The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity

By Martin Brückner

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Bruckner 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 the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s.

Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner 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, Bruckner 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, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807838976

Martin Brückner

Martin Bruckner is professor of English and material culture studies at the University of Delaware.

Book preview

Introduction

THE GEOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION IN THE WILDERNESS

Let us consider two family portraits in order to glimpse how geography shaped Anglo-American identities during the long eighteenth century. In a 1667 portrait celebrating the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil Calvert holds out a manuscript map of Maryland boldly inscribed Nova Terrae-Mariae Tabula; standing before the lord is his grandson, playfully pawing at the same map under the watchful gaze of an African servant (Figure 1). Shown in the hand of a British statesman, the map—emblazoned with the family crest—represents the Calverts’ possessions in the British American colonies. Handed down to the American-born boy, the map also signals the patrilineal exchange of landed property from fathers to sons, imperial landowners to future colonists. Linking three generations, the map becomes the symbolic text and literary key to British American self-representation.

A century and a half later, in the newly formed United States, a painter marshals a much larger array of geographical texts to limn the members of an emerging middle class (Figure 2). In an 1810 group portrait, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse—a conservative Federalist and successful author of geography schoolbooks—has gathered his wife Elizabeth Breese and their three sons around a table, upon which are placed a globe, a geography book, and a foldout map. This portrait still celebrates the patriarch, possessions, and the ritual display of modern identity, but in a new and different way. Instead of a single map representing landed property as the basis of identity, diverse geographical texts have now become the prized possessions defining the early American subjects.

What is fascinating about these portraits is that American identities are not predicated on the visual display of maps or geography books as such. Rather, what appears to prop up the self-image of the imperial, colonial, and early national subject is the demonstration of geographical literacy: the basic competence to read maps and to read and write about the world in modern geographic terms. In the portrait of Lord Baltimore, the map is visible only to the viewers and thus assumes an audience that is trained in map reading. In the Morse family portrait, the textual tools of geography are highlighted as essential to the education of Anglo-American citizens, adults and children. Both portraits illustrate how geographical literacy served a symbolic, cognitive, and pedagogic role in the representation of early Anglo-American identity.

Figure 1. Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore. By Gerard Soest. 1667. Photo Courtesy of Maryland Department, Enoch Pratt Free Library

Figure 2. Morse Family. By Samuel F. B. Morse. 1810. Permission of National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Behring Center

This study explores the geographic revolution in early America from the 1680s to the 1820s. Concentrating on Anglo-American culture in North America, it brings to light the interaction between geography and literary education and examines how this relationship influenced the textual practices surrounding the process of identity formation. The aim of this study is thus twofold. First, it tells the story of the rapid rise of geography, from a scarce and symbolic text that symbolized privileged lives inside an imperial culture, to a form of everyday discourse widely used by a socially diverse population of English-speakers living in colonial British America and the early United States. To better understand how fundamental geographical literacy was to the overall literary experience in early America, I examine the circulation and sociology of geographical texts, recovering geography as a broadly defined genre consisting of many vibrant textual forms: property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and magazine maps, atlases and geography textbooks, flash cards and playing cards, paintings and needlework samplers.

Second, in order to show how geographical literacy affected eighteenth-century conceptions of American identity, this study examines the discourse of geography in relation to early American literary productions, paying close attention to genres that treated issues of self-representation. The various forms of geographical writing (for example, maps and textbooks) profoundly informed early American literary documents—such as poems and natural histories, diaries and novels—because their conception and production were deeply linked to the cognitive, pedagogic, and material practices derived from the study of geography. The study’s more specific aim, then, is to show how lessons in geographic modes of reading and writing intersected with the more familiar practices that we commonly associate with literary competence, from the first ciphering of the alphabet to performing speeches to writing narrative compositions in the English language.

