Morse, Jedidiah:

$22,000 · Offered by William Reese Company

GEOGRAPHY MADE EASY. BEING A SHORT, BUT COMPREHENSIVE SYSTEM OF THAT VERY USEFUL AND AGREEABLE SCIENCE....ILLUSTRATED WITH TWO CORRECT AND ELEGANT MAPS....CALCULATED PARTICULARLY FOR THE USE AND ... First edition—the Warren Heckrotte copy—of what Howes describes as the "[f]irst American school geography" and the "first American book describing the western country," here including the very rare folding map of the United States, often missing. The author, Jedidiah Morse, is widely regarded as the "father of American geography." Published when he was just twenty-three, Geography Made Easy was the first of many geography books written by Morse in what would prove a lucrative textbook publishing career. Frustrated by the lack of affordable, domestically produced textbooks on the subject; dissatisfied with foreign authors' treatment of America; and spurred by a burgeoning sense of cultural nationalism, Morse set out to produce his own textbook. Geography Made Easy, notes one scholar, "was based upon lectures the author had written while teaching at a school for young women in New Haven. He did this while studying theology at Yale and Geography Made Easy was undertaken shortly after he received his degree....Targeted at a young audience living in a young nation, Morse's book was modest in comparison to the British books he used as models....[It] was composed in a straightforward manner and arranged in a simple layout. It situated the reader in shrinking concentric circles of geograp

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