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Distributed for Newberry Library

Mapping Manifest Destiny

Chicago and the American West

Published to coincide with an exhibition at Chicago’s Newberry Library, Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West charts the historic role maps have played in imagining, understanding, promoting, and exploiting the Western frontier of North America. Featuring more than sixty full-color maps and views from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, this fascinating book documents how maps encouraged Euro-Americans to see the West as a land of promise. Maps helped visualize a nation destined to expand across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.
Curators Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon present an interpretively rich, carefully researched selection of items drawing on the Newberry’s superb collections of historic maps and Western Americana. They have organized the book into four sections: maps for empire, maps for building a new nation, maps for enlightenment, and maps for business. Chicago emerges first as a dot on one of these maps, but it subsequently becomes a bustling metropolis and a major center of cartographic production.
 

120 pages | illustrated in color throughout | 9 x 12 | © 2008

Geography: Cartography


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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Cities and the Mapping of Frontiers: The View from Chicago
(essay by Michael P. Conzen)
 
Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West
(Section introductions and text by Diane Dillon)
 
Section One: Maps for Empire
America in the European Mind
The Native American Landscape
Spanish Imperium
French Domain
British Territory
Russian Country
Chicago Becomes a Place
 
Section Two: Mapping to Serve the New Nation
The Age of National Exploration
Dispossessing Native Peoples
Surveying Western Resources
Chicago Becomes Official
 
Section Three: Mapping for Enlightenment
Tracking the West
Promoting the West
Made in Chicago: Envisioning Western Settlements
 
Section Four: Maps for Business
Railroads Open Up the West
Hawking Real Estate
Scrambling for Mineral Wealth
Stimulating Tourism
Chicago Corners Commercial Mapping
 
Bibliography

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