Geography has traditionally been viewed as one of the crucial contexts defining Anglo-American identities. Calling upon the material realities of the North American continent—its abundance of space, availability of landed property, or distinct topography—influential studies have discussed geography as a constructive background in order to explain the Americanness of social, aesthetic, or psychological models of identity. In those accounts, the discussion of geography tended to foster exceptionalist narratives in which the collective identity of American colonists or United States citizens was tied to the experience of physical geography. These sometimes exuberantly patriotic studies have been complicated by cultural historians who continue to emphasize the contextual function of geography as the physical, and hence quantifiable, background for explaining early ideas of community and identity. Their studies show how the perceived surplus of geographic space spurred the early commodification of American lands and how the meshing of economic practices and political decisions provided fuel for the double fantasy of an Anglo-American empire and nation-state.¹

Similarly, as literary scholars have shown, the description of physical geography provided a highly productive metaphor through which American identities were imagined in opposition to European modes of self-definition. Seminal discussions commenting on the relationship between language and identity—examining, for example, Mary Rowlandson’s New England, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, or Henry David Thoreau’s Massachusetts—have pointed out how, in the hands of Anglo-American authors, the real geographical landscape became the foundational topos through which authors imagined a variety of American selves. In forging links between the land, the heart, and the home, early American writers expanded references to physical geography into strategic settings, including the American wilderness, the American garden, and American nature. Cast in these terms, the descriptions of American geography have served as deterministic, symbolic, or ontological metasettings in which authors turned the continent’s physicality into a dynamic literary trope that could be used to explain social changes and at the same time ground individual characters. Thus, depending on the various interpreters’ ideological convictions, descriptions of physical geography have provided the imaginary setting into which writers inserted distinctly American identities such as the heroic colonist farmer, the patriotic anarchist-revolutionary, the feudal patriarch as new man, the fierce regionalist, and the capitalist imperial self.²

By privileging the contextual approach to geography, academic and popular discussions of identity have invariably established geography as a material history and symbolic structure of early American feeling. In this interpretation, early Anglo-American encounters with real mountains stir up real emotions (William Byrd and the Blue Mountains), geological formations are objects of wonder (Thomas Jefferson and the Natural Bridge of Virginia), and the view of unfamiliar water systems creates lasting memories of reverie (William Bartram and coastal Florida). Whether enlisted for patriotic, Marxist, or feminist purposes, in critical examinations of American literature geography has one recurring plot line: the realities of the land overwhelm the individual author or fictional character to the point of reconfiguring his or her sense of identity. Personal meditations on geography are seen as evidentiary tales of how geography invariably transforms personal experiences into heartfelt characterizations of selfhood.³

In contrast to these contextual evaluations of American geographical identities, this book proposes an alternative source of geographic affect, the text of geography itself. It takes as its starting point the observation that in theory and practice the construction of the American subject was grounded in the textual experience of geography. During the period of this study, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans consistently defined and applied the terms of geography according to the literal signification of the Greek word, as to record, draw, and write the earth. This was the meaning of the word repeatedly invoked by professional geographers and students throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By drawing upon this definition, this study locates geography not only at the intersection of the verbal and the visual (to record and to draw) but also recovers geography as a material form and stylistic device of literary production (to write).⁴

As the discourse of geography has become second nature, we rarely notice the extent to which geography as text and form of literacy permeates the modern mass media, from the magazine National Geographic to the nightly news to online map services. We easily forget how place-names and coordinates, borders and topographic symbols are continually providing a writing system and thus a quasi-linguistic code through which we structure our daily perception of and relation to land, variously calling it country, place, or space. For eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans, however, the very forms of geographic writing—in particular the map and geography book—were new tools of communication taking hold of the literary practices of new audiences. While today the term geography is associated with spectacles of adventure or the tedium of memorizing facts and figures, becoming geographically literate provided many ordinary people with a vehicle for describing and defining their personal place in both the local and global community. Indeed, for many British Americans, geography was the gateway to literacy itself, as learning to read was linked to geographic instruction.

