National Geographic Society

The National Geographic Society has a wide-ranging impact on how Americans—and the world—understand geography, tying its mission of diffusing geographic knowledge to human fascination with exploration, travel, and adventure. The society both represents and shapes cultural understandings of geography in the United States.

The Washington, D.C.-based National Geographic Society was founded in 1888, in an era of “explorers’ clubs,” with 33 original members that included geologists, bankers, explorers, and meteorologists. Gilbert Grosvenor, the magazine's first editor, is credited with transforming the magazine from a jargon-ridden technical review to the colorful publication it is today. Under Grosve-nor's reign, National Geographic found its footing in eyewitness, photograph-heavy accounts of faraway places. Society projects have included research by Louis and Mary Leakey on the origins of humans in Africa, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees in Tanzania, and Robert Ballard on the sunken Titanic. Today National Geographic magazine has a circulation of 8.5 million and is published in more than 30 languages.

National Geographic is an internationally known magazine that has long served to educate its readers about distant places. At times, however, the magazine has been as reflective of Western culture as it has been educative. In its early years, National Geographic stories carried an imperialist tone common to explorers’ clubs of the day. In hindsight, the bare-breasted photos of women in “exotic” locales are seen as voyeuristic, and the magazine's mid-20th-century photography is criticized for being more aesthetic than enlightening. In the 1960s and 1970s, the magazine moved in a more realistic and politically charged direction. While this angle created internal dissent about the society's mission, features such as those illustrating urban conditions in the United States or the impact of apartheid in South Africa ultimately became an important part of National Geographic as it is known today.

A key turning point in the National Geographic Society's history was its December 1970 [Page 1978]magazine titled Our Ecological Crisis, in which authors took a stand against pollution. In the following years, the society has focused on conservation and increasing environmental awareness while continuing to showcase beautiful locales around the world.

While the magazine is the cornerstone of the National Geographic Society, its educational mission has expanded over the past century to include many other forms of media. Its membership, together with its other enterprises, has funded more than 8,000 field research projects. These and other geographic findings have been profiled in society lectures, books, television specials, and on the Internet, where the National Geographic Web site gets 12 million visitors per month. In recent years, the society has focused on improving geographic literacy through educational alliances, grants to schools, and the nationally televised National Geographic Bee.