1945 Nat\'l Geographic School Bulletin WWII Balloon Ascent Badlands Tientsin For Sale

This original single sheet from a “GEOGRAPHIC SCHOOL BULLETIN,” published by The National Geographic Society, is dated December 3, 1945, and constitutes Volume XXIV, Number 10. Issued weekly from the Society’s General Headquarters in Washington, D. C., these bulletins were a specialized educational tool designed to bring current geographic knowledge into classrooms, directly supporting the Society’s stated altruistic and scientific mission. The header of this issue bears the patriotic wartime injunction to “Buy U. S. Victory Savings Bonds and Stamps,” a common civic appeal that firmly anchors the document in the immediate post-World War II period, reflecting the ongoing cultural mobilization of the home front.The front page presents a table of contents for the issue’s articles, including features on the enlarged Federal District enclosing Ottawa, Canada’s capital; Tientsin, China, as a trouble spot and battleground during the Boxer War; the Channel Islands as a British possession on France’s doorstep for 900 years; and a piece on the 1935 stratosphere balloon flight that contributed to winning the war in the air. A column titled “Geo-Graphic Brevities” covers Wiese Island in Egypt. The primary image, credited to G. B. Gilbert and H. K. Baisley, is captioned “THIS BALLOON’S ASCENT OVER THE BADLANDS WAS BAD NEWS FOR THE AXIS,” and a secondary photograph, credited to Richard H. Stewart, shows the gondola that “took two men and a ton of instruments to new heights.” The verso, or back side, contains administrative information for teachers on how to obtain the bulletins, a crucial detail for understanding the item’s distribution as a pedagogical resource. As a piece of vintage ephemera, this bulletin exemplifies the mid-century American practice of combining current events, geography, and patriotic sentiment into a single, affordable printed format for mass educational diffusion.