Geography K–12 · High school · Grades 11–12 · One semester

Geopolitics: The Great Ideas

A one-semester high-school course on the great arguments about geography and power, read in the thinkers’ own words: Thucydides on Athens and Sparta, Mahan’s sea power and his coaling stations, Mackinder’s Heartland and the Trans-Siberian railway, the Nazi abuse of geopolitics as a warning, Spykman’s Rimland, Kennan’s containment and the polar maps of the air age, each one weighed for its strengths and its failures, and ending with a capstone in which the student writes a fair, reasoned geographic analysis of one region.