The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950
Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226740560

Schulten examines four enduring institutions of learning that produced some of the most influential sources of geographic knowledge in modern history: maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools."--BOOK JACKET.

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950
Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2001-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780226740553

Schulten examines four enduring institutions of learning that produced some of the most influential sources of geographic knowledge in modern history: maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools."--BOOK JACKET.

A History of America in 100 Maps

A History of America in 100 Maps
Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-09-21
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 022645861X

Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past. In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the power of cartography to illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past. Gathered primarily from the British Library’s incomparable archives and compiled into nine chronological chapters, these one hundred full-color maps range from the iconic to the unfamiliar. Each is discussed in terms of its specific features as well as its larger historical significance in a way that conveys a fresh perspective on the past. Some of these maps were made by established cartographers, while others were made by unknown individuals such as Cherokee tribal leaders, soldiers on the front, and the first generation of girls to be formally educated. Some were tools of statecraft and diplomacy, and others were instruments of social reform or even advertising and entertainment. But when considered together, they demonstrate the many ways that maps both reflect and influence historical change. Audacious in scope and charming in execution, this collection of one hundred full-color maps offers an imaginative and visually engaging tour of American history that will show readers a new way of navigating their own worlds.

Genocide and the Geographical Imagination

Genocide and the Geographical Imagination
Author: James A. Tyner
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2012-05-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442209003

This groundbreaking book brings an important spatial perspective to our understanding of genocide through a fresh interpretation of Germany under Hitler, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and China’s Great Leap Forward famine under Mao. James A. Tyner's powerful analysis of these horrifying cases provides insight into the larger questions of sovereignty and state policies that determine who will live and who will die. Specifically, he explores the government practices that result in genocide and how they are informed by the calculation and valuation of life—and death. A geographical perspective on genocide highlights that mass violence, in the minds of perpetrators, is viewed as an effective—and legitimate—strategy of state building. These three histories of mass violence demonstrate how specific states articulate and act upon particular geographical concepts that determine and devalue the moral worth of groups and individuals. Clearly and compellingly written, this book will bring fresh and valuable insights into state genocidal behavior.

Mapping the Nation

Mapping the Nation
Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2012-06-29
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0226740706

“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

Sketch Maps: Drawing the Geographical Imagination

Sketch Maps: Drawing the Geographical Imagination
Author: Carla Lois
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2023-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004547304

Sketch maps, despite their intuitive, informal appearance and seemingly naïve use, are intellectual devices and efficient tools that shape the geographical imagination, regardless of the drawing skills of their makers. By delineating the silhouettes of nations, we express territorial knowledge and geopolitical stereotypes that, although shaped at school from an early age, organized the way we interact with the world. why do we still need to draw maps? What is behind our common and naturalized practice of sketching maps? This innovative book deciphers why and how the intuitive mechanisms behind sketch mapping activate multiple conscious and unconscious knowledges about place and space.

Mark Twain’s Geographical Imagination

Mark Twain’s Geographical Imagination
Author: Joseph A. Alvarez
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1443807931

As early as the 1850s, when Samuel L. Clemens (before he became Mark Twain), as a teenager, traveled from his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, to the east (Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and New York City) and south (St, Louis). In the 1860s, he traveled west to Nevada, California, and The Sandwich Islands (Hawai’I). He also traveled east to Europe and the Middle East. In between these early travels and his “around the world” lecture tour in the 1890s, he lived for periods of time in Europe. From these travels and sojourns abroad, Clemens often found that the imagined geography differed significantly from the reality. And, as most people know, he drew on his real and imagined “home” geography of the lower Mississippi River region to produce several works, including his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although much has been published about his travels, this collection of essays marks a different approach to Twain’s use of geography and geography’s influence on Twain. The eleven essays use Twain’s concepts of space (geography) to help us understand (or to complicate our understanding of) some of Twain’s works, including Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, No. 44 The Mysterious Stranger, Tom Sawyer Abroad, and “The Private History of Campaign that Failed.” The contributors include veteran Twain scholars as well as a graduate student and a non-academic humorist. Their critical perspectives range from the biographical and historical to Althusserian Ideological.

Picturing America

Picturing America
Author: Stephen J. Hornsby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 022638618X

Instructive, amusing, colorful—pictorial maps have been used and admired since the first medieval cartographer put pen to paper depicting mountains and trees across countries, people and objects around margins, and sea monsters in oceans. More recent generations of pictorial map artists have continued that traditional mixture of whimsy and fact, combining cartographic elements with text and images and featuring bold and arresting designs, bright and cheerful colors, and lively detail. In the United States, the art form flourished from the 1920s through the 1970s, when thousands of innovative maps were mass-produced for use as advertisements and decorative objects—the golden age of American pictorial maps. Picturing America is the first book to showcase this vivid and popular genre of maps. Geographer Stephen J. Hornsby gathers together 158 delightful pictorial jewels, most drawn from the extensive collections of the Library of Congress. In his informative introduction, Hornsby outlines the development of the cartographic form, identifies several representative artists, describes the process of creating a pictorial map, and considers the significance of the form in the history of Western cartography. Organized into six thematic sections, Picturing America covers a vast swath of the pictorial map tradition during its golden age, ranging from “Maps to Amuse” to “Maps for War.” Hornsby has unearthed the most fascinating and visually striking maps the United States has to offer: Disney cartoon maps, college campus maps, kooky state tourism ads, World War II promotional posters, and many more. This remarkable, charming volume’s glorious full-color pictorial maps will be irresistible to any map lover or armchair traveler.

The Red Atlas

The Red Atlas
Author: John Davies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022638960X

The “utterly fascinating” untold story of Soviet Russia’s global military mapping program—featuring many of the surprising maps that resulted (Marina Lewycka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian). From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and London to towns like Pontiac, MI, and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. The information on these maps ranged from the locations of factories and ports to building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by Soviet spies on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us.

Presenting America's World

Presenting America's World
Author: Tamar Y. Rothenberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1351909169

National Geographic magazine is probably the most visible and popular expression of geography in the USA. Presenting America's World presents a critical analysis of the world portrayed by National Geographic, from its formative years in the nineteenth century, through to 1945. It situates the National Geographic Society's development within the context of a new American overseas expansionism, interrogates the magazine as America's ubiquitous source of wholesome exotica and erotica, examines the ways in which it framed the world for its millions of readers, and questions its participation in the cultural work of US global hegemony. The book argues that National Geographic successfully employed 'strategies of innocence', a contradictory stance of representation which simultaneously asserts innocence - either the innocence of 'just watching' or the innocence of altruistic behaviour - while naturalizing Western hegemony. Presenting America's World not only considers the world that National Geographic presented to its readers, but also examines the magazine’s own institutional world of writers, photographers and editors. Particular attention is paid to Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the magazine's editor for over 50 years, Maynard Owen Williams, a writer and photographer who worked on nearly 100 articles from 1919 to 1960 and Harriet Chalmers Adams, a freelancer, explorer and Pan-American activist who contributed 21 articles.