Home Geography and the Development of Elementary Social Education, 1890-1930

Home geography was the principal means by which primary students in the United States learned about the social world from the 1890s through the 1920s. This subject was rooted in the German subject of Heimatkunde, and it reflected the changing nature of the academic discipline of geography in the late nineteenth century. Its content focused on basic human activities, starting with the experiences closest to students and gradually expanding outward. This curriculum was fundamentally similar to that which would later be known as "expanding horizons," and an analysis of its development calls into question several assumptions about the history of social studies and its relationship to other subjects. Most notably, it demonstrates that the elementary curriculum did not have a single invention or founding but evolved gradually out of previous patterns and was influenced by developments both in the United States and Europe. In addition, the relationship between home geography and the university discipline makes it clear that at the primary level, the transition to "social studies" did not involve replacing earlier, disciplinary content with the integrated study of the social world, but merely reflected a new name for a curriculum that was already well in place.