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Professional geographers use maps to reveal spatial patterns in their data and to seek correlations in those patterns, although they no longer always do so by the time-honoured method of simple visual comparison of distributions on a series of paper maps. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are founded on maps stored electronically. In most British geography departments, cartography has been distanced from geography. This chapter discusses the use of maps in geography, quantification and spatial science, maps and public policy in Britain, thematic mapping, compilation of atlases and reading of maps.

A map can translate data into visual form and give it meaning. These “thematic” or “weighted” maps are used to identify particular types of information or relationships. By contrast, traditional maps typically represent locations, waterways, topography, and borders without emphasizing any one aspect in particular. Thematic mapping dates back to the 1830s when Europeans began compiling maps of crime, disease, and temperature. This technique was soon adopted by American elites, not only as way-finding or location aids, but also as tools of spatial analysis, inquiry, administration, and control. This book explores the use of maps by Americans to understand their past and the extent to which national identity was predicated on geographical knowledge. Focusing on historical mapping from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, it considers the development of climate and weather maps to study the behavior of storms and the nature of disease. It also looks at maps depicting the density of slavery and the use of cartography as a tool of governance.

Francis Amasa Walker's Statistical Atlas of the United States, published in 1874, was unlike anything that most Americans had ever seen. But he soon realized that these new forms of cartography would require training to be understood. Emma Willard created maps of the past to convey a sense of sovereignty and identity to her fellow citizens, giving tangible evidence of the new nation's coherence and stability. Similarly, Johann Georg Kohl spearheaded an effort to collect and preserve old maps as evidence of America's territorial legitimacy. By giving the nation's history a cartographic dimension, Kohl and Willard helped establish many of the models of historical mapping that endure today. Whereas Kohl and Willard mapped the nation's past, others, such as Alexander von Humboldt, focused on mapping its present. Techniques were developed to map slavery, climate, and epidemics. The twentieth century witnessed how the use of thematic maps continued to flourish—in part due to the advent of geographic information systems (GIS)—in areas ranging from etiology to urban planning, social research, marketing, and political strategy.

During the same period when American-made maps began to circulate in the public and private spheres, much of the impetus for recognizing maps as a form of spectacle was generated internally from within the maps’ signs, symbols, and inscriptions. Drawing on several hundred American maps, in particular wall maps, this chapter delineates design choices made by successive generations of commercial mapmakers who transformed maps into unique communication platforms intended for the simultaneous transmission of cartographic and noncartographic information. It shows that maps freely borrowed from a visual stock of signs, images, and graphic designs available in a media landscape that included small paintings, large street signs, and the decorative arts. Contending that American mapmakers constructed large and small maps by tapping a common visual literacy, this chapter offers a comprehensive morphology of American map designs, in the course of which it demonstrates a compositional logic linking maps as unique media platforms to nascent expectations about image legibility and commercial visual culture.