Derek Hayes. Historical Atlas of the United States: With Original Maps. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 280 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25036-9.
Reviewed by Maria Lane (Department of Geography, University of New Mexico)
Published on H-HistGeog (July, 2008)
Illustrating American History through Maps
Readers familiar with Derek Hayes's exquisite illustrations of North American history will find this latest volume pleasantly familiar. His earlier works include Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley (2005), America Discovered: A Historical Atlas of North American Exploration (2004), Historical Atlas of the Arctic (2003), Historical Atlas of Canada: A Thousand Years of Canada's History in Maps (2002), and Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest: Maps of Exploration and Discovery (1999). His newest work, Historical Atlas of the United States, offers a series of thematic essays covering five centuries of American history, but, as with his other works, its real attraction is the lavish illustrations. Reproducing more than five hundred historic maps from numerous archival and cartographic collections, Hayes has created a stunning and very affordable coffee-table book that provides a welcome geographical view of American history.
In nearly sixty separate illustrated essays, the book presents major events and eras in American history by referring the reader to original maps that were produced at the time. In a four-page spread chronicling early Spanish exploration of North America ("Cities of Gold, Cities of Mud"), for example, we find the following reproductions, among several others: the first map to show conclusively that the Gulf of Mexico did not connect with the Pacific Ocean (by Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda, 1519), the first published map of the gulf (by Hernán Cortés, 1524), the gulf region portion of a Spanish world map drawn on vellum (by Juan Vespucci, 1526), the only contemporary map of Hernando de Soto's coastal explorations (by Alonzo de Santa Cruz, 1544), and an early depiction of the Seven Cities of Cibola and Colorado River (by Joan Martines, 1578). In this essay and others, these beautiful maps are allowed to dominate each page, with their captions sometimes rivaling the essays themselves in total word count.
For Hayes, the saga of American history is largely a story of territorial control, proceeding chronologically from early European exploration to extensive British settlement to various clashes over territory, and eventually to the consolidation of American control through westward expansion and the building of transcontinental rail lines. These eras and events occupy the great majority of the book, with the final essays briefly turning to other topics, such as urbanization, the rise of American interest in the world outside North America, the world wars, the Cold War, and even current events in the Middle East. Historical maps are dominant throughout, inviting the reader to marvel at both their detail and their quantity, while also offering an uncommon perspective on American history.
In the author's own words, the book's combination of maps, essays, and detailed captions is meant to document "the discoveries and explorations, the intrigue and negotiations, the technology and the will that led the United States to become the world leader it is today" (p. 7). If this sounds like an overly teleological mission, to some extent it is. As outlined above, the book focuses mainly on exploration and military endeavors, setting aside many other important yet uncomfortable subjects in American history. (To use page counts as a measure of this emphasis, the American Revolution merits eighteen pages, French explorations of the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi rivers deserve fourteen pages, the American Civil War warrants twelve pages, the Mexican-American War earns ten pages, the War of 1812 gets eight pages, and the Lewis and Clark expedition is worthy of six pages. The slave trade, in contrast, is given only two pages.) But this is not written as a comprehensive history and should not be judged as such. For what is essentially a popular history, Historical Atlas of the United States should be commended for offering an intriguing presentation of American history that foregrounds original maps prominently and thoroughly.
In an age when history is a staple but geography continues to languish as a second-rate or nonexistent school subject in the United States, it is no small accomplishment that Hayes has managed to show very clearly how a spatial perspective enhances our understanding of historical events and patterns. The sheer magnitude of the removal of Native Americans from their eastern territories to western enclaves, for example, is nowhere expressed as plainly as in the maps that illustrate Hayes's essay titled "A Trail of Tears." Made by government agencies to chronicle or enforce the cession of native lands and the settlement of assigned reservation lands, these maps show very clearly how the spatial compression or loss of eastern tribal homelands and the associated displacement of western peoples radically disrupted the existing human geography of the time. The march of railroads and settlers across the West, likewise, is a story best told cartographically, as the maps of army surveyors and railroad promoters make clear. Such historical episodes as the pressure for Southern secession during the era of westward expansion, the frenzy for war with the Spanish in the imperialist heyday, and the explosion of a highway network during the Cold War can be understood more deeply because their description is accompanied by original maps that were produced to justify or direct events as they were happening.
The major contribution of Hayes's work, then, is that by illustrating the most celebrated events in American history almost exclusively with maps, the book shows clearly how cartography is and has long been connected to the production of American national identity. This is probably not Hayes's primary purpose in a book written for a wide popular audience, but it is an unmistakable effect. Perhaps Donald W. Meinig (The Shaping of America, 4 vols. [1986-2004]) would disagree that this volume is "the first to tell the story of America's past from a geographical perspective," but kudos to Hayes for creating a beautiful book that presents American history very clearly as a geographical story (inside jacket).
