The World As They Knew It: Maps and Marginalia from Europe and North America

Maps contain keys to understanding how societies have historically viewed themselves, other communities, and asserted control. While modern maps use tested empirical data to represent exact geographic features to depict a city or section of land directly overhead, earlier cartographers (mapmakers) often took a more artistic approach to geographic representation. Perspectives from a nearby hill overlooking a town were common and all maps relied more on accounts from previous travelers in the cartographer’s interpretations. This perspective still provided a sense of a city’s size or the terrain, without the exactness of a street layout or distances between landmarks. It also allowed space in the margins to enhance and creatively describe an area in multiple ways. Early modern maps remain a collector’s item today for the unique artistic styles and exploration of geography in the Americas.

The maps in this collection range in time from the early modern period of European exploration and colonization of the Americas (1400-1700) through to 20th-century visions of transportation routes in New Mexico. Maps have always been powerful tools for representing and disseminating information about newly discovered lands. All of the maps also feature a form of implicit bias or stereotyping. More than purely geographical documents, the maps showcase myths of ‘primitive’ Indigenous lives, the fabricated island of California, and artistic visions of history and different communities. These views were perpetuated around the world through maps as mapmakers became cultural observers, closing the geographical gap in knowledge of the globe while intentionally distancing their own culture and beliefs from the land they depicted.