The Cartographic Consolidation of America
The Cartographic Consolidation of America
While the Civil War was raging, physician Edwin Leigh tried to map the strength of slavery. Enthralled by the power of maps to visualize data, Leigh wanted to gauge the power of slavery in Missouri. A year earlier, the Coast Survey had used a technique of shading to represent the distribution of slavery in a recognizable and meaningful way. The tremendous achievements of the Coast Survey in the 1860s sparked an outpouring of cartographic experimentation in the years following the Civil War. This chapter focuses on individuals who advanced the use of cartography by mapping the nation after the Civil War, including Daniel Coit Gilman, an ardent education reformer and the first president of Johns Hopkins University, and Francis Amasa Walker, who was appointed chief of the new Bureau of Statistics in 1869. It begins with a discussion of the use of statistics in social inquiry before turning to the use of maps in Census Office reports and the publication of the Statistical Atlas of the United States in 1874.
Keywords: maps, Civil War, Edwin Leigh, slavery, Coast Survey, cartography, Daniel Coit Gilman, Francis Amasa Walker, statistics, Statistical Atlas of the United States
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