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

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 visionaries who manipulated and sometimes invented geographies, outlining the “sketchy” places with aggressive borders and labels and 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.
Pacific Historical Review, 87 (Fall 2018): 593-637 (Link)

Cartobibliography

A list of the maps referenced in the article "Unquestionable Geographies" with links to the cartographic archives for high-resolution images. (Here)
Picture
Original photography and text © 2016-2020 Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.
Site updated December 31, 2020
  • Home
  • About
  • News
    • 2020
    • 2019 Archive
    • 2018 Archive
    • 2017 Archive
    • 2016 Archive
  • American Elsewhere
    • AE Home
    • AE TOC
    • AE Artwork
    • AE Other Artwork
    • AE Appendices
    • AE More Reviews
  • Publications
    • Inventing Destiny
    • The Martial Imagination
    • More Zeal Than Discretion
    • Our Eyes Ached
    • Unquestionable Geographies >
      • Cartobibliography
    • Give Me My Skin
    • The Weary West
    • Anglo-Texan Adventurism
    • Patriot-Warrior Mystique
    • The Enduring People
    • Commerce of the Elsewhere
    • Are We Chimerical
    • Adventures & Recollections
  • Projects
    • Gothic Expansion
    • William G. Cheeney
  • Elsewheres Blog
  • Misc.