Several essays discussing the past, present, and future of the National Geographic Society accompany an index covering one hundred years of the Society's magazine.

National Geographic magazine is probably the most visible and popular expression of geography in the USA. Presenting America's World presents a critical analysis of the world portrayed by National Geographic, from its formative years in the nineteenth century, through to 1945. It situates the National Geographic Society's development within the context of a new American overseas expansionism, interrogates the magazine as America's ubiquitous source of wholesome exotica and erotica, examines the ways in which it framed the world for its millions of readers, and questions its participation in the cultural work of US global hegemony. The book argues that National Geographic successfully employed 'strategies of innocence', a contradictory stance of representation which simultaneously asserts innocence - either the innocence of 'just watching' or the innocence of altruistic behaviour - while naturalizing Western hegemony. Presenting America's World not only considers the world that National Geographic presented to its readers, but also examines the magazine’s own institutional world of writers, photographers and editors. Particular attention is paid to Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the magazine's editor for over 50 years, Maynard Owen Williams, a writer and photographer who worked on nearly 100 articles from 1919 to 1960 and Harriet Chalmers Adams, a freelancer, explorer and Pan-American activist who contributed 21 articles.

National Geographic magazine is an American popular culture icon that, since its founding in 1888, has been on a nonstop tour classifying and cataloguing the peoples of the world. With more than ten million subscribers, National Geographic is the third largest magazine in America, following only TV Guide and Reader's Digest. National Geographic has long been a staple of school and public libraries across the country. In Veils and Daggers, Linda Steet provides a critically insightful and alternative interpretation of National Geographic. Through an analysis of the journal's discourses in Orientalism, patriarchy, and primitivism in the Arab world as well as textual and visual constructions of Arab men and women, Islam, and Arab culture, Veils and Daggers unpacks the ideological perspectives that have guided National Geographic throughout its history. Drawing on cultural, feminist, and postcolonial criticism, Steet generates alternative readings that challenge the magazine's claims to objectivity. In this fascinating journey, it becomes clear that neither text nor image in the magazine can be regarded as natural or self-evident and she artfully demonstrates that the act of representing others "inevitably involves some degree of violence, decontextualization, miniaturization, etc." The subject area known as Orientalism, she shows, is a man-made concept that as such must be studied as an integral component of the social, rather than the natural or divine world. Veils and Daggers repositions and redefines National Geographic as an educational journal. Steet's work is an important and groundbreaking contribution in the area of social construction of knowledge, social foundations of education, educational media, and social studies as well as racial identity, ethnicity, and gender. Once encountered, readers of National Geographic will never regard it in the same manner again. Author note: Linda Steet is Assistant Professor of Social Foundation of Education and Co-Coordinator of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Michigan, Flint.