Despite marveling at the sheer quantity of important maps and their effective presentation in Historical Atlas of the United States, scholars will undoubtedly feel disappointed on a few levels. Historical geographers will argue that this is not a "historical atlas" at all, given that it favors original maps over those showing historical data. Historians of the various American regions and eras will take issue with the Whiggish, selective, and sometimes simplistic presentation of their topics, not to mention the complete lack of footnotes. The deepest disappointment, however, is bound to affect historians of cartography who will rue the opportunity Hayes misses by using maps primarily as illustrations rather than as subjects of critical discussion.
Although the volume graphically succeeds in presenting five hundred years of American history through the eyes of its mapmakers, the text generally avoids critical discussion of the processes of mapmaking or the power expressed in and consolidated by the maps themselves. For example, the eight-page spread on the War of 1812 ("The Rockets' Red Glare") includes numerous military maps produced by both American and British forces during and after various campaigns. Through captions and cropping, these maps are used to identify battle sites, forts, lines of advances and defense, waterways, topographical barriers, and the fall of important military commanders. Although the accompanying essay gives a strong sense for the influence of physical geography on strategic decision making, it says little about the ways that control of geographic knowledge or cartographic conventions played a role in the military conflict.
As J. B. Harley argued two decades ago, maps are produced and consumed in ways that reflect and reinforce spatial power relationships more surely than they reflect physical or cultural realities on Earth's surface.[1] In subsequent work, numerous scholars have developed this idea, showing us how our maps act as both agents and mirrors of distortion, manipulation, domination, and subjugation, to name only a few powerful effects.[2] In light of this important body of work, it is simply no longer tenable to dismiss the critique of cartography, as Hayes did in his earlier Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley: "To some people maps have a bad reputation, as they are seen as instruments of colonization or artifacts that usurp land ownership from native people. There is no doubt that the surveying of boundaries and the defining of ownership tends to legitimate this process. But maps also uniquely show human geography as it was at the time, and are thus a very special historical record."[3] Perhaps it is unfair to use Hayes's words from a different volume to comment on the present work, but he makes no modification of that sentiment in this volume, and it seems important to address the continued impact of such thinking. The most glaring problem with the stance quoted above is that it misses the critical points made by Harley and others, assuming instead that their main purpose is to attack the "reputation" of maps and either invalidate or eliminate them as historical sources. Critical scholarship in the history of cartography has taken aim, however, not at maps, but at the uncritical reading of maps as innocent reflections of "human geography as it was at the time." Maps are indeed "a very special historical record," as Hayes noted. Perhaps most important, they record the inscription of territorial and social control through the processes of their own production and consumption.
Hayes is not unaware of this effect, as is made clear in his comments on mapmakers' hopeful depiction of a navigable channel through temperate North America during the early years of European exploration (in "A River Runs through It"). According to Hayes, these "eccentric" maps were somewhat calculated in their "erroneous" delineation of a river running from the Saint Lawrence to the Pacific: "This [river] was extended ... by overzealous mapmakers seeking to please their monarchs by showing them in paper form what they wanted to believe. Somehow drawing a map made the feature more real" (p. 28). This effect, of course, is true for all maps, not just those that are today considered eccentric or erroneous.
But this is one of only a few instances where Hayes levels a critical gaze on his maps. In general, he accepts them at face value, including them uncritically alongside a narrative of increasing American progress and power. Not coincidentally, then, the maps that illustrate this narrative were produced primarily by conquerors, explorers, soldiers, and land surveyors. Maps, like the old adage says of history, are written by the victors, and this beautiful collection is no exception, even if it does include a few maps made by native peoples.
That said, it is both interesting and valuable to see just what history the victors have written in their maps, and this is an undeniably important contribution of Hayes's volume. While Historical Atlas of the United States refrains from offering any sustained critical discussion of individual maps or historical episodes, it should be admired for boldly embracing the map in a popular history. Imagine how much more effective American high school history textbooks could be if they used maps instead of mug shots as their primary form of illustration! Hayes has shown how effective such an illustration scheme can be, and he has left the door open for someone to take on the additional challenge of critically interrogating the maps themselves as agents of historical influence.
Notes
[1]. J. B. Harley, "The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography," in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1-42; J. B. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277-312; and J. B. Harley, "Deconstructing the Map," Cartographica 26 (1989): 1-20.
[2]. For a few key works, see R. B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Denis Cosgrove, Apollo's Eye (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Denis Cosgrove, Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Matthew Edney, "Cartography without Progress: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking," Cartographica 30 (1993): 54-68; and Christian Jacob, "Towards a Cultural History of Cartography," Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 91-98.
[3]. Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005), 6.
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Citation:
Maria Lane. Review of Hayes, Derek, Historical Atlas of the United States: With Original Maps.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14683
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