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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 Carey did not limit themselves to the Constitutional understanding of the Republic. Fielding Lucas, Jr., for example, prefaced his atlases with a map of the whole Union [item 23]. At the same time, hints of the Republic’s expansive nature were incorporated into these atlases; consider the ambiguous and open depiction of Mexico’s northern boundary in an 1822 atlas by Carey & Lee [item 24]. Of course, the dominant images in U.S. atlases remained those of the individual states. Lucas thus continued the practice of representing one state per page in his curious scroll-format atlas of ca. 1823 [item 25]. |
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It appears that after 1830, publishers began to combine the maps of some smaller states in their atlases of the United States as a cost-cutting measure. They generally combined the same pairs of states: New Hampshire with Vermont, Connecticut with Rhode Island, Maryland with Delaware [items 26-27]. However, this practice did not detract from the general representation of the Republic as a collection of states. A telling exception to the standard geographical practice of U.S. atlas publishers is offered by the work of Henry Schenck Tanner, who sought to rationalize the atlas-mapping of the United States. Tanner disliked the manner in which U.S. atlases fitted each state into the same size space, regardless of the state’s size; this meant, of course, that many important features in large states like New York could not be shown, while insignificant features of small states like Rhode Island received undue prominence. He therefore published atlases—in both large folio and small pocket varieties—which grouped states together on maps constructed at the same scale [items 28-29]. Because they did not conform with either of the public’s conventional understandings of how the United States was to be mapped, Tanner’s atlases were not commercial successes. Nor, for that matter, were subsequent atlases which divided up the United States along similarly rational lines. |
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6. Manifest Destiny and the Popular Mapping of Wars |
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Contact: oml@usm.maine.edu
©2003 Osher Map Library University of Southern Maine |
