A century has passed since the Civil War, which had as one of its main emotional causes the problem of human bondage. Like John Brown's spirit, its ghost still marches with us as we painfully attempt to solve the problem of race relations. Because the geography textbooks that were printed before the war contained considerable history and government, as well as geography, they exercised a mighty force on the thinking of their youthful readers at a time when books were by no means as plentiful as they are today, and there was no competition from television. Through them we can trace the strengthening or weakening of positive attitudes toward the greatest social evil in the history of mankind.