David H. Burr, Map of the United States of North America (1839). Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Unquestionable Geographies:
The Empirical and the Romantic in U.S. Expansionist Cartography, 1810-1848

Forthcoming, The Pacific Historical Review, November 2018. From 1810 with the publication of the first charts of the Louisiana Purchase to 1848 with the celebration of the Mexican cession, leading U.S. cartographers like John Melish, Henry S. Tanner, S. Augustus Mitchell, and others marshaled their empirical and romantic skillsets to engage willfully and consciously in the work of empire-building. Instead of presenting static and impartial displays of geographic information, they were self-conscious and unashamed romantics who manipulated and sometimes invented empirical geographies, outlining sketchy places with aggressive borders and labels as well as filling in the silences with make-believe topographies and hydrographies. They professed the revelation of natural designs that forecasted grand and prosperous futures. As powerful, yet fictive, expressions of dominion, maps significantly impacted the way many Americans viewed their national destiny, enticed by the geographic vocabularies that masked their chauvinisms and avarice by normalizing their territorial ambitions as natural, providential, and inevitable.

For the complete version of David H. Burr's Map of the United States of North America, visit the Library of Congress online map catalog.