Slide Sets

The situation of the several parts of the earth is better learned by one day’s conversing with a map or sea chart, than by merely reading the description of their situation a hundred times over in books of Geography.
– Watts “On the Mind,” found on the title page of W.C. Woodbridge’s Modern Atlas, 1833

The history of maps has long been presented in both popular literature and scholarly works as a simple progression from the inaccurate to the precise. The noted achievements of cartography were seen as those which “filled in” the blank areas of the globe or corrected the “mistakes” of previous mapmakers. As maps designed for children did not contribute to this progression, the evolution of children’s maps has largely been ignored. The standard reference on the history of cartography make no mention of when maps for children first appeared or of how they differed from maps designed for an adult audience.

The problem with this view is that at its basis is the concept that maps are objective renditions of the real world and that inaccuracies found on the maps are the result of incorrect or incomplete data. Theoretically, then, with better data the rendition would be flawless. On the contrary, maps can never be flawless because they are never objective. At the most fundamental level, maps, like all forms of communication, are attempts to convey certain assertions about the world and those assertions can never be value-free and are seldom straightforward. Mapmakers of all ages have not only selected what will and what will not be put on the map, but also how it will be portrayed in order to convey their conceptions of the milieu. As Denis Wood writes, “Not only is this inescapable but it is precisely because of this interested selectivity—this choice of word or sign or aspect of the world to make a point – that the map is enabled to work.” It is what gives power to maps.

As noted by Norman Thrower, “viewed in its development through time, the map is a sensitive indicator of the changing thought of man, and few of his works seemt o be such an excellent mirror of culture and civilization.” It could be argued that school atlases are particularly unique “mirrors” of civilization because the material in the atlases is carefully selected by educators, presumably on the basis of what is important for children to know about the world. The six slides in this set are a cross-section of cartographic views that colored the image of the world for millions of 19th century American school children.

Prior to the American Revolution, geography texts which circulated in the American colonies were all published in Europe, most notably an English translation of Jean Marie Bruyset’s Atlas des Enfans (1783) and William Guthrie’s New System of Modern Geography (1780). After the Revolution a fledgling publishing industry began in Philadelphia and soon came to hold a dominant position in the U.S. school atlas market. Jedidiah Morse published Geography Made Easy in 1784, the earliest and, for over a quarter of a century, the most popular American geography. Mathew Carey, a recent immigrant from Ireland, produced an American edition of Guthrie’s Modern Geography. As Carey points out in the preface to the American edition, it was corrected, improved and greatly enlarged from the original.

An American edition of this work had long been wanted: and the publisher was of the opinion, that he could not give a more useful or acceptable present to the citizens of the United States. But upon close examination, he very soon discovered, that the grammar, which had been so long, and so loudly celebrated, united, in many passages, almost every fault, that can disgrace a literary composition. The book was exactly calculated to flatter the grossest prejudices of the English nation, at the expense of every other part of the human species.

Carey not only changed the text, but also the maps. On his maps, longitude was marked from two prime meridians—one running through London, the other through Philadelphia. While it is easy to understand the anti-English sentiment which flourished after the Revolution, it is also clear that the commercial publishers of the newly formed United States, such as Carey or Morse, drew heavily from the cartographic heritage of Great Britain and Europe.

The success of the Morse and Carey geographies encouraged other map publishers to enter the school geography and atlas market. Two of them, John Melish and Henry Tanner, both of Philadelphia, would become the preeminent American commercial map publishers of the first half of the 19th century. While they are best known for producing some of the most elegant atlases in American history, much of their income was derived from the sale of their school atlases and simple travel guides.

While the school atlas market may have been relatively lucrative, it also presented some unique challenges. The maps had to be inexpensive, relatively sturdy, and easily understood. Two printing methods for illustrative dominated late 18th century publishing—copper plate engraving and wood cut blocks. Carved wooden blocks were cheap but could only produce very coarse maps; copper plates could produce exquisitely fine detail, but the plates were expensive and could only produce a limited number of copies before the soft copper would wear out. New printing technologies had to be developed to supply the hundred of thousands of maps that were needed in a country that espoused education for all its children. Much of the history of 19th century cartography was related to improved printing technologies. S.A. Mitchell and J.H. Colton came to dominate the school atlas market because of their quick adoption of steel plate engraving in the 1830s. Thirty years later, Rand McNally adopted a wax engraving process first used in the United States by Sydney Morse, brother of the telegraph inventor Samuel Morse. By the end of the century, Rand McNally would replace Colton and Mitchell as the leading map maker in America.

