Geography Story Briefs

Geography provides a sense of place. What a country has, in terms of strategic location and natural resources, can determine its role in the world. See why geography matters in this collection of stories.

Ringed-tail lemurs live in the southern part of Madagascar - and nowhere else in the world (except for zoos).

English settlers, on Roanoke Island, near the Outer Banks of today's North Carolina, disappear without a trace. Where did they go?

Robben Island lies off the coast of Cape Town and, according to the Robben Island Museum, has been an off-and-on prison site for hundreds of years:Peo...

During 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson took a long walk with a donkey in the south of France. His objective was two-fold: Try to forget about Fanny Osbor...

Theodore Roosevelt thought it would be great to spend some time with his son Kermit (who lived in South America).

NASA honored Sacajawea when the federal agency used her name to describe an elliptical caldera on the planet Venus.

In the summer of 1944, Allied forces fought a vicious battle with the Japanese on the island of Saipan.

General Saito, commanding Japanese forces on the island of Saipan, believed his troops could not hold the island if they did not have air power over i...

As U.S. infantry troops took their positions on the 6th of July, 1944, they were unaware that opposing forces were about to engage in a mass attack, u...

Image of a drawing depicting Samuel Beckles at his legendary excavation in 1857 on the cliffs of Durlston Bay.

This aerial view depicts the San Andreas as it slices through the Carrizo Plain.

The San Andreas Fault - one of the most-famous faults on Earth - is located in California. Long associated with the state's "down side" - California'...

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