As they arrived in North America, British colonists left behind a culture of letters that included a rich and complex tradition of mapping and geographic literature. Starting in the late sixteenth century, the coincidence of overseas colonization, domestic enclosure acts with their ensuing land surveying projects, and the extensive production of geographical books worked far-reaching changes in the everyday habits and literary life of English men and women. Cartographic and geographic discourses helped to propel and articulate the emergence of English nationalism. Artists and craftsmen worked the nation’s geographic outline into symbolic and literary expressions of a national community: in paintings, the body of Queen Elizabeth was projected on the outline map of England, and playwrights like William Shakespeare developed narratives of national power by deploying geographical texts, such as maps in a theater called the Globe; between the literary hack and the aesthetic theorist, a variety of geographic writing practices became the focus for popular discussions addressing everything from the Englishness of literary forms to political stability.⁵

As geography fostered a sense of national identity at home, it also paved the way for imperialism abroad. The same media and technology that had propagated the idea of geographic cohesion as fundamental to the nation’s self-image also provided government agents and trading companies with the kind of textual blueprint that invited and legitimized international expansion. Following the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, British subjects living on both sides of the Atlantic consumed geographic texts that envisioned America as an unclaimed part of the world upon which a centralized state apparatus or an individual entrepreneur could impress the mechanisms of colonization and enact personal narratives of an emerging British imperial identity.⁶

A closer examination of the representational strategies surrounding national and imperial writings reveals that the lessons for internalizing geographical knowledge were intimately linked to the methods and practices surrounding the earliest steps of literacy acquisition. There was considerable practical as well as conceptual cross-fertilization between geographical texts and alphabetic literacy. For example, geography’s most elementary graphic form, the grid, impinged upon the traditional technologies of writing. As a simple script consisting of longitudinal and latitudinal lines, the grid elegantly enclosed and organized the earth on paper in modern map images and textbook tables. At the same time, the grid also affected the graphic design of the letter alphabet, writing instructions, and the design of print fonts. As early as 1529 the French printer Geoffrey Tory demonstrated a protocartographic sensibility. By drawing letters using the Euclidian grid, Tory introduced a mapping habit into the design of early modern letters. At about the same time, the work of Gerard Mercator illustrates the practical overlap between alphabetic literacy and geographic writing. A sixteenth-century writing instructor turned mapmaker, Mercator not only popularized the now-familiar cartographic image of the earth’s geography but codified the use of alphabetic text on maps and in geography books. For some writers, like the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, the very practice of cartographic writing became indelibly tied to narrative meditations on the state of modern selfhood.⁷

By the end of the century, pedagogues embraced geographical writings as the practical context through which to test literacy skills such as reading and writing and even, as John Locke suggested, the exercise of foreign languages. Indeed, throughout the seventeenth century, geographical instruction supplemented the first years of education. Geography provided a cornerstone for Locke’s theory of the modern curriculum. According to Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), the ideal modern child, having been taught by his mother, "could readily point … to any Country upon the Globe, or any County in the Map of England, knew all the great Rivers, Promontories, Straits, and Bays in the World, and could find the Longitude and Latitude of any Place, before he was six Years old."⁸

Replete with its own vocabulary, writing system, and publishing industry, by the end of the seventeenth century the spatial discipline of geographical literacy had begun to substantively supplement the alphabetic order of the English-speaking and -writing world. Through its persistent application in classrooms and widespread dissemination in popular handbooks, the genre of geography was shaping the English literary consciousness and the way in which individuals and institutions explored the relationship between alphabetic literacy and the modern subject. Thus, by the late seventeenth century, as English men and women were simultaneously charted as national and imperial subjects, the textual venues of geography engendered a new literary consciousness. Restoration writers from Aphra Behn to Thomas Southerne, soon to be followed by authors from Daniel Defoe to Jonathan Swift, frequently commented on the new geographical order, as their novels, plays, and essays explored (or lampooned) the effect of maps and cartographic writings upon the emergence of a modern identity.⁹

At the turn of the eighteenth century, British American colonists enthusiastically participated in this culture of geographic letters. Geographic print materials, including maps and textbooks, became staple goods in the American literary marketplace. Those with financial means ordered lavishly illustrated atlases and folio geographies. Those of lesser means encountered descriptions of the latest geographic theories, expeditions, or territorial conquests in almanacs and magazine maps.¹⁰ Moreover, growing numbers of British colonists studied the science of geography in day and evening schools. Men and women practiced reading the globe and maps, they memorized the differences between mathematical and civil geography, and they proudly swapped their sons’ and daughters’ school assignments in geography. Indeed, as the colonial and early national records suggest, British Americans effectively included geography and related subjects such as geodesy and cartography into the basic educational curriculum; taught next to the New England Primer and the Bible, maps and geography books informed basic literacy, even as geographical literacy was shaping secular and sacred knowledge.¹¹

