Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity

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

Brückner, Martin

Paperback

Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo

AtlasesColonial Period (1600-1775)Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)

ISBN10: 080785672X
ISBN13: 9780807856727
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press
Published: Feb 27 2006
Pages: 296
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.18 Depth: 9.24
Language: English
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 Brückner 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, Brückner 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, Brückner 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.

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