The fact that most American school atlases were commercial ventures had an enormous effect on their content and development. Atlases had to be profitable, and that meant aggressive marketing, the recycling of old maps and illustrations to save costs, and the rapid development of new maps to keep ahead of rival firms. Mapping houses merged, failed, were bought out, and split apart to form new companies. Publishers stole ideas from one another and, perhaps most importantly, raided each other for personnel. While the corporate intrigue may have been intense, the maps published were normally quite conservative. Map-making was a labor intensive art, requiring skilled craftsmen hundreds or thousands of hours to draw the map and then engrave it upon a printing plate. Moreover, school systems often purchased atlases based on their familiarity with the atlas from previous years. Thus, there was tremendous reluctance to change successful products. As a result, a handful of popular atlases, updated and reprinted year after year, came to dominate the American classroom.

The maps in this atlas were hand colored and “tipped” into the atlas. This map of the recently purchased Louisiana region measured 5 ½” by 7 3/8”, utilized a simple conic projection, and was at a scale of approximately 1 inch to 300 miles. The atlas contained 58 maps, nearly half of them individual maps of the U.S. states and territories. Two world maps were included as were fifteen maps of European nations, while the rest of the world was covered on nine sheets. This map is typical of the genre of individual state and territory maps which comprised the greatest part of American school atlases of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. If color was used, it was to delineate borders; seldom were large areas shaded in with color. Rivers were emphasized, indicating the important position they held for transportation and power. Often the distance upstream that a river could be navigated was indicated, though not on this map. Towns were marked with little distinction made between large and small places. On this map New Orleans is labeled with the same size and style of letter as the small village of “San Andero” in southern Texas. A unique feature of this map is the inclusion of Indian settlements, which are marked with a small triangle. These undoubtedly were culled from the reports of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06. The mountains are shown using hachures, fine lines that indicate slope. On small-scale maps of poorly known areas, like this one, hachures often degenerated into “wooly caterpillars.”

This map represents several visions. First of all, it is an American vision of what constituted the Louisiana Purchase, as it includes not only the Missouri and Mississippi drainage basins but also virtually all of present day Texas, Washington, Oregon, and northern California. It is also clearly a vision of America as seen from the East. Note that longitude is marked not only from London (Greenwich) but also from Philadelphia and the longitudinal extent of the Great Plains is greatly exaggerated, while the Rockies and west coast are severly foreshortened and contain virtually no detail. The St. Francis Mountains of present day Missouri, and the Black Hills of South Dakota are portrayed, while western mountains, including the Coastal ranges of California, the Olympic Mountains, Sierra Nevadas, and Cascades are not, though not all were well known by this time. And finally, it is a vision of opportunity. The lakes shown along the northern border of the United States are portrayed like a series of giant stepping stones neatly linked together as if promising easy passage from the Great Lakes almost all the way across the continent. The dense network of rivers portrayed must have been tempting to Easterners accustomed to rivers as transportation arteries and power sources. The only major barriers shown are the Rocky Mountains, but even they are greatly minimized, by being shown as a single narrow chain conveniently broken by the unnamed Snake River.

William C. Woodbridge (1794-1854) was both publisher and trained geographer. He was a member of several learned societies on both sides of the Atlantic and editor of The American Annals of Education and Instruction. He was quick to incorporate the latest scientific and educational ideas into his atlases, as is evidenced by this map and others appearing in the fifth edition of his Modern Geography, published in 1831 and designed to accompany his System of Universal Geography. The atlas contains tables listing the population and resources of each country, the population of U.C. cities, the primary products of each U.S. state, and twelve maps. Nine of the maps would be considered standard reference maps—the world using the globular projection (see slide 3), maps of the six inhabited continents, the United States, and a map of central Europe—and three of the maps are early examples of thematic cartography. The first showed the political and moral divisions of the world, the second the distribution of climates and productive plants, and the last, shown here, the animals of the world. Theis monochrome map measures 10” x 8” and appears to be on a modified Mercator projection. It has an accompanying table with descriptions of the animals listed by the climactic zone—torrid, temperate, and frozen regions—in which they live. In addition there are a series of questions designed to be answered by students using the map and table, (such as, “Where do you find the Zebra?” and “What beasts of burden can you find in the Temperate Zone in Azia?”).

