From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame (review)

In making the dirty secrets of cartography's mechanics and manipulability accessible to a broad readership, the books of Mark Monmonier—professor of geography at Syracuse University and the editor for volume 6 of the University of Wisconsin's definitive History of Cartography series—are especially well known. In the last twenty years, Monmonier has produced a number of books organized around cartographic themes designed to appeal to an educated nonspecialist audience, such as Spying with Maps, How to Lie with Maps, Cartographies of Danger, and Bushmanders and Bullwinkles. This book, with its risqué title, has the same intent. Monmonier's goal in From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is to acquaint the readers with the convoluted political and social discourse involved in toponymy and nomenclature, especially, though not solely, as they relate to maps.

The organization of the book is thematic, and in the course of eight chapters we are introduced to cases and examples of cartographic erasure, censorship, and appropriation as well as some of the organizational structures affecting and afflicting them. The exploration starts in the United States and Canada, with battles over racist, pornographic, or simply confusing toponyms tied to evolving standards of cultural and social acceptability; Monmonier does a good job of providing the social and cultural context of both the original toponyms and the struggles to change them. But in the second half of the book, he extends beyond those local political and social struggles over toponyms into a discussion of more serious and sometimes costly international arguments over naming (such as the argument between Korea and Japan over the name of the sea between them, Microsoft's inclusion of a politically incorrect map of South Asia in Windows 95, or place names on disputed Cyprus), and even questions about toponyms and nomenclature in uninhabitable and uninhabited places such as the deep sea or deep space.

Given such breadth, this is not a comprehensive history—nor is it intended to be. There are no historiographical signposts included here, and no academic arguments or debates (even though Monmonier certainly knows that material and includes some of it in the extensive endnotes). Nevertheless, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow provides valuable insights into the interface between society, the labeling of the landscape, and the cartographic technologies intended to render it legible. Monmonier shows us how great the slippage can be through well-chosen examples and illustrations in each theme. The innovation here is not in the fact that maps are subjectively created and consumed, but in this book's particular packaging of those observations, its exploration of the relationship between the names on the map and the forces that produce and obliterate them, and its extension of that exploration to, literally, the ends of the earth and beyond.

Monmonier writes with a style that is assured without being overwrought, and even when dealing with bureaucratic details the book retains its readability. Part of the reason is because he specifically eschews any discussion of poststructuralist theory, but part of it is also because many of the details are chosen for their marvelously salacious or absurd interest and can bring a smile to a reader's face in a way that Foucault rarely can.

Historians of technology who are specialists in cartography or geography may find little that is entirely new here, aside from the particular examples the author chooses, the archival sources he used in pursuit of them, and his engaging description of the vagaries of the electronic databases he plumbed. However, the organization, clarity, and presentation are excellent, and like his other general-audience-oriented books, its chapters form accessible introductions to principles and examples of geographic subjectivity. In the final analysis, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is a useful book that belongs on the shelf of anyone with an interest in cartographic issues. It is also a pleasant Sunday read, so long as you don't read it...