Matt Hannah has reviewed Susan Schulten’s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago) on H-Net Reviews.

Susan Schulten’s Mapping the Nation is physically attractive, based on sound scholarly work yet accessibly written, and effectively supplemented by a user-friendly website offering a good selection of high-resolution images of historical maps and charts (www.mappingthenation.com ).The intuitive simplicity of the argument for the current relevance of the topic only reinforces the impression of a well-conceived and timely study. As Schulten, a history professor at the University of Denver, writes on the website, “Today we live in a world that is saturated with maps and graphic knowledge. The maps on this site reveal how this involved a fundamentally new way of thinking.” The “way of thinking” that coalesced as the tradition of thematic mapping has at its core the use of maps not as general representations of a region but…