In view of the nexus between geography and conventional literacy, this study ultimately expands from a proposition made by Ludwig Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Applying this dictum to the American experience of the geographic revolution, I explore the textual frontier along which individual, social, and institutional practices integrated geographic instruction with literary education. How did the discourse of geography change the limits of language in British America and the early United States? How do the signs and symbols on the map or the rhetoric and narrative structures of geography books affect the practices surrounding the production of literature? Finally, how does the internalization of geography as a kind of language shape the literary construction of the modern American subject?¹²

My argument builds upon three developments in early American studies. First, the more general argument, namely that geography is a highly diversified genre, has been substantively shaped by historical studies of cartographic and geographical writings. While these histories have relieved me from having to present a comprehensive history of geographic texts, they also leave unanswered questions about the cognitive, pedagogic, aesthetic, and social function of geographical literacy. Second, my argument is informed by critical work in literary and cultural studies, in which a few early Americanists have quietly repositioned geography away from being a purely metaphoric or extraliterary (natural) context, understanding it instead as a concrete literary practice though not quite as an aspect of popular literacy.¹³

But, above all, my argument has been made possible by those innovative studies in the fields of media, book, and reading history that have constructively challenged the primacy of the Word as the dominant building block out of which Anglo-Americans simultaneously invented and transmitted ideas of individual and communal identity. To be sure, the fabrication of early American identity relied heavily upon the creative interplay between English rhetoric, writing, and print. Yet, the critical base of analysis was inherently logocentric and has thus obscured the way in which the identity work of Anglo-Americans depended also on extraverbal vehicles of popular mediation, including music, theatrical performance, and visual images. I join these revisionist explorations into broader conceptions of Anglo-American literacy by turning to geography and suggest that over the course of the eighteenth century its signs, symbols, and rhetoric became an everyday language by which men and women not only spoke and wrote about each other but came to symbolically represent themselves.¹⁴

In pursuing this study, I had expected to find that the textualities of geography would convey the stories of others, but I had not anticipated that geographic literacy would have its own tale to tell. Studying geography’s symbolic, pedagogic, and literary role in North America from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, I discovered that the story of geographic literacy assumed its own dramatic arc. From its beginning in surveying manuals and property maps, geographic literacy enabled British Americans to quite literally get their feet on the ground, granting them a sense of place and entitlement, engendering a process that led to the Revolution. In the early Republic, geography helped the country to come together and mature, providing the vehicle that new citizens used, usually deliberately and self-consciously, to emerge from an ideologically complicated relationship with the mother nation, imperial England. However, in the context of western expansion geography became a language for instilling, expressing, and enacting the new imperial dynamic of the eastern states. What had enabled a people to find and define themselves as a republican nation was transformed into expressions of imperial self-identification and actions of territorial annexation.

For the most part, this study moves in chronological order, beginning with the crown’s revocation of British land charters in 1690 and ending on the verge of the Indian removal policy in 1825. Within this chronological movement, I have organized the chapters thematically around different media, social aspects, and aesthetics of geographic literacy in order to test how various geographic texts impinged upon or conformed to the conventions of alphabetic literacy, classical rhetoric, the visual arts, print culture, and public education.

Chapter 1 explores colonial writing habits, how a geodetic consciousness and a proliferation of surveying manuals created an early American culture in which writing and surveying became conceptually, practically, and ideologically intertwined; how geodetic writing practices created a literary mode that privileged the individual surveyor-writer, at once upholding and opposing the central authority of English imperial mapping projects. The second chapter takes up the role of geography in colonial notions of political rhetoric and speech; in a move that at once appropriated and diverged from classical modes of oratory, colonial speakers crafted the figure of the continent as a discursive vehicle that allowed for the individual and collective expression of a different, American selfhood. Chapter 3 shows how linguistic reformers promoted the semiotics of cartography, in particular the logo of the national map, as an answer to the quest for a universal, revolutionary, non-English language that would distinguish the early Republic from its former imperial ruler.

Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate the reciprocity of early national geographies and the novel. Geography textbooks, among the most widely published and circulated genres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, set out to shape ideal republican citizens through the teaching of geography. Geographic literacy in turn shaped the strategies and sentiments of the picaresque and sentimental novel, as in the case of Charles Brockden Brown, in which the dominance of geography as a literary and affective mode overwhelms the integrity of the novel form. Chapter 6 traces this failure of geographic discourse into its practical, political application in the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who encountered the epistemological limits of Western geographical discourse. The book’s concluding chapter discusses how an emotionally charged aesthetics of geography taught by nineteenth-century school-books and atlases primed a geoliterate population for the seemingly natural necessity of westward expansion and the elimination of the indigenous inhabitants.

NOTES

1. According to H. Roy Merrens, the old-school approach to geography falls into three lines of inquiry, beginning with the man-land tradition and its environmental deterministic stance, the spatial tradition and its penchant for demographic charts and land use analysis, and the area studies tradition and its desire to create a holistic snapshot of any given location. See Historical Geography and Early American History, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXII (1965), 529–548.

Representative authors of these approaches are, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (1920; rpt. New York, 1996); Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (Washington, D.C., 1925); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1967); James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972); Douglas R. McManis, Colonial New England: Historical Geography (New York, 1975).

For examples of modern cultural studies of geography, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on Five Hundred Years of History, I, Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1986); T. H. Breen, An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776, Journal of British Studies, XXV (1986), 467–499; Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia, 2002).

2. Studies discussing geography in its material form—and there are many—include Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), and Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London, 1964); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978); Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

3. I think, for example, of the geographical-literary surveys of Cape Cod (William Bradford), of the Dismal Swamp between Virginia and North Carolina (William Byrd), or of the forests of upstate New York (James Fenimore Cooper).

4. Scholars of geography regularly gesture to the literary qualities of geography. See, for example, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), 135–139; Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge, 1981), 28; David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford, 1992), 99–100. These authors, however, move on to apply the analysis of the term’s literal translation not directly to the practice of writing but to the early modern debate over the disciplinary value of the subject of geography (locating it among the classical genres of cosmography and chorography or, in the context of the scientific revolution, differentiating between mathematical and civic geography). Though important, these distinctions are not central to the argument of my study.

5. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992); Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley, Calif., 1992); Lesley B. Cormack, ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbors’: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England, Isis, LXXXII (1991), 639–661; John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, 1994); Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, Calif., 1998); Kristen Poole and Martin Brückner, The Plot Thickens: Surveying Manuals, Drama, and the Materiality of Narrative Form in Early Modern England, English Literary History, LXIX (2002), 617–648.

6. The cartographic image of geography in elite and common cultures of Renaissance Europe is a central aspect of studies such as Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, I, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974); Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983); Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century, III, The Perspective of the World (London, 1984). On the institutionalization of geographic writing before 1700, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998); Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, II, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley, Calif., 1985).

7. On the cartographic grid, see William Boelhower, Inventing America: A Model of Cartographic Semiosis, Word and Image, IV (1988), 475–497. Longitudinal lines were at the time much more easily come by in geographical writing than in the actual navigation. For the history of calculating longitude, see Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York, 1995). For the history of letter design, see Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (London, 1995). For a discussion of Tory’s Champ Fleury, see Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis, Minn., 1996), 86, and, on Descartes, 279–301. On Mercator, see Eileen Reeves, Reading Maps, Word and Image, IX (1993), 51–65; David Woodward, The Manuscript, Engraved, and Typographic Traditions of Map Lettering, in Woodward, ed., Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago, 1987), 174–212; A. S. Osley, Mercator: A Monograph on the Lettering of Maps … (London, 1969).

