These maps also display the power of American industry, picturing agriculture, mining, and manufacturing locations across the country. Of course, some groups are excluded, and even many groups who are included are not favorably depicted.
These maps prominently emphasize the many populations of immigrants who make up the American population to push an image of a welcoming, cosmopolitan United States. In the postwar world, the United States had taken its place as global superpower, and likely sought to parade its greatness to the nations of the globe. Rather than being intended as a tool for navigation, they are works of art, though they also have information contained in them. While the history of pictorial maps stretches back all the way to the beginnings of cartography itself, the “golden age” of pictorial maps in the United States took place from the 1920s to the 1960s. To ask who is American, or what Americans are, requires geographical, historical, demographic, and cultural discourse on the United States, which these three pictorial maps may provide insight on. Moreover, the idea that anyone save the indigenous peoples of the area have a right to its territory or identity may in itself be flawed. Here he brings that style to the emerging ski industry in the Colorado high country in the middle of the twentieth century, just as that region was moving from a mining culture toward one primarily centered around tourism.Ī closer look reveals Shelton’s fidelity to the terrain, nearly approximating a photograph, yet one from an impossible, imagined point of view.What is it to be “American”? This question, itself, is loaded: residents of the United States have co-opted a term that logically should refer to all inhabitants of the “Americas”. What is most remarkable is that Shelton was able to convey the landscape in a way that was both faithful and complex on the one hand and pictorial and accessible on the other. Shelton was known for his groundbreaking cartography both at the Geological Survey and with Jeppesen Aviation. In fact one of the most alluring in the DU exhibit is Hal Shelton, whose extraordinary renderings of topography won him an active and devoted following in the map world. Not all pictorial maps were unrealistic depictions of geography, however.
McCutcheon used the pages of the Chicago Tribune to satirize “The New Yorker’s Idea of the Map of the United States” (1922). But even earlier than Wallingford, John T. In an even earlier experiment, Wallingford rendered the country from the view of Boston, equally parochial.
The geographic myopia of New Yorker’s was itself the subject of the map. In Wallingford’s rendering, the Mississippi River flows through Colorado, Dubuque is in Illinois, and Nashville in the Florida Panhandle. The exhibit is curated by Rebecca Macey, and located in the Anderson Academic Commons, in the heart of campus, just one of the many events related to “Map Month!” This week the University of Denver will open an exhibit of pictorial maps drawn from the private collection of Wes Brown. Podcast discussion of "Mapping the Nation"Īp| 20th-century images, art and cartography, children's maps, Colorado maps, imaginary maps, pictorial maps | No Comments ».National Geographic: "All over the map" blog.
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