What makes the map particularly innovative is both what Woodbridge uses and what he does not use. With the exception of the equator, latitude and longitude markings are missing from this map. Woodbridge realized that the graticule, a mainstay of world maps, would only add visual clutter to the map. In another unusual design choice, Woodbridge “clipped” off the Arctic, Antarctic, Western North America, and the Far East, and moved Australia westward in order to maximize the size of area of interest on the page. The result is an uncrowded clear view of 62 different animal portraits as well as numerous views of human hunters. Each animal is identified by a number which corresponds to both the legend on the map and to the descriptions found in the accompanying table. It is easy to imagine that this map, with its delightful illustrations of both familiar and exotic animals, would be quite popular among school children of the day.

An interesting note concerning this map is that the lines marking the “Southern Limit of the Frozen Region” and “Northern Limit of the Tropical Regions” are isotherms taken from Woodbridge’s Isothermal Chart, which also appears in this atlas. The idea of using isotherms to map temperature is attributed to the German Geographer, Alexander Von Humboldt, and this atlas may represent their earliest use in American map making.

The years between 1820 and 1840 have been called the “Golden Age” of American cartography. It was during these two decades that copper plate engraving reached its highest level of craftsmanship, and that numerous scientific surveys were undertaken allowing mapmakers to greatly improve the accuracy of the outline of the world’s great land masses. By 1839 when this world map was published by R.C. Smith in Smith’s Atlas (which was designed to accompany his geography text), one could easily mistake it for a modern rendition of the world. On closer inspection, one would find the Antarctic continent and the northern polar regions only partially delineated and a large chain of nonexistent mountains portrayed in central Africa. These legendary “Mountains of the Moon” had been shown on maps for over a thousand years and their cartographic extinction, even in the face of mounting scientific evidence, was hard to realize!

This two page, 18 ½” by 11 ½”, map of the world employs the so called globular projection developed by the Arabic scholar, al-Bírúní, about 1000 AD. This circular projection, neither conformal nor equal area, was reintroduced by the English cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith in 1794 and came to be the preferred projection for general and school atlases for the next 100 years. Often school atlases, including Smith’s, would have two world views, the one using the globular projection would be labeled “A Map of the World” and the other, using Mercator’s famous projection, would be labeled “A Chart of the World.” For a nation so reliant on international trade as the United States the importance of Mercator’s projection for navigating the seas was so great that it was deemed a necessary part of children’s eduction.

The map’s Eurocentric viewpoint is quite evident. The four “states” of society are clearly conceived within a European Christian framework (see the discussion of slide 6) and of the five classes of world religions, three are forms of Christianity. In addition, the only inset showing greater detail is of central Europe.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this map is the amount of descriptive material it purports to display. The size of each nation or region is shown, as is their total population and population density. In addition, the form of government for each country or region is noted, as is the dominant form of religion, location of Protestant missionaries, and state of soceity. There is also a great deal of material concerning recent scientific expeditions, particularly in the Antarctic. The effectiveness of the map in communicating most of this information is questionable. The symbols are very small and the letters and numbers used for the races of mankind, forms of government, and population estimates get lost among the general text of the map. However ineffective this map was, it is indicative of a fundamental change in cartographic products designed for school children. Earlier maps were simply concerned with accurately portraying where places were located; this map attempted to educate the child concerning what those places were like.

In 1804 Jacob Perkins of Massachusetts developed a method for easily engraving steel printing plates. Before this time copper was used, because its softness allowed for easy engraving. Unfortunately, its softness also meant that only a few thousand impressions could be made before fine detail would wear out the plates. Perkins developed a process for first softening steel plates, called decarbonization, and then re-hardening them after they had been engraved. The hard steel plates could be used over and over again for years, and show virtually no wear. The rapid growth in the number of American school children created a need for hundreds of thousands of inexpensive maps, which the old copper printing plates simply could not meet. By 1830, two companies had adopted the new technology, S. Augustus Mitchell’s Philadelphia firm and Joseph H. Colton’s publishing company in New York City. These two publishing houses would dominate the school and home atlas market until the very end of the 19th century.

This map comes from the 1847 edition of Mitchell’s School Atlas. The map is 16” x 10” and is drawn at a scale of 1” to 50 miles. It covers the populated portions of the new western states as well as the western part of the state of Virginia. It is a general reference map showing the counties within each state, major cities and towns, topography, railroads, canals, and rivers. Like many maps designed for school atlases at this time, there is a great deal of information embedded in the map. Little flags mark the sites of important battles, and three styles of tiny anchors indicate how far up each river steamboats, ships, and sloops could navigate. The small numbers near streams indicate their total length, and those near cities denote the number of their inhabitants. The very fine type and symbols used on the map make the map somewhat difficult to read, and must have greatly tested the craftsmanship of the engravers.

