Author: Martin Brückner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807830003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among non elite Americans. This illustrated book argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s.
Author: Martin Brückner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Bruckner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres--written, for example, by William Byrd, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark--significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s. Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Bruckner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.
Author: Christopher P. Iannini
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Iannini connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world--the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. Iannini argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas. The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
Author: Gertrude Stein
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307824438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
First published in 1936, The Geographical History of America compiles prose pieces, dialogues, philosophical meditations, and playlets by one of the century's most influential writers. In this work, Stein sets forth her view of the human mind: what it is, how it works, and how it is different from - and more interesting than - human nature.
Author: Jerry M. Williams
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816511846
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Contributions from anthropology, history, political science, literature, the natural sciences, religion, and philosophy provide a comprehensive overview of the diverse influences America had on Europe. Topics covered include the impact of early botanical and geographic studies on Europe and on the scientific revolution, the structure of indigenous and colonial cultures, and the ideology and ethics of conquest and enslavement. Together, these essays constitute a reevaluation of the images held by the first colonists via new ways of understanding some of the main figures, processes, and events of that era.
Author: Martin Brückner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807834696
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
"Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Brückner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair. The essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the Western Hemisphere." --from the publisher.
Author: Martin Brückner
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781469632605
Category : Cartographers
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A "carto-coded" America--a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful--had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.
Author: Jennifer Van Horn
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 457
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Book Description
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.
Author: Timothy Barney
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between North and South, East and West. Maps also influenced how identities were formed in a world both shrunk by advancing technologies and marked by expanding and shifting geopolitical alliances and fissures. Pointing to the necessity of how politics and values were "spatialized" in recent U.S. history, Barney argues that Cold War–era maps themselves had rhetorical lives that began with their conception and production and played out in their circulation within foreign policy circles and popular media. Reflecting on the ramifications of spatial power during the period, Mapping the Cold War ultimately demonstrates that even in the twenty-first century, American visions of the world--and the maps that account for them--are inescapably rooted in the anxieties of that earlier era.
Author: Susan Schulten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226740706
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
“A compelling read” that reveals how maps became informational tools charting everything from epidemics to slavery (Journal of American History). In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past. All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map. Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.
