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James Smithson never visited the United States, but he left our country an incredible gift: 100,000 coins that were to be used to fund an institution for learning and exploration . Thus was created the Smithsonian Institution in my home town . It would become not only the world's largest museum complex, but also a global leader in research. The intellectual breadth and depth of the organization enables it to publish an equally robust magazine -- every month  Smithsonian  draws on the global reach of the Smithsonian organization to bring a trove of geographic lessons to my mailbox. It is from the most recent issue that I learned of  Thimmamma Marrimanu in Andhra Pradesh, India. What appears to be a grove of trees in the center of the map image above is in fact a single tree -- a banyan tree with its own name and a history extending more than half a millennium. Journalist Ben Crair and photojournalist Chiara Goia tell the tree's story in words and images. It is a great geograph

This Danish video has been seen well over 1.5 million times -- and more than 160,000 times in this subtitled version -- since it was posted last month.  It is difficult to watch -- the man who produced it has even been accused of abusing these children -- by filming them as they hear words that fill the air in all too many places in these xenophobic times. To learn about the context and consequences of this video, I recommend listening to the PRI broadcast from which I learned about it. The player below includes today's entire installment of The World  (which I recommend); cue it to 15:42 to hear the segment in which Rupa Shenoy discusses this video in the context of current Danish politics and of her own experiences with identity in the United States. I am encouraged that both Shenoy and the video's producer suggest that what I describe above as "these xenophobic times" are actually something a bit different. Xenophobia is in the air, certainly, in the United States

I am not directly involved in Africa Awareness Week at BSU this year, though I will be attending some of the events and encouraging my students to do so. I'm posting all of the events here so that there is an additional way to find them online. All locations are on the campus of Bridgewater State University 2017 AAW program   Monday,  March 27 Distinguished Lecture : West Africa’s Women of God: Alinesitoue and the Diola Prophetic Tradition, by   Robert Baum, Dartmouth College,  2-3:15 pm, Dunn A   Tuesday,  March 28 Distinguished Lecture : Art & Agency in East Africa,  by Mama Charlotte Hill O’Neal, Founder, and director of the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC), Imbaseni, Tanzania,  11 am –12 pm & 12:30-1:30 pm, LIB 207     Distinguished Lecture : Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panthers,  by Mama Charlotte Hill O’Neal, Founder and director of the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC), Imbaseni, Tanzania ,  2 -3 pm, LIB 207 Distinguis

Since our university's One Book One Community program began in 2010, it has brought many excellent books to the attention of our university, local schools, and our town at large -- often bringing the author of the book to our campus for a public lecture. Whenever I can manage to align it with my own curriculum -- and I usually can -- I assign the book to one or more of my classes. One such selection -- The Lemon Tree  by Sandy Tolan -- was so valuable to my students that I have continued to assign it every semester in my online survey course, Geography of the Developing World. The in-depth narrative by this journalist about one very important part of the world is the perfect complement to the systematic coverage in the course's main text by the late, great geographer Dr. Harm de Blij . NPR journailst Joanna Kakissis tells a contemporary tale that echoes Tolan's earlier work. She visits Asael Street, in the Abu Tor neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This very street had once

When leaving Bridgewater for points north, we nearly always drive through an intersection in the center of West Bridgewater (more on the historical geography of that statement in our Bridgewaters Project blog ).  Traffic had become problematic as a growing number of vehicles tried to navigate the narrow, complicated intersection with inadequate turn lanes. We were therefore relieved when this became one of those "shovel-ready" projects funded by federal stimulus money. I was in disbelief when I first saw the estimate of the time that would be required for construction, and was fascinated as we watched the entire area dug, redug, filled, and realigned over long months. One building was removed entirely so that trucks could turn safely around the northwest corner of the intersection. The final result is a bit bewildering, and beyond the driving skills of many Bay Staters (who are not strictly interested in lane markings). It could have been made much simpler with the eliminatio

Writing for Slate , Stephen Kearse asks " What Defines a Coffee's Terroir? " and provides some preliminary answers, beginning with the subtitle: "Country of origin is just the beginning." His story begins with his realization that the fact that his enjoyment of one Ethiopian coffee did not translate to a similar experience with all the coffees he encountered from that country, which as he points out is the birthplace of coffee -- the only place that Arabica grows wild.  Geographic differences at a finer scale can influence the flavor of coffee -- from elevation, aspect, and slope to meso- or microclimatic variations to very important differences in soil composition. The human geography of variation in cultivation and processing are also important. Incidentally, Kearse focuses on two of these factors -- topography and climate. He erroneously uses the word "geography" for topography; "geography and climate" is like "vegetables

This graph shows the rate of human population year-by-year since 1951.    Notice that it has been in decline throughout most of that time.    How is it, then, that the human population has grown by billions during my lifetime and    we expect to gain about    2 billion more people by the middle of the century. Graph source: worldometers Note: a 2-percent growth rate results in doubling every 35 years A 1.2-percent growth rate, every 58 year During this period, world population nearly tripled, from 2.7 to 7.3 billion A Dark and Stormy Night To understand how this is possible I need to start with the story about the misconceptions surrounding population change. This story goes way back,   decades ago,   to an evening in Cambridge Massachusetts. It was a dark and stormy night on the campus of Harvard University. A young divinity student who would eventually become a professor of mine decided to go to a lecture over at the Harvard business school. The speaker was a famous businessperson, p