About

I developed this site to showcase the complex and beautiful maps that spread through nineteenth-century America, all of which are detailed further in the book, Mapping the Nation.

The site is a collaboration between the University of Denver Penrose Library and the Office of Teaching and Learning, and could not have been realized without John Adams, Alex Karklins, Betty Meagher, Chet Rebman, Dresha Schaden, Jeff Rynhart, Fernando Reyes and Sheila Yeh. The design was crafted by Erin Pheil and Josh Petrucci of timeforcake creative media. I thank all of these individuals for their vision, direction, and good humor.

Pilot support for the project came from the University of Denver’s Office of the Provost, while later stages were funded by the Office of the Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Many of the maps on this site are in the public domain, and available for download. Others are subject to copyright restrictions and available for viewing only. I thank all the individuals and institutions that have generously shared their items: David Rumsey, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Boston Public Library, the Denver Public Library, and the University of Denver Penrose Library.

About the Book

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The nineteenth century was a period of great cartographic innovation. Medical men mapped disease to understand epidemics, natural scientists mapped the environment to uncover weather patterns, and educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among young Americans. As the sectional crisis intensified, Northerners used maps to assess the strength of slavery, especially during the Civil War. After the war, the nation embraced statistical and thematic mapping as a way to profile the population and its resources on an unprecedented scale.

Through these maps, Americans came to see themselves and their nation in fundamentally new ways. Mapping the Nation explains that these experimental maps of disease, the census, the environment, and the past actually redefined cartography. The world we inhabit today—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this reconfiguration of spatial thought and representation.

About the Author: Susan Schulten

Since 1996 I have taught history at the University of Denver. Some of my favorite courses include Understanding Lincoln, the American Civil War, American Thought and Culture, America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Great Depression, and the Culture of the Early Cold War.

My latest book is A History of America in 100 Maps, a full-color exploration of maps across five hundred years of history. My first book, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 , examined the way that Americans were taught to see the world around them as the nation rose to international power. I continue to explore this interest in several venues, including contributing to the New York Times’ “Disunion” series on the American Civil War.

You can learn more about my work here, which includes "The Civil War and the Origins of the Colorado Territory," Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2013); “The Cartography of Slavery and the Authority of Statistics,” Civil War History (March 2010); “How to See Colorado: The Federal Writers’ Project, American Regionalism, and the ‘Old New Western History,” Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2005); and “Emma Willard and the Graphic Foundations of American History,” The Journal of Historical Geography 33(2007).

I earned my undergraduate degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, and my doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. My research on the history of mapping has been funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010) and a Public Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2017).

Praise for Mapping The Nation

In a work of deep scholarship and insight, Susan Schulten traces the origins of a now-ubiquitous presence in American life: maps with a story to tell. Schulten uncovers not only a fascinating panorama of maps but also a colorful array of characters who taught America to see itself in new ways. Read this book and maps will never look the same.”—Edward Ayers, University of Richmond

Susan Schulten has produced an impressive synthesis of some of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American cartography, tracing the ways that maps became tools of social organization, governance, and economics. Engaging and informative, Mapping the Nation is a novel and persuasive look at American history, visually and cartographically.”— Mark Monmonier, Syracuse University

In this important study of the way in which nineteenth-century Americans represented their social and natural worlds, Susan Schulten illuminates how weather, disease, slavery, and the aggregate reality of the census could all be represented in visual and spatial terms. This is an important contribution not only to America’s cultural and disciplinary history, but to the history of government and our shared sense of history itself.”—Charles Rosenberg, Harvard University