Imagined Nation

The map, the census, the museum: in Benedict Anderson's famous formulation, these are key objects through which people personally unknown to one another construct themselves imaginatively as a nation.¹ In The Geographic Revolution in Early America, Martin Brückner examines the first of these, extending his study to include a wide range of geographic representations. His subtitle, Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, reflects the breadth of his concerns, for in this work he asks three different sets of questions. How were changes in mapping practices and geographical representations in the decades before and after the American Revolution connected to changes in other realms? How did the study of geography develop a distinct form of literacy, a literacy related to a "geographical consciousness"? And how do people develop an emotional attachment to a nation such that their identity with it becomes embedded within their personal sense of self? This is an important book in all three realms, of interest to historians of cartography, historians of literacy and the book, and to historians of the American Revolution/Early Republic and of comparative nationalisms. Because readers are likely to come to this book with familiarity with at most one or two of these subjects, they may well find some sections tough going. Moreover, Brückner brings to his study the distinctive disciplinary practices of literary scholarship; as an historian, I occasionally found arguments for which I would have expected different sorts of evidence and I sometimes had difficulty reading across the disciplinary divide. Nonetheless, this is a deeply erudite study, provocative and ambitious, and one that will reward patient attention.

The sheer volume and variety of geographical representations Brückner uncovers is convincing evidence of the significance of geographical thinking to people in what would become the early United States, and the range of his evidence is one of the strengths of his study. In his opening chapter, Brückner argues that English-speaking colonists developed geographic knowledge that was primarily personal and local, and they did so through surveying individual plots of land. For this chapter, surveying manuals, surveyors' journals, and plats of surveyed land are his evidence. Beginning in the 1760s, people who contested British policies and then British sovereignty found a legitimating voice for themselves in the rhetorical figure of the North American continent. Certainly maps with their cartouches and political cartoons that included maps are sources for this discussion, but so are rhetorical strategies and oratorical practices. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, men like Noah Webster and Jedidiah Morse worked to make the geography of the nation and its constituent parts familiar to Americans not only through geography books and atlases, but also through primers and spellers. At the turn of the nineteenth century, geographical discourses were central to a number of important novels, and in the earlynineteenth century, the publication of the travels of Lewis and Clark offered another genre of literature that contributed to the national imaginary. By the 1820s, Americans had so internalized the conventions of this wide variety of spatial representations that spatial metaphors and other rhetorical devices in newspaper essays had come to seem like natural bases for political argumentation. Not only maps, then, but also surveying manuals, geography textbooks, children's primers, newspaper rhetoric, political cartoons, travelers' journals, and novels support Brückner's contention that geographical practices and texts became widely familiar to middling people in what is now the eastern United States over the course of the long eighteenth century. So why does he think this matters?

One way in which geographical thinking was historically significant was in the connections between changes in geographical representations and power. Historians of cartography and geography, following the lead of the late J.B. Harley, have for the past twenty-five years concerned themselves with the connections between representation of space and other realms like political power.² Like historians of technology more generally, historians of cartography...