A History of America in 100 Maps
... As Metcalf herself affirms, "almost all of the maps are available as high-resolution digital copies that can be consulted online through the websites of the libraries, archives, and museums that hold them" (xv). They are also well-known staples in many other books on the history of cartography-for example, Peter Barber's (2005) Map Book or Susan Schulten's (2018) A History of America in 100 Maps (reviewed in Cartographic Perspectives 92). Too, some of the cartographic stories presented in this book are "old hat" and have been discussed thoroughly, notably: pre-1492 cartography (Edson 2007; reviewed in Cartographic Perspectives 68) and the Waldseemüller map (Schwartz 2007;Lester 2010). ...
... Interested readers can choose from books with such catchy titles as Theater of the World: The Maps That Made History (Berg 2018), Maps: Their Untold Stories (Mitchell and Janes 2014) or Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Akerman and Karrow 2007). Some titles promote the quantity of their contents, along the lines of trendy clickbait articles advertising "[some number] of [places or things] to [somehow experience] before you die"-among them one finds: A History of the Twentieth Century in 100 Maps (Bryars and Harper 2014), A History of America in 100 Maps (Schulten 2018) or 100 Maps That Changed the World (Harwood 2012). Some famous map libraries have also jumped on this cartographic bandwagon and released their own picture books, where they highlight the most celebrated and/or curious pieces in their collections (Barber and Board 1993;Rumsey and Punt 2004;Virga 2007;Hall 2016;Harper 2019). ...
On the surface, maps enable the planning and development of human dwelling, the visualization of connections, and drawing of boundaries. Throughout human history, however, maps have also acted as antidotes to chaos by generating spatial imaginations as pathways to meaning, belonging, and yearning. Exploring both theoretical and practical trajectories of transnational mappings, this article traces cartographies through the spatio-cultural nodes of the mainland United States, Hawaiʻi, and Micronesia. By revealing hidden connections, interstices, mobilities, memories, flows, and polysemic knowledges, it argues that an archipelagic approach to cartographic creation and interpretation reveals the significance of ‘minor’ spatial imaginations, mobilities, and historical practices. Although these may appear interspersed, fragmented, or insular, I suggest that they form nodes in archipelagic networks of resistance against colonizing cartographic regimes that aim to homogenize, police, and commodify spaces according to imperial logics—thus casting doubts on the authority of continental, national, and imperial/colonial geographic vocabularies. The article’s findings make apparent the need for a methodological turn that takes into account the methodological relationality and social agency of maps as actors in the generation and interpretation of discursive networks of spatial imaginations. Engaging with these imaginations, it becomes clear, means reevaluating and redefining conventional understandings of oceans, islands, continents, archipelagos, as well as those yet unnamed, unmapped, and unwritten places that exist between or submerged below these categories.
For many people, maps are still conceived as two-dimensional graphic representations of spatial arrangements, printed or drawn on paper, included in a book, posted against a wall or, more recently, seen on a computer or smartphone screen. From this perspective, maps remain static documents, offering a range of lifeless geodata such as landscape objects (buildings, rivers, roads, mountains, swamps, etc.), surface areas (parcels of land, parishes, communes, cities, states, continents, etc.) and/or their thematic attributes (population densities, outbreak of diseases, levels of education, etc.). The function of maps is limited to location (what is where) and the physical space of the representation (printed or digital) only serves as a receptacle or repository for information. For their part, cartographers tended, and still tend, to map stable phenomena to endow their products with ‘greater longevity if not greater utility,’ and also to shift ‘the burden of dealing with environmental temporality’ to the map users. In other words, ‘[b]y making maps of relatively static features, cartographers may simplify their job, but they largely ignore the fact that time is a vital part of the map user's world.’ As a result of this limited and limiting notion of maps, both movement and temporality are put in the background, stripping cartographic representations of their temporal depth, spatial dynamicity, and, equally important, of their potential and power as storytelling devices.
However, many old and new maps provide far more than just a static representation of spatial arrangements. Numerous examples of maps present narratives (e.g. wars and sieges, natural disasters, building campaigns, and miraculous events) and movement (e.g. traffic flows, pilgrimages, migration patterns, discoveries, weather changes, and trade routes). They visualize a particular (hi)story that happened ‘in’ the mapped landscape or territory, and spread the news of one or more events; they show the directions, extent, and importance of flows of people, goods, physical phenomena, or societal trends. In addition, their production and consumption is always connected to flows of material and intellectual resources.
This volume argues that the mapping of stories, movement and change should not be understood as an innovation of contemporary cartography, but rather as an important aspect of human cartography with a longer history than might be assumed. The authors in this collection reflect upon the main characteristics and evolutions of story and motion mapping, from the figurative news and history maps that were mass-produced in early modern Europe, through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century flow maps that appeared in various atlases, up to the digital and interactive motion and personalised maps that are created today. Rather than presenting a clear and homogeneous history from the past up until the present, this book offers a toolbox for understanding and interpreting the complex interplays and links between narrative, motion and maps.
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