On November 22, we hosted From The Vault: Doing More with maps.

For this collections showing, we welcomed educators attending the National Council for Social Studies Conference alongside general visitors and shared maps that encouraged us to think about how who made or paid for the creation of each map impacts what is depicted (or excluded).

Who Made the Map?

John Bonner, The town of Boston in New England (1744)

We often use this 1744 map of Boston with visiting students. We love to ask the question: What does the person who made the map want us to pay attention to?

John Bonner (c.1643-1726) lived in Boston with his wife, Mary, and his son, John. He was a captain, navigator, and shipwright (shipbuilder). It comes as no surprise then—and students often notice—Bonner highlights Boston’s role as a port city. He not only includes the details of all of the wharves, docks, and shipyards—he also takes the energy to detail several ships in the harbor.

This is the first printed map of Boston and gives us a significant understanding of what was here in the early eighteenth century.

Louise E. Jefferson, Uprooted people of the U.S.A. (1945)

With a map like this, we ask students: How does the cartographer capture our attention?

At first glance, this map may look like a typical twentieth-century tourist map of the United States. The color palette of primary colors, inclusion of numerous figures across the map and the decorative border all echo the maps sold to travelers to promote positive views of the United States.

This map was created by Louise E. Jefferson, an African American woman who achieved success in many fields. In this map, Jefferson highlights the impact of war on where and how Americans live. She points in her caption in the lower left corner that 25,000,000 Americans have been physically uprooted since 1940. Across the country she includes factors included Japanese internment camps, multiple negro migrations, and military training facilities. Jefferson demonstrates the complicated landscape of war from victory gardens to prisoner of war camps.

Don Bloodgood, Ask Shell! [1948–1955]

This map rewards the viewer with a feast of activity. With so much going on, we start by asking students: What do you notice first?

As we absorb the scene, we see all sorts of high jinks as campers wrestle with tents, fishermen are caught by their own hooks, cows eat paintings, and row boats tip over their passengers. Broken down cars are scattered across the roads.

We realize this map isn’t really a map at all, at least not one of a real place. Instead, it’s an imaginary mashup of the American West, the iconic landscape for the family road trips which became a rite of passage for many Americans in the postwar years, when this was published. A mutually reinforcing relationship between map publishers, oil and gas companies, automobile manufacturers, and tourist boards during this period made the road map one of the most recognizable forms of popular cartography.

How Do Maps Shape Us?

Republican National Committee, Electoral votes for President in 1916 and for Congress in 1918 : make your guess for 1920 [1919?]

We have become accustomed to making assumptions about “red” and “blue” states. However, the colors have not always had the same assumptions of political allegiance.

This map uses blue and red for elections in a different way than we are used to in 2024.

We ask students, “What patterns and trends do you see?”

John Russell, James Cutler, and Simon Gardner, Natural and political history of the Gerry-mander! : In two chapters [1813–1822]

When Governor Elbridge Gerry took the map of Massachusetts in 1812 and redrew a State Senate district around Salem so that it would contain more voters loyal to his Democratic-Republican Party, outraged opponents published a cartoon of the district’s outline forming the figure of a salamander. The new term, gerry-mander, stuck, and has been used ever since to describe the practice of drawing electoral maps for unfair partisan advantage.

We would engage in a long conversation with students about “How do we determine who fits? What does ‘fair’ look like on the map?”