This cross-disciplinary conference investigated the enduring significance of space and place in scholarship of the early Americas against the backdrop of the Newberry Library’s world-class cartographic holdings.

Sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists; the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, and the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History; and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.

Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Program Committee

Thursday, March 2

Welcome and Opening Remarks

James Grossman, Newberry Vice President for Research and Education (now with the American Historical Association)
Dennis Moore, Florida State University and President, Society of Early Americanists

Morning Concurrent Sessions

Session 1: Washington, Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark
Chair: Dennis Moore, Florida State University

The MapMaker from Mount Vernon, 1747-1799
Edward J. Redmond, Library of Congress

Describing Jefferson’s West
Peter J. Kastor, Washington University in Saint Louis

Traveling East with Lewis and Clark
Thomas Hallock, University of Mississippi (now at University of South Florida)

Session 2: Contested Space at the Time of King Philip’s War
Chair: Stephanie Fitzgerald, Mount Saint Mary’s College (now at Kansas University)

Cultural Contours: A Native Scholar and a White Scholar Remap Mary Rowldandson’s Captivity Narrative
Betty Donohue, Wingate High School, and Zabelle Stodola, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

“They have Usurp’d vast Territories”: Cartographic Representations of French, British, and Indian Conflicts, 1700-1755
Andrea Foroughi, Union College

Lockean Geographies
Jess Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University

Afternoon Concurrent Sessions

Session 3: Teaching Early America with Historical Maps: A Workshop

Organizers and presenters:

James Akerman, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library
Jerry Danzer, University of Illinois at Chicago, emeritus
Judith K. Bock, Lake Villa, Illinois, Public Schools, retired

Session 4: Mapping the Colonial Imagination
Chair: Carla Zecher, Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies

Figures of Speech: Decoding a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Land Map
Dennis A. Carr, Yale University

Mapping Religion in the (Imagined) Space of European Expansion
David A. Boruchoff, McGill University

The Performance of Place in the Voyages of Pierre Esprit Radisson, 1636-1710
Bruce Greenfield, Dalhousie University

Mapping America and the Colonial Imagination
Oliver Scheiding, University of Mainz

Keynote Lecture and Reception

Cemanauactli ymachiyo: The Image of the World and the Lure of the Local in Colonial Cartography
Barbara Mundy, Fordham University and co-director of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America 1520-1820

Friday, March 3

First Morning Concurrent Sessions

Session 5: Mapping Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century
Chair: Eric Slauter, University of Chicago

Building Urban Spaces for the Interior: Thomas Penn and the Colonization of Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania
Judith Ridner, Muhlenberg College

Mapping Early American Fiction
Ed White, University of Florida

Session 6: Mapping the Early Chesapeake
Chair: Jerry Danzer, University of Illinois at Chicago, emeritus

Garnishing the Plott: The Raoanoke Images of John White nad Theodore De Bry
Timothy Sweet, West Virginia University

“To Conquer all the World”? A New Interpretation of John Smith’s Map of 1612
Catherine Armstrong, University of Warwick (now at Manchester Metropolitan University)

Maps in the Dust: Negotiating Spaces in Early Colonial Virginia
Gavin Hollis, University of Michigan (now at Hunter College, CUNY)

Second Morning Concurrent Sessions

Session 7: Treaties and Colonial Space
Chair: Susan Imbarrato, Minnesota State University Moorhead

Mapping Tradition: Contesting Treaty Geographies in Black Hawk’s Narrative
Mark Rifkin, Skidmore College (now at University of North Carolina Greensboro)

Adam’s Excision: Remapping Race in the Treaty of Fond du Lac
Edward Watts, Michigan State University

Bull Stories
Andrew Newman, SUNY Stony Brook

Session 8: Mapping North Carolina and the Caribbean
Chair: Thomas W. Drise, University of Central Florida

Portraying Early North Carolina: The Exceptionalist Geography of John Lawson’s A New Voyage to Carolina, 1709
E. Thomson Shields, East Carolina University

“A capacious and secure harbor”: Mapping Havana in the English Magazine, 1740-1762
Scott Lehman, San Francisco State University

Hurricanes and Revolutions
Michael Drexler, Bucknell University

First Afternoon Plenary Session

Session 9: Cartographic History, Markets, and Contexts
Chair: Betsy Erkkilä, Northwestern University

Threads and Ink: Nineteenth-Century Schoolgirl Mapping, 1770s-1840
Judith A. Tyner, California State University, Long Beach

The Elephant in the Print Shop: Wall Maps, Literacy, and Symbolic Action in British America
Martin Brückner, University of Delaware

Colonial America’s Mapping Tradition: The Cartography of Capitalism
Thomas M. Woodfin, Texas A&M University

Second Afternoon Plenary Session

Session 10: The Great Basin and the Northwest in the Eighteenth Century
Chair: Matthew Edney, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Native American Contributions to the Mapping of the Interior American West
Richard Francaviglia, University of Texas at Arlington, now emeritus

The French Maps of North America from Lahontan and Delisle to Le Page and Buache
Gordon Sayre, University of Oregon

Syke’s Sketches, Vancouver’s Maps: Enlightenment Visions of the Northwest American Coast
Barton C. Keeton, Duke University

Saturday, March 4

Plenary Session

Session 11: Native American Cartography in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest
Chair: Brian Hosmer, D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, The Newberry Library (now at the University of Tulsa)

From Oneota toOklahoma via the 1837 Ioway Map
William Green, Beloit College

Constructing Territories: Indigenous Cartography in the Old Northwest
David Bernstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Re-establishing Handenosaunee Communities at Buffalo Creek
Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Yale University

Encountering Cartographic Performance: The Pawnee Star Chart Viewed from the Perspective of Skiri-Band Cosmology and Ritual
William Gustav Gartner, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Roundtable Discussion

Session 12: Knowledge, Practice, Culture: Cartography in the Early Americas
Organizer and chair: Martin Brückner, University of Delaware

Participants:

James Akerman, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library
David Buisseret, University of Texas at Arlington (now emeritus)
Tom Conley, Harvard University
Matthew Edney, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mary Sponberg Pedley, University of Michigan

Program Committee

Co-chairs: Gordon Sayre, University of Oregon; and Carla Zecher, Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies.

Committee members: James Akerman, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library; Martin Brückner, University of Delaware; Stephanie Fitzgerald, Mount Saint Mary’s College; Susan Imbarrato, Minnesota State University Moorhead; Thomas W. Krise, University of Central Florida; Dennis Moore, Florida State University; and Eric Slauter, University of Chicago.

Learn more about Center for Renaissance Studies programs.