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
- America: From the Ground Up! Episode 2 (stop when you get to fur trading fort at time 8.08)
- White Gold Pioneers: Asbestos Mining
CHAPTER 3. The Maritimes
CHAPTER 4. New England
- Last log drive, lost art of the old days here in Maine
- The Massachusetts Mill Workers, Lowell National Historical Park
CHAPTER 5. New York and Ontario
CHAPTER 6. The Middle Atlantic
CHAPTER 7. The Southern Appalachians
- One or more videos from Appalachian Independent or Appalachia's Ballad Singing Tradition
- How mountaintop mining affects life and landscape in West Virginia (first 6 minutes, up to Trump)
- Henry Ford, Muscle Shoals Alabama and the TVA, Part 1
- Henry Ford, Muscle Shoals Alabama and the TVA, Part 2
CHAPTER 8. The Interior Low Plateaus
CHAPTER 9. The Ozarks and the Ouachitas
CHAPTER 10. The Southeastern Piedmont and the Coastal Plain
CHAPTER 11. The Florida Peninsula
- An Everglades Documentary: Follow the Water
- A Brief History of Florida Tourism - A Take 5 for Florida History
- Florida citrus industry fighting for its life
CHAPTER 12. The Gulf Coastal Plain and the Alluvial
- Seaports of the Gulf Coast Episode One (to the end of Port of Mobile section)
- Keep Texas Wild: Pineywoods
- Alabama Black Belt, Part I Discovering Alabama [up to the beginning of the section of land ownership (to 15:25)]
- Old River Control Structures--Phenomenon Explained
- History of Engineering Old River: Phenomenon Explained
CHAPTER 13. The Corn Belt
- The history of the world according to corn
- The Missouri Compromise
- Chicago History Episode 2
- What is the Chicago Board of Trade?
- Chicago Board of Trade: For Cryin' Out Loud
- The Changing Face of Commodity Trading
- What can we learn about the Santa Fe Trail from the landscape
- The Loess Hills, The Fragile Giants of Iowa
CHAPTER 15. Texas and the Southern Plains
- The Republic of Texas - US History for Kids!
- The American West 06 - The Cattle Trail (1879) - from Timelines.tv
- Keep Texas Wild: Pineywoods - Texas Parks and Wildlife [Official]
- Keep Texas Wild: Blackland Prairie - Texas Parks and Wildlife [Official]
- "This is the City Oil Built"
CHAPTER 16. The Prairie Wheat Lands
- The Great Plains Are Not as Dry as They Seem
- NDSU relives history of wheat
- Forest Prairie Interface 422 4718
- The Selkirk Settlers; Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk
- Prairie Provinces of Canada 1943 (last segment)
CHAPTER 17, The Southern Rocky Mountains and the High Plains
- Rockies Thrust Up | National Geographic
- Sustainability: Water - The Ogallala Aquifer
- A Dam Called Pathfinder
- Nebraska Stories | Sandhills Critters
CHAPTER 18. The Missouri Plateau
- World's biggest mine: Inside US coal
- Bone Dry - Farming Across Montana in 2021 (from linked spot to 6.44 (part that starts with 100 years of the state grain labs))
- The rise and fall of the Lakota Empire - Pekka Hämäläinen
- A Brief History of Yellowstone National Park | National Geographic
CHAPTER 19. The Northern Rocky Mountains and the Columbia-Snake Plateau
- The history and future of Butte, Montana
- Idaho's Geography is UNDERRATED
- Rocky Mountain Forest Processes (watch at least the first 12 minutes)
- Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer impacted by drought
- The Hemlock Dam Removal Story - Columbia Basin Restoration (to 9:47)
CHAPTER 20. The Great Basin
- Great Basin National Park
- The Mormon Trail | Daily Bellringer
- C-SPAN Cities Tour - Carson City: Nevada Mining and the Comstock Lode
- "The Land That God Had Forsaken" | National Geographic
CHAPTER 21. The Colorado Plateau and the Desert Southwest
CHAPTER 23. The Canadian Shield
CHAPTER 24. The Far North
- The Inuit and their Indigenous Foods
- Inuit History, Culture and the Formation of Nunavut- A Discussion with Piita Irniq, Inuit Elder
- Taimani - 'At That Time': Inuvialuit History Timeline Introduction
- The Great Klondike Gold Rush Part 2
- Pipeline boom and bust in rural Alaska | MIDNIGHT OIL
CHAPTER 25. The Pacific Northwest
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