Entry Page

 

Index of Images

1. Introduction

Conflicting Representations

of the Republic

 

2. Spaces of Independence:

Mapping the Union

3. Constitutional Spaces:

Mapping States

 

The Tension of

Spatial Representation

4. Early Republic Gazetteers and Atlases

5. Geographical Atlases

6. Manifest Destiny

and the Popular Mapping of Wars

7. Governmental Mapping:

Topography, Coastal, Geological

Osher Map Library home page

 

MAPPING THE REPUBLIC

Conflicting Concepts of the Territory and

Character of the U.S.A., 1790-1900

Maps of the United States of America made after 1790 by American map makers embodied a basic conflict in how Americans understood and conceptualized the republic. According to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the republic comprised “one People” united in their opposition to British tyranny; this federalist concept would underpin the ideology of Manifest Destiny and the republic’s Westward expansion. Yet according to the Constitution, which took effect in 1789, the republic comprised less a union and more a collection of sovereign and autono­mous states; this alternative concept would underpin the issue of “states’ rights” and the Civil War (1861-1865).

This exhibition explores these two conflicting concepts and their political ramifications by means of early nineteenth-century wall maps found in schools, public offices, and private homes (sections 2 and 3). It then examines the tension between these spatial and political conceptions, revealed in a variety of maps and atlases made by both commercial companies and government agencies: geographical gazetteers and atlases from the Early Republic; general atlases from 1820-1860; newspaper broadsides covering both civil and external wars; and, the surveying and mapping of the topography and coasts of the United States by the Federal government (sections 4 through 7). Of course, the conflict persists to this day: even though we understand the United States to be a single entity, as represented by the weather maps of U.S.A. Today, we still expect Rand McNally and other publishers to organize their road atlases by individual states!