The first edition of this popular atlas was released in 1839 and the last nearly 50 years later. The colors used to differentiate the various states—pink, yellow, pale green, and light blue—became cartographic conventions in American school atlases well into the 20th century. Maps like this became ingrained in American culture; clearly this was the style of map that Mark Twain had in mind when he penned the following exchange between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The two were arguing whether or not the balloon they were drifting in was over Illinois or Indiana.

Huck: …if we was going so fast we ought to be past Illinois, oughtn’t we?
Tom: Certainly.
Huck: Well we ain’t.
Tom: What’s the reason we ain’t?
Huck: I know by the color. We’re right over Illinois yet. And you can see for yourself that Indiana ain’t in sight.
Tom: I wonder what’s the matter with you, Huck. You know by the color?
Huck: Yes I do.
Tom: What’s the color got to do with it?
Huck: It’s got everything to do with it. Illinois is green, Indiana is pink. You show me any pink down here, if you can. No sir; it’s green.
Tom: Indiana pink? Why, what a lie?
Huck: It ain’t no lie; I’ve seen it on the map, and it’s pink.

-Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

One of the most unique inclusions of mid- and late-19th century atlases were comparative charts. One kind of these compared the size of the world’s islands by placing on a single page dozens of small maps of islands all at the same scale. On one page Java could be squeezed between Baffin Island and Madagascar, while Long Island might lie nestled between Ceylon and Crete. Similar charts were developed for nations and for lakes. One of the most common comparative charts, found in most school atlases, was one that showed the heights and lengths of rivers. This one, from J.H. Colton’s 1856 Atlas of the World, is one of the most elegant. These charts were often quite ornate and fanciful, perhaps a chance for the cartographer to express artistic abilities unfettered by the restraints of geographic location. The intricate border encompassing the map was typical of mid-19th century atlases. It reflects not only the high degree of skill that the engravers brought to their craft, but may also indicate the roots of their training, which for many engravers was in the production of bank notes and stock certificates.

This illustration, covering two pages, is quite large (25” x 17”). It graphically compares the length of 43 of the world’s great rivers and several hundred of the best know mountain peaks. For each river, the chart shows the region where the river rises, significant towns along its banks, major tributaries, and finally the body of water into which it emptied. To fit all of the rivers onto a single page necessitated a great deal of course-straightening. For example, note the Mississippi River system on the far left, which included the Ohio and Missouri Rivers and their associated tributaries. In reality, both the Ohio and Missouri Rivers flow somewhat perpendicular to the Missisippi, the Ohio entering from the east near Cairo, Illinois and the Missouri entering from the west just upstream of St. Louis. However, on the chart their courses are shown as being nearly parallel to the Mississipi. A particularly interesting portrayal is that of the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, which are shown as a single river system. In order to effectively accomplish this, Lake Michigan was simply removed.

The mountains of the world are shown as a series of long chains. There are chains for North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the British Isles. Each peak in the chain is numbered and those that were considered to be active volcanoes are shown with belching smoke. Along the right side of the chart is a scale in feet that could be used to determine the elevation of each peak. The numbers refer to a table printed on the following page which gave the name of the mountain and its exact elevation. Note that the first two “peaks” of the African chain are in reality the pyramids of Cheops and Cephrenes.

The disembodiment of the rivers and mountains from their geographic context can be both unsettling and enlightening. Mountains that are thousands of miles apart in reality are moved next to one another simple because they are nearly the same height—while those that may be geographic neighbors are widely separated because one is taller than the other. On the other hand, it is fascinating to so easily compare the length of the Mackenzie and Congo Rivers or the height of Mt. Whitney to the Matterhorn.

The popularity of comparative charts among educators was probably indicative of the state of the discipline of geography during the last half of the 19th century. At that time geography was considered a descriptive science concerned primarily with the measurement of the earth’s features and depiction of its peoples. Analytic and predictive geography would not become central to the discipline until well into the 20th century.

Shortly before the Civil War, William Rand opened a small print shop in Chicago, where he published a series of guidebooks. Andrew McNally, an immigrant from Ireland, worked for Rand as a printer, and after ten years became his partner in the renamed firm of Rand McNally & Co. Today, no American publishing house is more closely associated with maps than is Rand McNally. While transportation maps, first railrad and later highway maps, might be the cartographic product most closely associated with Rand McNally by the general public, their school atlases and geography texts became the most widely used in America.

