Mapping Nature across the Americas

This richly illustrated and carefully edited volume deserves high praise and will be of great interest to Latin Americanists across the geographical and temporal spectrum. Twelve focused essays, a comparative epilogue, and an eloquent introduction by the two coeditors reflect the results from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2014. As the introductory essay makes clear, this collection is likely the “first book to fully contemplate historical maps as the primary evidentiary sources in examining the evolution of environmental knowledge in the Americas” (p. 2). It draws sustenance from a longer history of attention to the relationship between mapping and human enterprise in and of the environment that is at least 500 years in the making. The authors focus with creative verve and scholarly precision on distinct scales of ecological history as expressed through the cartographic enterprise. The volume is eminently interdisciplinary, bringing together specialists on the history of art, philosophy, literature, environment, and other fields, a hallmark of the best scholarship in the ever-burgeoning, rapidly evolving field of the history of cartography.One important emphasis of the volume is its attention to marginalized peoples—including Indigenous societies and enslaved populations—and the manner by which maps recognize these peoples' vibrant existence even while assisting in their erasure or removal. Indigenous geosophy—that is, the geographical knowledge of Indigenous peoples, a term referenced by Craig Colten in his essay—stands in for a range of knowledge systems explicated within these essays. This is highlighted especially in the volume's first section, which includes essays by Jennifer Saracino (on Indigenous symbolic conventions within the Ayer map of Teotihuacan and changing concepts of land analyzed through comparisons with contemporaneous documents, including the Techialoyan manuscripts), Kelly Hopkins (focusing on how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps of the Great Lakes articulated forms of Indigenous mobility and migration, agricultural practices, attempts at Native autonomy, and significant social changes pressed on Indigenous groups despite their contributions to European geographical knowledge), Craig Colten (on the persistence of Native names within the fluvial toponymy of the multilingual American South, with a focus on how colonial-period regional maps of Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana remained viable into the national period despite governmentally induced pressures, commercial practices, and a certain “fluidity” in colonial naming practices), and Michelle Zacks (in an innovative chapter on the antebellum maritime transport of Chesapeake oysters and other goods as part of a “cultural landscape” for antislavery ideology and activism, including opportunities for people of African descent to use the oyster industry to enhance their own material conditions and gain freedom from white oppression) (pp. 86, 90).The second section begins with two chapters that are after this researcher's heart: one (by Ernesto Capello) highlighting the importance of mountains to the French geodesists Charles-Marie de La Condamine and Pierre Bouguer as they graphically traduced the Andes into print, and another (by Adriana Méndez Rodenas) on Alexander von Humboldt and his textual and cartographic mapping of the Orinoco River basin. Both emphasize the importance of previous European exploration—whether in the Alps or elsewhere in the Americas—and the power of the creative geographical imagination to influence cartographic representations in a supposed age of precision and accuracy. Two additional chapters—an innovative discussion by Brian Bockelman on the presence of palm trees and other “vegetation mapping” practices in cartographic representations from early modern portolan charts to nineteenth-century physical atlases, and a fascinating analysis by Raymond Craib on the literary mapping of Hernán Cortés's supposed route through central Mexico and its textual inscriptions through an imagined history by non-Mexican observers—round out this section by highlighting the fluid boundaries between fact and fiction in environmentally inflected maps (and texts) (p. 160).The final section focuses on larger scales and more complex geopolitical concepts, including borders, homesteads, and distinctive regimes of nation-based environmental thought. Mary Mendoza discusses the highly politicized mapping of the US-Mexican border from the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth by emphasizing government-sponsored commissions that regularly distorted on-the-ground realities and erased populations with the stroke of a pen. Sara Gregg draws attention to the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act, which led to one of the most significant surveys of natural resources in the western United States to date and an association between climatological realities—especially the presence or absence of water in the arid and semiarid regions—and western expansion. Matt Dyce and Graeme Wynn provide a soaring overview of the centuries-long mapping of Canadian space and the particular geographic, climatological, and resource-based challenges to synthesizing and historicizing this process. And Peter Nekola breaks new ground by suggesting that late nineteenth-century forest maps were experiments in “new ways of representing field data” that placed agricultural specialists and plant scientists at the vanguard of newly “philosophical” ways of viewing landscapes; the chapter provides an innovative manner of understanding forests through underrepresented cartographic documents (pp. 270, 279). The epilogue, by Catherine Dunlop, offers a useful and insightful summary of some of the contributors' salient points and an important admonition to consider using historical maps as tools for teaching environmental history.This volume stands proudly alongside the many other collaborations between the University of Chicago Press and the Newberry Library in bringing together younger scholars with established specialists to assess traditional topics and launch new fields of cartographic study. It also highlights many extraordinary collection items from US government repositories and sundry treasures from the Newberry itself.In short, Mapping Nature across the Americas is an excellent and innovative collection that will be useful to students and scholars throughout the Americas, opening new vistas and challenging traditional perspectives in a vein similar to the multiple actors from across the social spectrum whom the editors and the volume's contributors so majestically illuminate.

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