Epilogue

Having addressed maps as media platforms that were at once personas and avatars, best sellers and spectacles, this book recovered the social life of maps at the intersection of generic diversity and social engagement. Examining the discrete biographical stages in a map’s life, its chapters retrieved the labor and rituals with which the materiality of ordinary maps fostered a national culture of map intimacy. The Epilogue surveys the thickly folded patterns of mediation in which map content and cartographic signification emerged as a form of cartoral art, informing paintings as well as literature. National maps, collectible cartifacts, and a cartocoded education turned everyday map encounters into everyday metaphors that Americans came to live by.

Cartographic Transfers

Before maps arrived in American homes, their social life was regulated by institutional agendas set by government agencies as well as voluntary associations. But, as this chapter shows, the path that led small, ambulatory maps into the domestic lives of ordinary citizens most frequently was created and maintained by the nation’s emerging school system. After the Revolution, an educational consumer demand, spurred by the introduction of the monitorial teaching method and homework assignments in primary and secondary education, was responsible for turning plain, conventional maps into formative experiences of lasting cognitive and social consequence. Examining the synergetic relationship between “mappery,” a form of cartographic instruction, and the emerging pedagogic theory of “object teaching,” the final chapter delineates how educators established maps as a powerful social media, linking schools and homes, elementary education and adult learning, cognitive theories and communal socialization, including the creation of a map-based national imagination.

The Manufactured Map, 1790–1830

The symbolic and social value of maps changed irreversibly at the turn of the nineteenth century when Mathew Carey and John Melish introduced the business model of the manufactured map. During the decades spanning the 1790s and 1810s respectively, Carey and Melish revised the artisanal approach to mapmaking by assuming the role of the full-time map publisher who not only collected data from land surveyors and government officials but managed the labor of engravers, printers, plate suppliers, paper makers, map painters, shopkeepers, and itinerant salesmen. As professional map publishers, they adapted a sophisticated business model familiar in Europe but untested in America. This chapter documents the process of economic centralization and business integration critical to the social life of preindustrial maps and responsible for jump-starting a domestic map industry that catered to a growing and increasingly diverse audience.

The Artisanal Map, 1750–1815

During the colonial and revolutionary periods, American maps emerged from a medley of artisanal workshops that were steeped in the art of pictorial printmaking. Defined by the dual status of intellectual originality and material singularity, the maps reflected the surveyor’s geodetic data, the mapmaker’s drawing and engraving skills, the printer’s work habits, and the papermaker’s competence. Addressing the preconsumer life of maps made by Lewis Evans, John Mitchell, Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, Nicholas Scull, and Samuel Lewis, this chapter explains the design and look of early American-made maps as they developed from an idea and a draft into a raw print and a preconsumer artifact. Because artisanal maps were by and large considered fair use objects, plagiarized at random, they led a double life of being at once rare original imprints and mass-produced copies.

The Industrial Map, 1820–1860

During the antebellum decades, the patterns of map production and consumption were profoundly altered by technological innovations. The inventions of machine-made paper, lithographic printing, steam-powered presses, and an expanded transportation network altered the faces of the American map industry and the map themselves. Adapting the business models explored by Carey and Melish, a new generation of Philadelphia map publishers, in particular Henry S. Tanner and Samuel A. Mitchell, experimented with a new form of map authorship based on production teams and modern business practices. By pooling the knowledge of map designers as well as engravers and colorists familiar with different printing techniques, and by controlling the construction of special map paper and sales networks, they introduced new designs that changed the look of maps and their materiality. Finally, this chapter shows how the art of mapmaking became increasingly tied to the art of map selling; bolstered by a decline in production costs, a single map design would support multiple material formats, from erasable pasteboards and atlas maps to multicolored wall maps and handkerchief maps.

Looking Small and Made to Go

This chapter shows that the vast majority of maps entered the lives of Americans in the closed format of books or booklike objects. Folded or glued into bindings of different sizes, mapmakers imitated the designs and rules of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commercial book trade. Thus hidden from view, plain maps borrowed a book-specific understanding of mobility, ranging from the transmission of ideas to the portability of printed matter, from the map’s associations with pop-up illustrations to the look of reading, to the proprioception of book engagement. As map books or as book supplements, small maps were carried as personal cargo, grounding American citizens and foreign travelers at once epistemologically and ontologically in a world defined by geography and sociability, affect and politics.

Self-Made Spectacles

During the same period when American-made maps began to circulate in the public and private spheres, much of the impetus for recognizing maps as a form of spectacle was generated internally from within the maps’ signs, symbols, and inscriptions. Drawing on several hundred American maps, in particular wall maps, this chapter delineates design choices made by successive generations of commercial mapmakers who transformed maps into unique communication platforms intended for the simultaneous transmission of cartographic and noncartographic information. It shows that maps freely borrowed from a visual stock of signs, images, and graphic designs available in a media landscape that included small paintings, large street signs, and the decorative arts. Contending that American mapmakers constructed large and small maps by tapping a common visual literacy, this chapter offers a comprehensive morphology of American map designs, in the course of which it demonstrates a compositional logic linking maps as unique media platforms to nascent expectations about image legibility and commercial visual culture.

Public Giants

This chapter argues that the social life of “spectacular” maps contributed to the creation of the American public sphere between 1750 and 1860. Recovering the way in which materially overdetermined maps—that is, wall maps whose representational contents were enhanced or qualified by their visual design and material heft—stood out from the vast array of printed texts, it shows how wall maps became public spectacles. Marshalling inventories, public documents, and visual evidence, the chapter documents map placements inside architectural landscapes that included lecture halls, museums, and the meeting rooms of religious or reform societies. Frequently staged as theatrical props, large maps reconfigured the public sphere as a social space where public expressions of reason and passion became predicated on the spectacle of cartographic representation, with maps providing implicit or explicit support (or withholding it) during performances that ranged from political speeches and educational meetings to ballroom dances and art exhibitions.

Preface

Providing a survey of critical approaches to maps adopted by historians, bibliographers, and art historians, the preface emphasizes that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cartographic literacy was anything but a common competence. It was a skill and habit that had to be learned and practiced in order to become a major mode of communication. Because maps were also commercial goods, much of their value—be it informational, symbolic, or restorative—emerged during the social process of exchange. After describing the book’s method of inquiry adapted from visual studies, material culture, historical phenomenology, and economic history, the preface provides a short summary of the book’s main parts and chapters.

Private Properties

This chapter examines private map spectacles as they unfolded in American homes between 1750 and 1860. Using advertisements, probate records, and personal correspondence, it shows that private consumption of large maps and maps displays grew at an astounding rate after 1750 and continued to do so well into the nineteenth century. Pursuing two lines of inquiry, the chapter first examines the history of map marketing by recovering the way in which the American marketplace of prints packaged large maps as desirable commodities and decorative objects intended for private consumption. Second, the chapter reconstructs map displays inside domestic architecture in relation to the material culture and ritual practices of everyday life. Ultimately, this chapter explores the spatial work of wall maps in private places in order to balance the previous examination of public map displays with the way in which maps became entangled in the visual culture and cultural life of the American private sphere.