8. "At the same time that he is learning French and Latin, a Child … may also be enter’d in Arithmetick, Geography, Chronology, History, and Geometry too. For if these be taught him in French or Latin, when he begins once to understand either of these Tongues, he will get a knowledge in these Sciences, and the Language to boot. Geography, I think, should be begun with." John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford, 1989), sect. 178. A century earlier, Thomas Blundeville, teacher of the sons of English aristocrats and merchants, was one of the first textbook authors to incorporate geography lessons into his schoolbook: Blundeville, His Exercises: Containing Eight Treatises (London, 1597). On the history of geography in English Renaissance education, see Bowen, Empiricism, 67–122; Livingstone, Geographical Tradition, 63–101.

9. See the path breaking work of J. B. Harley, especially Maps, Knowledge, and Power, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge, 1988), 277–312. Also of interest are his essays Deconstructing the Map, Cartographica, XXVI, no. 2 (Summer 1989), 1–20, and Cartography, Ethics, and Social Theory, Cartographica, XXVII, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 1–23. These essays are now collected in Paul Laxton, ed., The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore, 2001). On eighteenth-century literary adaptations of cartographic writings, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).

10. See, for example, the records of The Library of the Late … Mr. Samuel Lee (Boston, 1693); Samuel Gerrish, A Catalogue of Curious and Valuable Books … (Boston, 1718); Joshua Moodey and Daniel Gookin, A Catalogue of Rare and Valuable Books (Boston, 1718); B[enjamin] Franklin, A Catalogue of Choice and Valuable Books … [Philadelphia, 1744]; Elizabeth Reilly’s transcription of Jeremiah Condy, A Bookseller’s Account Book, 1759–1770 (Boston, 1978), at the American Antiquarian Society. These catalogs give a sense of the range of geographical texts owned by colonial readers. They included Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1st ed. 1652; date of copy is 1669) as a folio edition, and a quarto edition of his Description of the World (n.d.); Philip Clüver’s Introduction into Geography (1st English ed., 1657; n.d.); a folio edition of Herman Moll’s atlas, A Compleat System of Geography (1701; here 1709) and his textbook The Compleat Geographer … (London, 1723); Patrick Gordon’s school geography, Geography Anatomiz’d (1693; here 1704); Isaac Watts, Principles of Astronomy and Geography (n.d.); Thomas Salmon, The Geographical and Historical Grammar, now appearing under the new title, Present State of All Nations (London, 1738); a French two-volume edition, Geographie par M. Robbe (n.d.), and a two-volume edition entitled World in Miniature (n.d.). Probate records detailing the libraries of the colonial elite in New England (the Mather family) and the southern colonies (the Byrd and Custis families) generally record a similar range of cartographic and geographic writings.

For geographic instructions in almanacs, see Geographical Paradox: Answers and Questions, in The Ladies Diary; or, The Woman’s Almanack, for 1711, owned by Benjamin Franklin; or Franklin’s Poor

Reviews for The Geographic Revolution in Early America

[michaelm42071 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Traditional accounts of the influence of geography on American identity focus on physical geography: how the Virginia natural bridge affected Jefferson, the effect of the landscape on various artists and writers, and so on. Brückner is looking at the discourse of geography—land plats and surveying documents, maps, and such. The British Parliament revoked colonial land charters in 1690, and everything had to be resurveyed or surveyed for the first time. This made the language and the practice of the survey common for the amateur as well as the professional surveyor like George Washington. After bookkeeping, surveying training was the most common vocational training in eighteenth-century America. The language gets into poetry, and the surveying manual becomes nearly as common as the primer. Surveying elevates the love of the land, which becomes a patriotic virtue.Prior to 1764, colonists rarely identified themselves as “Americans;” thry were Englishmen, His Majesty’s subjects living in the British dominions, plantations, or colonies, or New Englanders, or Virginians. After the Stamp Act Crisis in 1764, colonial discourse everywhere refers to Americans. B. thinks that maps had something to do with this change. They enable a persona of the continent itself to gradually replace the mute Indian figures who formerly were found on maps of North America—Henry Popple’s 1733 map, or John Mitchell’s 1755 map.