Other Countries, Other Maps

Of all the images available to represent the historian's task, one of the most attractive is the picture of a traveler mapping a complex landscape. The country of the past is filled with terrain features. Historians as travelers and cartographers make sense by selecting and interpreting certain landforms and their relationships one to the other. And like any exploring party, it is the planning and expectations before the journey that will make some hills and valleys bulk larger and mean more than others. Not many years ago scholars who mapped the terrain of the early Republic had what seemed a straightforward task. The country they surveyed appeared bounded by the Atlantic and the Mississippi, Canada and the Caribbean. Country meant nation; the boundaries were at once political and geographic. The most important reference points were urban centers like Boston, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Charleston. Maps-whether on the page or by way of classroom lectures-offered a cartographic and narrative angle of vision that located every place in relation to Washington or perhaps Monticello. That view from the Federal City put Santa Fe in a remote region called the Southwest while St. Augustine was situated on the edge of the Southeast. This perspective dictated not only where scholars looked to map but also what was mapped. The most important terrain features were public, political, male, and white. Congressional speeches, corporate charters, and the acts of state legislatures-these seemed the most natural and therefore the most mappable aspects of the landscape. These mental maps both reflected and advanced the definition of a period in North American history synonymous with the founding and expansion of one particular nation. Like explorers, scholars go in search of the expected, the already defined. And perhaps more important, both kinds of travelers find what they expect. In too many ways charting the early Republic means unrolling a map of the political United States. The three essays that precede this brief note represent another way to imagine the period and its varied landscapes. What Frank de la Teja, Charles Cutter, and Jane Landers offer are pieces of a larger map, pieces that by themselves reveal the presence of a wider and more complex country. And if there is more

Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History