Bookish Family: Across This Land Video List - 100+ Geography Videos about the U.S. and Canada

My oldest son loves geography. He loves maps and he loves learning about new places. He has devoured every living geography book that I have ever given him. He particularly enjoyed reading Halliburton's Book of Marvels and loves the video companions by Wonder + Wildness.

When I was planning his 7th grade homeschool year, I asked him what subject he wanted to study and was not surprised that he chose geography. Because he loves geography and retains information easily, I knew he would prefer something that was very in-depth and didn't repeat information that he already knew.

Fortunately, I happened to watch the Alveary's preview of the 2022-2023 curriculum where I learned about the college regional geography textbook Across This Land by John C. Hudson. I bought an older edition for $6.89 and got it for free with a Thriftbooks free book credit.

This book goes region by region through the US and Canada and explores how the geography and resources of each place affected the ways in which humans interacted with the land and influenced industry, politics, culture, and more. Although it is used as a college geography textbook, it is very suitable for a high schooler or even a motivated 7th or 8th grader.

To make the reading come even more to life, I selected YouTube videos to accompany each chapter. In this way, my son could see the levies, the log drives, the mills, the copper mines, the farmers, the native peoples, the flora and fauna, the geological formations, and many more of the topics and people covered in this book. It became a labor of love as the list of videos swelled to one hundred.

If anyone else uses Across This Land for their geography studies, I hope that you can benefit from this collection of videos that my son enjoyed so much. Even if you don't use this book, I could imagine using these videos for any survey of North American geography.

As always, I encourage previewing the videos for yourself or watching them with your children. I tried to use the videos to present other perspectives or enrich the discussion started in the book so some of them discuss controversies primarily about different land uses, labor issues, environmental issues, and the displacement of native people by settlements.

CHAPTER 1. Newfoundland and Labrador

CHAPTER 2. Quebec