Like the Mitchell and Colton publishing companies before them, the initial success of the Rand McNally Co. can be attributed to their early use of a new printing technology. Wax engraving, a process pioneered in the United States by Sydney Morse (brother of famed inventor Samuel Morse, and son of Jedidiah Morse, who produced the first American school atlas), was a process of creating printing plates in soft easily carved wax, and then electroplating the wax impressions to create a hard printing plate. Accepted slowly after its development in 1840, by 1880 it had become the dominant method for printing maps in America, a crown it would retain until World War II. The method was never widely used by European atlas makers, who noted its inferior linework and “muddy” detail. However, the American commitment to universal education demanded tremendous quantities of maps at low cost, and though wax engraving could not create the exquisite detail of copper or steel plates it was far less expensive and the wax plates could easily be updated. The greatness of Rand McNally was not in the quality of their work, but in the speed with which they could produce new products and in their marketing. They produced inexpensive geography textbooks with a picture, diagram, or map found on nearly every page. New editions were issued every year and special individual state versions were printed. For example, there was a “Kansas” edition which was identical to the regular issue, except for a four or five-page supplement of Kansas maps and statistics placed at the end of the book. Nothing was wasted; maps and illustrations from one edition would be updated, enlarged, reduced, or tinted for the next.

The illustration shown here is from their Primary School Geography of 1894. It is approximately 6” x 4 ½” and is typical of the quality of illustrations produced using the wax engraving method. The same illustration appears in numerous editions of this text as well as other texts and atlases published by Rand McNally. It was used to illustrate the four levels of mankind, as was commonly accepted in the 19th century. The levels were said to be based upon want. Savages were people who wanted to “live almost as animals do and work but very little,” while barbarians had slightly higher wants for better food, clothing and shelter than savages and were willing to work a little harder to supply them. Those people “who have still higher wants, such as to own lands, houses, and other property, who want to enjoy life more, and who have more regard for decency” were called half-civilized, while people “who have all these wants and who also want books, music, pictures, etc., and who feel the need of things to feed the mind as well as the body” were classified as civilized. Variations of these clearly racist “states of mankind” had been employed in school texts throughout the 19th century and would be carried over into the 20th century. The bias of these illustrations (note that the home of the “civilized” person is a virtual mansion) and the text may be painfully obvious to the reader of today. However, for the primary school child of 1890 the illustrations and written statements were probably viewed as factual as the pictures of the ostriches and the descriptions of icebergs that also appear in the book.

An interesting variation of the “states of mankind” was the idea that environmental conditions determined the degree to which regions of the world had become civilized. According to the theory, people of the tropics, finding food plentiful and clothing and shelter needs minimal, had no need to work hard and thus “better” their condition. In polar and other harsh climates life was so hard that all of man’s energy was spent simply attaining food and shelter, leaving little time to devote to the arts and sciences—so once again man did not progress. Only in the temperate regions did mankind advance, because here the conditions encouraged hard work to prosper but were not so harsh that significant time could not be devoted to the “higher” arts. Despite the evidence of the great civilizations that developed in the tropics of India, Africa, and Mexico and in the harsh climates of Tibet and the Andes, this concept would continue to be taught well into the second half of th 20th century.

Rand McNally employed many professional geographers and educators to review their books and make suggestions for improvement. As a result, much of the material in their texts was very sound, even by today’s standards. In particular, the maps that they created for their school atlases were generally of high quality, and their ability to produce them at low cost meant that millions of children had access to them.

1. Mathew Carey, "Missouri Territory," from A General Atlas (Philadelphia: M. Carey, and Johnson and Warner, 1914).
2. William Channing Woodbridge, "Chart of the Principal Animals of the World," from A Modern Atlas on a New Plan (Hartford: Oliver D. Cooke & Co., 1833).
3. R. C. Smith, "Map of the World," from Smith's Atlas (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1839).
4. Samual Augustus Mitchell, "Chief Part of the Western States," from Mitchell's School Atlas (Philadelphia: Cowperthwait & Co., 1847).
5. George Colton, "Mountains and Rivers," from Atlas of the World, vol. 2 (New York: J.H. Colton & Co., 1856).
6. "Degrees of Civiliation," in The Rand McNally Primary School Geography (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1894).

Ristow, Walter. American Maps and Mapmakers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985.

Thrower, Norman. Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer Abroad. Hartford, 1894.

Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: Guilford Press, 1992.

Woodward, David. The All-American Map: Wax Engraving and Its Influence on Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.