Mapping Magic–and Mayhem–in Jazz Age Harlem
In 2016, the Beinecke Library at Yale University paid $100,000 to add Elmer Simms Campbell’s energetic profile of interwar Harlem to its celebrated collection of black history and culture. The...
Uncategorized Posts
Maps of Gilded Age San Francisco, Chicago, and New York
From the mid-1880s through the 1890s, reformers in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York experimented with maps to make sense of an exploding immigrant population. Considered together, what might these maps tell us about...
The twisted history of political mapping
We live in what is endlessly described as an era of unprecedented partisanship, with Americans polarized into red and blue camps and no convergence in sight. But much of the...
Unveiling a new (old) historical atlas
This week the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond has unveiled its latest project, a digital version of the landmark Historical Atlas of the United States, published in 1932 under...
Lincoln, maps, and the invasion of East Tennessee
In the spring of 1863–exactly 150 years ago–the Coast Survey was in the midst of an effort to comprehensively map the rebellion on a series of regional maps at a...
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...