How Geography was TaughtIn the nineteenth century, American schools, in contrast to current education practices, paid great attention to teaching geography. The USA was a new country and one commencing a period of great expansion. There was an impell...
These images of the installation of Envisioning the World in the Osher Map Library's exhibition gallery were created by Ron Levere, USM. The installation itself was by Stuart Hunter, working with Ms. Yolanda Theunissen and Prof. Matthew Edney....
The 25th International Conference on the History of Cartography, under the heading “The Four Elements,” will be held in Helsinki, Finland, 30 June – 5 July 2013. The conference is hosted by the Cartographic Society of Finland, under the ae...
Views of towns and cities may have been the most popular category of printed images in nineteenth century America. They have also been known as bird’s eye views, perspective maps and aero views. Although not drawn to scale, they show street pattern...
Mapping activities by the United States government were constrained by the strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution which prevailed before the Civil War. The division of responsibility between the Federal and state governments followed a simple...
The several wars fought by the United States during the mid- and late-nineteenth century attracted a great deal of popular cartographic attention. Much of the popular mapping associated with wars focused on the sites of conflict, as with the examples...
Mathew Carey’s American Atlas (see items 20-21) consolidated the practice of mapping the Republic as an assemblage of individual states. Indeed, this basic structure is still used today for atlases of the United States. However, publishers after Ca...
The earliest geographical publications in the fledgling United States adopted one or other of the territorial and political conceptions of the Republic examined in the first half of this exhibition. Jedidiah Morse, often called the “Father of Ameri...
The Constitution of the United States, which took effect in 1789, defined how the Union would function legislatively, administratively, and judicially. It also provided some arrangements for managing interactions between the states. But, other than g...
The Declaration of Independence established the idea of the Union of the original thirteen colonies—“one People”—opposed to British tyranny. Even so, Americans in the Early Republic adapted the standard British colonial geographical image for...
