| The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 | Brückner, Martin | | Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and UNCP | Chapel Hill, NC | 2017 | https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469632605/the-social-life-of-maps-in-america-1750-1860/ | <p><em>Winner of the 2018 Fred B. Kniffen Book Award, International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture</em><br></p><p>In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A "carto-coded" America--a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful--had to be created. <em>The Social Life of Maps</em> tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence.Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Brückner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.</p> | mcb | | |
| Early American Cartographies | Brückner, Martin | | Univ. of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill, NC | 2011 | http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/early-american-cartographies-martin-bruckner/1102102856 | <p>The fourteen essays in <em>Early American Cartographies </em>examine indigenous and European peoples' creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited.
Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Brückner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair.
This volume not only highlights the collaborative genesis of cartographic knowledge about the early Americas; the essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the western hemisphere. Taken together, the authors reveal the roles of early American cartographies in shaping popular notions of national space, informing visual perception, animating literary imagination, and structuring the political history of Anglo- and Ibero-America. </p><p>Names of contributors in the project: </p><ul><li>Martin Brückner, University of Delaware<br></li><li>Michael J. Drexler, Bucknell University<br></li><li>Matthew H. Edney, University of Southern Maine<br></li><li>Jess Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University<br></li><li>Júnia Ferreira Furtado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil<br></li><li>William Gustav Gartner, University of Wisconsin Madison<br></li><li>Gavin Hollis, Hunter College of the City University of New York<br></li><li>Scott Lehman, independent scholar<br></li><li>Ken MacMillan, University of Calgary<br></li><li>Barbara E. Mundy, Fordham University<br></li><li>Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University<br></li><li>Ricardo Padrón, University of Virginia<br></li><li>Judith Ridner, Mississippi State University<br></li></ul><div><br></div> | mcb | | |
| American Literary Cartographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900 | Brückner, Martin | Hsuan L. Hsu | University of Delaware Press | Newark, DE | 2007 | http://www.amazon.com/American-Literary-Geographies-Production-1500-1900/dp/1611493188 | <p>This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores intersections between geography and American literary history from the earliest geographic chronicles of the New World to the massive geopolitical imaginings of the 1890s. By foregrounding the unsteady nature of geographical boundaries, the physical and imaginary migrations that coexisted with literary nationalism, and the changing attitudes toward geographical settings, the essays in
<em>American Literary Geographies</em> present textual, theoretical, and contextual alternatives to existing exceptionalist accounts of U.S. culture. Beginning with studies of the establishment of names, borders, and jurisdictions, the collection builds toward materialist readings of literary settings illuminated by maps, surveying tracts, travelogues, sailors' epitaphs, and various forms of racialized or gendered mobility. The focus on the literary and geographical discourse addresses more than social and political developments like imperialism, regionalism, and tourism; rather, this volume seeks to supplement literary histories by emphasizing spatial over temporal strategies as the organizing principle for telling the story of American literature. </p><p>Names of contributors in the project: </p><ul><li>Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland, College Park<br></li><li>Eric Slauter, University of Chicago<br></li><li>Anne Baker, North Carolina State University<br></li><li>Tom Conley, Harvard University<br></li><li>Alex Hunt, West Texas A&M University<br></li><li>Hester Blum, Pennsylvania State University<br></li><li>Leigh Ann Litwiller Berte, Spring Hill College<br></li><li>Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier, University of Tennessee, Knoxville<br></li><li>Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia<br></li><li>Ian Finseth, University of Michigan-Dearborn<br></li><li>Martha Schoolman, Miami University, Ohio<br></li><li>Susan L. Roberson, Texas A&M University-Kingsville<br></li><li>Edlie L. Wong, Rutgers University, New Brunswick<br></li></ul><div><br></div> | mcb | | |
| The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity | Brückner, Martin | | Univ. of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill, NC | 2006 | http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Geographic-Revolution-in-Early/Martin-Brckner/e/9780807856727 | <p><em>Winner of the 2006-2007 Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies </em></p><p> The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among Americans living in North America. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Brückner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres written, for example, by William Byrd, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark significantly influenced identity formation in America from the 1680s to the 1820s. Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Brckner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Brückner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, <em>The Geographic Revolution in Early America</em> proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.<br></p> | mcb | | |