| Contents |
People's nature. Staking claims on native lands: the symbolic power of indigenous cartographic conventions in the Ayer map of Teotihuacan Mexico (1560) and its copies / Jennifer Saracino ; Into the interior: reading the native landscape of the Great Lakes in European maps, 1612-1755 / Kelly Hopkins ; Currents of influence: indigenous river names in the American South / Craig E. Colten ; Oysters and emancipation: the Antebellum shellfish industry as a pathway to freedom / Michelle Zacks -- Reinventors' nature. Transcending the Alps in the Andes: Charles Marie de La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer, and the graphic invention of the mountain range / Ernesto Capello ; On the trail with Humboldt: mapping the Orinoco as transnational space / Adriana M̐uendez Rodenas ; Palms and other trees on maps: exoticism, error, and environment, from old world to new / Brian Bockelman ; Beyond the map: landscape, history, and the routes of Cort̐ues / Raymond B. Craib -- The state's nature. Nature knows no bounds: mapping challenges at the US-Mexico border / Mary E. Mendoza ; Visualizing the Enlarged Homestead Act: mapping power and place in early twentieth-century US land policy / Sara M. Gregg ; Mapping Canadian nature and the nature of Canadian mapping / Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn ; Seeing forests as systems: maps of North American forest conditions and the emergence of visual-ecological thinking / Peter Nekola -- Epilogue. The View from across the Pond / Catherine T. Dunlop. |
| Abstract |
"Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities on two-dimensional surfaces, maps are abstractions that capture someone's idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. It is these very characteristics, however, that give maps their importance in our understanding of how humans have interacted with the natural world over time and that give historical maps the capability to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature overtime. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature Across the Americas. The essays in this book argue for the greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas, from sixteenth century indigenous cartography in Mexico to the mapping of American forests in the US during the early conservation years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-372) and index. |
| Issued in other form | ebook version : 9780226696577 |
| Genre/form | History. |
| Genre/form | Maps. |
| LCCN | 2020056574 |
| ISBN | 9780226696430 |
| ISBN | 022669643X hardcover |
| ISBN | electronic book |
