The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity (review)

Martin Brückner, a literary scholar, has produced a fascinating study of geographic knowledge and representation in early America. Though the book is informed by the long tradition of geographically based history—ranging from Frederick Jackson Turner to William Cronon—it takes a new approach. Using the tools of history and literary study, Brückner has crafted a history of geographic literacy and geographic texts. It is not a study of the relationships between people and land, but of the relationships among people, texts, and nation.

Brückner construes "literacy" and "texts" broadly. He examines not only atlases, novels, diaries, geographies, and spelling books but also portraits, plats, and geographic decorations on household objects. He spends as much time on map cartouches as on the maps themselves. He argues that geographic images and symbols, alongside "the Word," were the metaphoric building blocks with which Americans constructed and transmitted their sense of self and community.

From these texts, Brückner derives two central arguments. The first is more conventionally "historical." He details a rapidly increasing geographic awareness, or literacy, between about 1690 and 1820. Drawing not only from the texts, but also from data on publication, sales, book ownership, school curricula, and surveying practices, Brückner traces how geographic knowledge changed from being the property of a small elite to part of the daily culture of masses of Americans.

In this area, Brückner's work is convincing. His opening chapter relates how late colonial expansion led to a huge demand for surveying land claims and describing them in plats. The ability to imagine, delineate, depict, and describe land—in short, to practice geography—was a necessary and practical skill acquired by many. Moreover, the plats themselves formed a huge body of geographic texts that colonists consulted frequently as they bought and resold properties. Subsequent chapters show the use of geographic imagery in revolutionary political rhetoric, the massive popularity of geographies as textbooks in the new republic, and the influence of geographical thinking on memoirs and fiction. Brückner's case for a revolution of geographic understanding is overwhelming.

His second argument is more "literary." Reading critically into the texts, he finds evidence of an emerging mindset. He argues that the language of geography shaped a new American national identity based on a sense of place and on an ideology of spatial expansion. By the 1820s, Brückner claims, "the expansionist policies of the nation-state become the applied expression of the American public's everyday geographic literacy" (262).

The second narrative is both more compelling and more problematic than the first. It is compelling in its linkage of a cultural and intellectual trend with the great struggles for control of the North American continent. It is problematic in that Brückner's case is far more convincing at some points than at others.

Brückner is at his best in the case of plats, which clearly were examples of geography directly applied to the control of land. His case is nearly as strong when he looks at the frankly expansionist language and maps contained in John Melish's geography books, or the "continental" rhetoric of the Revolutionary era (257–59).

At other points his argument is less convincing. Brückner's analyses of his various texts often take the form of explication without reference to the world outside the texts. Many of the explications are deeply insightful, as in the case of his discussion of how Lewis and Clark's journals reveal their encounter with Native American geographic thinking (218–26). A few are strained. For example, Brückner makes much of the presence of the words kill and blood among a list of practice words for a map labeling exercise in a schoolbook. It is something of a stretch to conclude that the young scholars therefore experienced their assignment as akin to "violently...