countries, while 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina showed that first world nations remain vulnerable.The Social Roots of Risk argues against the widespread notion that cataclysmic occurrences are singular events, driven by forces beyond our control. Instead, Kathleen Ti...