The Geographic Revolution in Early America

The Geographic Revolution in Early America
Author: Martin Brückner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807838977

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Bruckner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres--written, for example, by William Byrd, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark--significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s. Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Bruckner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.

The Cartographic State

The Cartographic State
Author: Jordan Branch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107040965

This book describes the emergence of the territorial state and examines the role that cartography has played in shaping its linear boundaries.

The History of Cartography, Volume 4

The History of Cartography, Volume 4
Author: Matthew H. Edney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 1803
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022633922X

Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800. The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.

The Commerce of Cartography

The Commerce of Cartography
Author: Mary Sponberg Pedley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2022-06-30
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 022681758X

Though the political and intellectual history of mapmaking in the eighteenth century is well established, the details of its commercial revolution have until now been widely scattered. In The Commerce of Cartography, Mary Pedley presents a vivid picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of the maps themselves. Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map? A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, The Commerce of Cartography charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.

History of Cartography

History of Cartography
Author: Elri Liebenberg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2012-01-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 364219088X

This volume comprises the proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography. The nineteen papers reflect the research interests of the Commission which span the period from the Enlightenment to the evolution of Geographical Information Science. Apart from studies on general cartography, the volume, which reflects some co-operation with the ICA Commission on Maps and Society and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), contains regional studies on cartographic endeavours in Northern America, Brazil, and Southern Africa. The ICA Commission on Maps and Society participated as its field of study often overlaps with that of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography. The USGS which is the official USA mapping organisation, was invited to emphasise that the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography is not only interested in historical maps, but also has as mandate the research and document the history of Geographical Information Science. The ICA Commission on Maps and Society participated as its field of study often overlaps with that of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography. The USGS which is the official USA mapping organisation, was invited to emphasise that the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography is not only interested in historical maps, but also has as mandate the research and document the history of Geographical Information Science.

Colonial and Global Interfacings

Colonial and Global Interfacings
Author: Gary Backhaus
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1443809314

How space is owned through practices of domination that emerged through colonialism and have been sustained through capitalist social relations in a 'post-colonial' context. How Imperial power created, in Foucault's words, a 'boomerang effect' whereby the techniques developed to control and subjugate colonial subjects worked with such efficiency that they were imported back into Western societies to create new orders of control. How while new social movements such as the Zapatistas have remapped the rural and developed new ways to challenge and transform politics, Western societies have sought to reconstruct the world order through economic processes and military strategy. How the self-image of the West is shaped by its relationship with the 'Rest,' but also how the rest has found news ways of constructing identity that are now transforming the West as people, images, commodities, and meanings flow through the global economy. The cases considered cover every continent, contrast the West with the East as well as the global North with the global South, and prompt us to take history seriously in the construction of the present. Addressing the current buzzwords that have spread from geography across the social sciences and the humanities, this book will appeal to researchers and practitioners fascinated by the connections between cultural representation, power, spatiality, and how the ways we have been thinking about the world are open to question.

Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific

Science, Empire and the European Exploration of the Pacific
Author: Tony Ballantyne
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351901818

This collection of essays assesses the interrelationship between exploration, empire-building and science in the opening up of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans between the early 16th and mid-19th century. It explores both the role of various sciences in enabling European imperial projects in the region, and how the exploration of the Pacific in turn shaped emergent scientific disciplines and their claims to authority within Europe. Drawing on a range of disciplines (from the history of science to geography, imperial history to literary criticism), this volume examines the place of science in cross-cultural encounters, the history of cartography in Oceania, shifting understandings of race and cultural difference in the Pacific, and the place of ships, books and instruments in the culture of science. It reveals the exchanges and networks that connected British, French, Spanish and Russian scientific traditions, even in the midst of imperial competition, and the ways in which findings in diverse fields, from cartography to zoology, botany to anthropology, were disseminated and crafted into an increasingly coherent image of the Pacific, its resources, peoples, and histories. This is a significant body of scholarship that offers many important insights for anthropologists and geographers, as well as for historians of science and European imperialism.

The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography

The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography
Author: Mona Domosh
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 1619
Release: 2020-11-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1529738660

Historical geography is an active, theoretically-informed and vibrant field of scholarly work within modern geography, with strong and constantly evolving connections with disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Across two volumes, The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides you with an an international and cross-disciplinary overview of the field, presenting chapters that examine the history, present condition and future potential of the discipline in relation to recent developments and research.

Measuring the New World

Measuring the New World
Author: Neil Safier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2008-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226733564

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.