The General Gazeteer … Geographical Dictionary 1816. This book is titled “The General Gazetteer, Or, Compendious General Dictionary, In Miniature. Containing A Description Of The Empires, Kingdoms, States, Provinces, Cities, Towns, Forts, Seas, Harbours, Rovers, Lakes, Mountains, Capes, &c. In The Known World, With The Government, Customs, Manners, And Religion Of The Inhabitants. Illustrated By A Map Of the World”. The book was originally written by R. Brookes, M.D., and is “Now Much Improved, And Brought Down To The Present Time, Under The Direction And Inspection Of the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, D.D.” The book was published in Boston in 1816 by Melvin Lord and printed by T. W. White the same year. The book has leather covers, horizontal gilt bands with gilt lettering on the spine, blank endpapers, two fold-out maps of the Eastern and Western hemisphere before the title page, a two-page Advertisement, 401 pages of text, with double columns one each page, and a seven-page Chronological Table at the rear (402 - 408). Dr. Richard Brookes (ca.1695 -ca.1766) was a physician and author who compiled numerous works on medicine, surgery, natural history, and geography, and not much is known about his life. Most of which were reprinted several times, and The General Gazetteer, his most popular work, went through at least 18 editions. The first folding map (of the world) includes a partial coastline of New Holland. Jedidiah Morse (1761 - 1826) was a geographer whose textbooks became a staple for students in the United States. He was the father of the Samuel Morse, the famous telegraphy pioneer - Samuel invented the Morse code - and Jedidiah’s textbooks earned him the title "father of American geography.” Jedidiah strongly influenced the educational system of the United States. While teaching at a school for young women, he saw the need for a geography textbook related to the history of the new nation; the result was skimpy, his Geography Made Easy (1784). He followed that with American Geography in 1789, which was widely used and copied. New editions of his textbooks came out annually, and eventually he hiked to compote out with this new and improved version of the General Gazeteer. The book measures and is in good condition. The binding is tight, and the pages and text are clean, with light faded gilt on the spine, some rubbing at the heel and crown and along the edges of the spine, light rubbing at the tips, some offset on the two folding maps in front, there’s some dried glue on the edges of the paste-downs from the binding process, page 59 has light loss in the margin at the bottom of the page, and still a solid book with a terrific history in the early days of our educational system. #165 #4987