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  • Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America by Susan Schulten
  • Margot Minardi (bio)
Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America. By Susan Schulten. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 246. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $30.00.)

You might be tempted to take a book called Mapping the Nation on a cross-country road trip. Alas, this illuminating volume is best perused at the office. You'll want a computer so you can pore over the companion website (mappingthenation.com) as you read. An impressive achievement on its own, this carefully curated online collection includes over a hundred high-quality images of the maps that make up Schulten's primary source base. An office is also the ideal setting for reading this book because it is in offices—particularly those of federal agencies—that the principal action of Schulten's narrative takes place. Other studies of American cartography in the nineteenth century, such as Bill Hubbard Jr.'s American Boundaries (2009) and John Rennie Short's Representing the Republic (2001), focus on the nation as topography or territory. In Schulten's work on "thematic" mapping, the nation emerges as a population to be managed by the state. Innovative in the nineteenth century, mapping population and other phenomena (such as climate patterns or incidence of disease) is so ubiquitous today that we barely notice it. Schulten aims to denaturalize this cartographic fixation by tracing its origins to the mid-nineteenth century. She is eminently successful in doing so.

"If traditional topographic maps were akin to description," Schulten argues, "thematic maps functioned more like an argument" (2). As other scholars of cartography (such as J. B. Harley) have shown, even maps that profess merely to "describe" land and boundaries in fact construct social order and power relations. Schulten herself recognizes that all maps assert an epistemological power, but her interest centers on [End Page 121] how nineteenth-century maps and mapmakers constructed new epistemologies. By mapping statistical data, novel forms of thematic cartography revealed patterns and raised questions indiscernible apart from the graphic form: "this form of knowledge shaped the substance of knowledge" (7). Thematic maps, then, were instrumental to the rise of social science in the late nineteenth century, a development intimately linked to a more precise, efficient, and "modern" state.

Part 1 of Mapping the Nation examines how, in the early republic, "geographical and historical knowledge substantiated what might otherwise have seemed artificial: a national Union that superseded local, religious, or colonial loyalties" (14). Education reformer Emma Willard's textbooks and historical atlas pioneered the graphic pairing of history and geography to tell "a visual story of settlement as national progress" (24). By midcentury, Willard's interest in the spatial dimension of American history was absorbed into the drive for a national map archive. Here federal agencies enter the scene, as the U.S. Coast Survey, the State Department, and the Smithsonian Institution encouraged collection and copying of historical maps. Previously "derided for their blunders," old maps began "to gain cachet in popular culture and respectability among elites as sources of national heritage and historical evidence" (51). But efforts to enshrine this newfound enthusiasm in a national archive stalled; not until the turn of the century did the Library of Congress create an official home for the country's cartographic past.

In the second and longer part of the book, Schulten's argument about cartography's connections to social science and the state coalesces. A chapter on maps of disease and climate shows how the charting of "unseen elements" produced medical and environmental theories based on otherwise imperceptible patterns. "The federal government was central here" in fostering the collection and dissemination of the data on which these maps were based (116). These early thematic maps were tied to the nation's territorial expansion, as maps of average rainfall or temperature depicted continuities across wide swathes of the continent, transcending political boundaries. Westward expansion catalyzed thematic mapping of slavery as well. In the early nineteenth century, census data was not mapped, but the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act provoked partisans to incorporate census data into political maps of slave and free states...

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