The geographic revolution in early America : maps, literacy, and national identity / Martin Brückner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brückner, Martin, 1963- author.

Series:

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--Historical geography.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (293 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, North Carolina : University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Summary:

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 Bruckner 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 identity formation in America from the 1680s to the 1820s.Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner 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, Bruckner 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 Americaproposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.

Contents:

Introduction : the geographic revolution in the wilderness

The surveyed self : geodesy, writing, and colonial identity in eighteenth-century British America

The continent speaks : geography, oratory, and the figuration of identity in revolutionary America

Maps, spellers, and the semiotics of nationalism in the early republic

Geography textbooks and reading national character

Novel geographies of the republic

Native American geographies and the journals of Lewis and Clark

Literacy for empire : geography, education, and the aesthetic of territoriality.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908780-2-1

979-88-908780-3-8

0-8078-3897-7

1-4696-0101-X

OCLC:

966765636