In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated volume edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, five leading scholars in history, geography, and cartography discuss the role Spanish explorers and mapmakers played in bringing knowledge of the New World to Europe. The entradas, of Pánfilo de Narváez and Alvar Núnez Cabeza de Vaca (1527-37), Fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1539-42), and Hernando de Soto and Luis de Moscoso (1539-43), into the Greater Southwest of North America were crucial in the dissemination of information and images of the newly discovered lands. The contributors investigate linkages between the early explorers’ experiences, their influence on indigenous peoples, and perceptions of the region as reflected in printed maps of the period. This body of images, which incorporated Indian information, made a powerful impression on the still largely preliterate people of Europe, reshaping their world.

The Great Basin was the last region of continental North America to be explored and mapped, and it remained largely a mystery to Euro-Americans until well into the nineteenth century. In Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin, geographer-historian Richard Francaviglia shows how the Great Basin gradually emerged from its “cartographic silence” as terra incognita and how this fascinating process both paralleled the development of the sciences of surveying, geology, hydrology, and cartography and reflected the changing geopolitical aspirations of the European colonial powers and the United States. Francaviglia’s interdisciplinary account of the mapping of the Great Basin combines a chronicle of the exploration of the region with a history of the art and science of cartography and of the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which maps are created. It also offers a compelling, wide-ranging discussion that combines a description of the daunting physical realities of the Great Basin with a cogent examination of the ways humans, from early Native Americans to nineteenth-century surveyors to twentieth-century highway and air travelers, have understood, defined, and organized this space, psychologically and through the medium of maps. Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin continues Francaviglia’s insightful, richly nuanced meditation on the Great Basin landscape that began in Believing in Place.

Mapping Wonderlands explores popular, illustrated maps of Arizona as a tourism destination, investigating the relationship between landscapes, visual culture, and narratives of place. These aesthetically appealing maps offer tourists an Arizona landscape at once historical and imaginary – just as their makers intended.

From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States took ownership of the land from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California—today's American Southwest. Each country faced the challenge of holding on to territory that was poorly known and sparsely settled, and each responded by sending out military mapping expeditions to set boundaries and chart topographical features. All three countries recognized that turning terra incognita into clearly delineated political units was a key step in empire building, as vital to their national interest as the activities of the missionaries, civilian officials, settlers, and adventurers who followed in the footsteps of the soldier-engineers. With essays by eight leading historians, this book offers the most current and comprehensive overview of the processes by which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. soldier-engineers mapped the southwestern frontier, as well as the local and even geopolitical consequences of their mapping. Three essays focus on Spanish efforts to map the Gulf and Pacific Coasts, to chart the inland Southwest, and to define and defend its boundaries against English, French, Russian, and American incursions. Subsequent essays investigate the role that mapping played both in Mexico's attempts to maintain control of its northern territory and in the United States' push to expand its political boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The concluding essay draws connections between mapping in the Southwest and the geopolitical history of the Americas and Europe.

57 studies of individual maps and the cultural environment that they spring from and exemplify, including one pre-Columbian map.

This volume comprises the proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography. The nineteen papers reflect the research interests of the Commission which span the period from the Enlightenment to the evolution of Geographical Information Science. Apart from studies on general cartography, the volume, which reflects some co-operation with the ICA Commission on Maps and Society and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), contains regional studies on cartographic endeavours in Northern America, Brazil, and Southern Africa. The ICA Commission on Maps and Society participated as its field of study often overlaps with that of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography. The USGS which is the official USA mapping organisation, was invited to emphasise that the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography is not only interested in historical maps, but also has as mandate the research and document the history of Geographical Information Science. The ICA Commission on Maps and Society participated as its field of study often overlaps with that of the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography. The USGS which is the official USA mapping organisation, was invited to emphasise that the ICA Commission on the History of Cartography is not only interested in historical maps, but also has as mandate the research and document the history of Geographical Information Science.

Originally published: Great cruelties have been reported: the 1544 investigation of the Coronado Expedition / Richard Flint. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2002.

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, they are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. These very characteristics, however, give maps their importance for understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world, and give historical maps, especially, the power to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature over time. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature across the Americas. Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history, and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas—including, for example, stories of indigenous cartography in Mexico, the allegorical presence of palm trees in maps of Argentina, the systemic mapping of US forests, and the scientific platting of Canada’s remote lands.

Between 1539 and 1542, two thousand indigenous Mexicans, led by Spanish explorers, made an armed reconnaissance of what is now the American Southwest. The Spaniards’ goal was to seize control of the people of the region and convert them to the religion, economy, and way of life of sixteenth-century Spain. The new followers were expected to recognize don Francisco Vázquez de Coronado as their leader. The area’s unfamiliar terrain and hostile natives doomed the expedition. The surviving Spaniards returned to Nueva España, disillusioned and heavily in debt with a trail of destruction left in their wake that would set the stage for Spain’s conflicts in the future. Flint incorporates recent archaeological and documentary discoveries to offer a new interpretation of how Spaniards attempted to conquer the New World and insight into those who resisted conquest.

The First European Colony in the United States Juan Ponce de León, the discoverer and first governor of La Florida, established the first European colony in the United States on the west coast of Florida in 1521. Although its location has never been determined, historians have theorized that it likely occurred somewhere in the Charlotte Harbor area. The settlement is believed to have lasted only three to four months. It was abandoned when conflict with the local Indians resulted in Juan Ponce being mortally wounded. The survivors took him to Cuba where he died of his wounds. In 1528, seven years after the Ponce de León settlement had been abandoned, Pánfilo de Narváez landed just north of the entrance to Tampa Bay with an expedition of 400 men and 10 women. On one of their first inland expeditions they encountered the Tocobaga Indians at their main village in today’s Safety Harbor, where they found many cargo boxes and European artifacts that may have been remnants of the Ponce de León settlement. The inland exploration by Narváez and three hundred of his men, seeking a non-existent large bay to their north, resulted in the deaths of all but four, who became the first to explore inland North America, finally reaching the Pacific eight years later. Rare and seldom-seen Spanish maps produced by the royal mapmakers in Seville in 1527 show the location and latitude for the Bay of Juan Ponce. MacDougald produces compelling evidence that Narváez was seeking the Bay of Juan Ponce, and that the first European colony established in the United States occurred in Tampa Bay, likely in the area known today as Safety Harbor in Old Tampa Bay, the site of the Tocobaga village visited by Narváez.