Geography 400: US & Canada

Welcome to the Geography 400 supplemental web site. Here you will find links to resources for class discussions and assignments. As the semester progresses, I will be adding more links specific to daily lectures, so check often for new material. I'm always interested in feedback from students, so please click here to email me.

Course Documents

Click below to download copies of class assignments and related materials in .rtf format: (all are preliminary editions; final versions may be adjusted)

• Maps of US Culture regions from the first lecture

College writing resources

• Improving your writing:
  • The Academic Enrichment Center on the Marion campus
  • Five excellent handouts from OSU's Main Campus Writing Center:
    • Getting started
    • Introductions
    • Plagiarism
    • Paragraphs
    • Developing a Thesis Statement
  • Common Errors in English by Paul Brians, Washington State University Dept. of English (read this first)
    • Direct link to his list of errors
  • Getting an A on an English paper by Jack Lynch, Rutgers University-Newark
    • Yes, I realize I've asked you to write geography papers, but his advice is surprisingly suitable for papers you might write for many subjects
• Avoiding academic misconduct (plagiarism in particular)
  • Ohio State's Code of Student Conduct (pay attention to Sec. 3335-23-04, Part A especially)
  • Frequently Asked Questions about academic misconduct from OSU's Committee on Academic Misconduct
  • APA Style Tips for general questions about grammar, punctuation, and word usage
  • Using proper citations (from OSU Libraries):
    • Citation style guides
    • Citing Net Sources: Quick Guide

  Lecture-related material

  Part I: Regional lectures

  • Atlantic Canada
  • French Canada
    • The James Bay Project and the Cree from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
    • Quebec's Carnival
  • New England
    • Slater Mill
  • New York & the Mid-Atlantic
    • Megalopolis
    • 1999 map of the metro areas of Megalopolis from the Census Bureau
    • L'Enfant's Plan for Washington, D.C.
  • Southern Ontario
  • The Coastal South
    • Percent of Georgia counties' population Black or African-American alone, 2000
  • The Upland South
    • Branson, Missouri
  • The Great Lakes
    • Surveying the Land using the US Public Land Survey (USPLS) system
    • DetroitYES: The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit
    • Maps of crop production from the US Dept of Agriculture:
      • Corn
      • Soybeans
      • Corn and soybeans in Canada, for perspective
  • The Upper Midwest
    • The Native Cultural Center of Michigan's Upper Peninsula
  • The Great Plains
    • The High Plains Aquifer Information Network (information on the Ogallala aquifer)
    • Maps of U.S. crop production from the US Dept of Agriculture:
      • Barley
      • Wheat
      • Flaxseed
      • Sorghum (a.k.a. milo)
      • Sunflower seed
    • The Homestead Act as interpreted by the Homestead National Monument (NPS site in Nebraska)
    • KansasFreeLand.com, a 21st-century version of the Homestead Act
    • Railroad land grants (does not open in Firefox)
    • Large map of Indian Lands in the United States
    • Large map of population change, 2000-2003, by county in the U.S. (source: U.S. Census Bureau)
  • Texas
    • Texas regions according to the state tourism agency
    • Big things:
      • The State Fair of Texas, the largest in the country
      • The University of Texas, which usually has the top number of students in the country in years that Minnesota and OSU's main campus do not
      • The Big Texan
  • The Mountain West
    • Geologic foundations of two regions, from the USGS:
      • Rocky Mountains
      • Colorado Plateau
      • Basin & Range
    • PitWatch, an organization in Butte, Montana, focused on monitoring the Berkeley Pit copper mine
  • The Southwest
    • Official web site of the Navajo Nation
  • California
    • California Department of Water Resources
    • Images of Water Resources -- Los Angeles Aqueduct, Owens Valley,and Mono Lake from the University of California
    • California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
    • The Moving Rocks of Death Valley
  • The Pacific Northwest
    • Two views of Portland's strict development rules, from Environmental Defense and the Pacific Research Institute
  • Hawai'i
    • Hawai'i: Independent & Sovereign (a pro-independence site)
  • The Canadian Shield and the Far North
    • Permafrost from the Yukon government's Climate Change site (note location of permafrost and the tree line on the map)

  Part II: North American Culture lectures

  • Folk/popular culture and culture traits
    • Phonological Atlas of North America
    • International Dialects of English Archive
    • The Modern Language Association Language Map (United States)
    • The American Religion Data Archive
  • Ethnicity
    • Maps from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Fact Finder that show the percentage of each county's population that is:
      • American Indian or Alaska Native alone
      • Asian alone
      • Black or African-American alone
      • Hispanic or Latino (of any race)
      • Non-Hispanic White alone
  • Urban Geography
    • New Deal Regional Planning and Greenbelt Towns
    • Levittown:
      • Levittowners.com, a site "for people who grew up in our home town, Levittown, Pennsylvania."
      • History of Levittown, PA
    • Segregation: neighborhood exposure by race from CensusScope.org (choose the metro area or state/city from the menu in the upper left)
  • Political Geography

  Links to outside resources and other links of geographical interest

  Potential paper resources:

  • US city and metro area populations and trends
  • The US Census Bureau
  • American Fact Finder (from the Census Bureau)

  Geography in general:

  • A decent world atlas from Mapquest, which also offers a place finder where you can find the locations of places in any country (great if you don't own a world atlas)
  • Download Google Earth, an interactive map of the entire world
  • Geography at About.com, an excellent collection of information about the discipline of Geography and links to more resources

The Ohio State University Geography Department Site
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