Ruth Taylor White

Women in American Cartography

Although women have been involved in mapping throughout history, their story has largely been hidden. The standard histories of cartography have focused on men. A woman’s name is rarely found. In Women in American Cartography, Judith Tyner argues that women were not deliberately erased but overlooked because of the types of maps they made and the jobs they held.Tyner looks at over fifty women exemplars in American cartography and their maps. She looks at teachers who made school atlases in the early nineteenth century; at pictorial mapmakers and book illustrators who created popular maps; at women who pioneered social and persuasive mapping, promoting causes such as suffrage; at women travelers who recorded their trips and mapped unexplored places; at women whose maps helped win Word War II; at women academics who studied, taught, and wrote about cartographic theory at colleges and universities; and at women who worked in government agencies and commercial mapping companies. These are just a few of the stories of women in American cartography.

Bureau Publication

Mapping Wonderlands

Though tourism now plays a recognized role in historical research and regional studies, the study of popular touristic images remains sidelined by chronological histories and objective statistics. Further, Arizona remains underexplored as an early twentieth-century tourism destination when compared with nearby California and New Mexico. With the notable exception of the Grand Canyon, little has been written about tourism in the early days of Arizona’s statehood. Mapping Wonderlands fills part of this gap in existing regional studies by looking at early popular pictorial maps of Arizona. These cartographic representations of the state utilize formal mapmaking conventions to create a place-based state history. They introduce illustrations, unique naming conventions, and written narratives to create carefully visualized landscapes that emphasize the touristic aspects of Arizona. Analyzing the visual culture of tourism in illuminating detail, this book documents how Arizona came to be identified as an appealing tourism destination. Providing a historically situated analysis, Dori Griffin draws on samples from a comprehensive collection of materials generated to promote tourism during Arizona’s first half-century of statehood. She investigates the relationship between natural and constructed landscapes, visual culture, and narratives of place. Featuring sixty-six examples of these aesthetically appealing maps, the book details how such maps offered tourists and other users a cohesive and storied image of the state. Using historical documentation and rhetorical analysis, this book combines visual design and historical narrative to reveal how early-twentieth-century mapmakers and map users collaborated to imagine Arizona as a tourist’s paradise.