An unrecognizable United States
In late October I gave a talk at Syracuse University, and was honored to have Donald Meinig in the audience. Meinig’s four-volume The Shaping of America (Yale) is written from a...
19th-century images Posts
A schoolgirl maps her nation in 1828
Next week I am speaking at Middlebury College, which reminded me of a charming document I came across a few years ago: the 1828 penmanship journal of Frances Henshaw, located...
The cartographic response to the secession crisis
Last April, CSPAN taped a lecture in my Civil War course for its “American History TV” program. The lecture aired this weekend, and I was heartened that people would actually watch a...
A picture of American faith
I have a piece today in Fast Company Design about the nineteenth-century origins of modern infographics, both thematic maps but also other forms of graphic knowledge like timelines. One of...
An alternative map of the American west
Could the map of the west have been drawn in a fundamentally different way? Last month I was interviewed by BackStory with the American History Guys for a show on...
Why Republicans mapped slavery in the 1856 election
Jon Dotson, owner of Old World Auctions, recently showed me a political broadside from the 1856 campaign, when the new Republican Party ran its first presidential candidate, the celebrated western...
How maps get used, then reused
In late July I gave a lecture on early maps of what eventually became the Colorado Territory, as part of a conference hosted here at DU on the mapping of...
Private Sneden maps the Civil War
I have a piece in today’s “Disunion” blog at the Times on Private Robert Knox Sneden, a soldier with artistic talents who was attached to the Third Corps of the Army of the...
New exhibit of thematic maps
John Delaney, a curator of the Historic Maps Collection at Princeton University Library, has created an excellent online exhibit of thematic maps (it may take a minute to load). In...
Charting the flow of political power
Timelines were very popular in the nineteenth century, in classrooms as well as living rooms. An intriguing example is this “Conspectus of the History of Political Parties” (1880). Created just...