made maps to investigate and publicize the condition of
the immigrant poor on the south side of Chicago. And in
Philadelphia W. E. B. DuBois mapped the living conditions of
the black community to analyze patterns of segregation. All
of these efforts were modeled on the work of Charles Booth,
who famously attempted to map poverty in East London in
the late nineteenth century. In turn, American suffragists
creatively deployed maps to advertise and extend women’s
suffrage across the country (page 174).
The first states to grant women the right to vote were inthe sparsely settled Far West, a region undergoing profound
shifts in the late nineteenth century. The railroads and the
federal government actively encouraged western settlement,
which had a catastrophic effect on the tribes of the Great
Plains. William Temple Hornaday mapped the systematic
destruction of the bison at late century, a function of native
hunting, fur trading, and especially the extension of the
western railroads (page 160). His attention to the buffalo
shocked the public and sowed the seeds of the modern
conservation movement. While Hornaday warned against the
extinction of the bison, John Wesley Powell urged Congress
to address the unrestrained growth in the arid West. His
solution was to reimagine western settlement not around the
logic of the grid but around watersheds and local control of
this limited resource (page 162). Powell failed to convince
Congress, in part because the nation’s industrialized
economy was chiefly driven by the needs of producers rather
than consumers.
Finally, industrialization at home led to a redefinitionof American foreign policy. As overproduction saturated
domestic markets, the US sought to expand trade with China
and Latin America. These economic demands—compounded
by a zealous sense of mission—brought the nation a host of
new territories in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The nation’s
largest map producer, Rand McNally, redrew its map of the
country in order to make room for the Philippines, Hawaii,
Cuba, and Puerto Rico (page 170). Rand McNally itself was
emblematic of the era: the company originally produced
timetables and tickets for the Chicago railroads, then
adopted inexpensive print techniques to produce maps,
atlases, and school textbooks for a mass market. Its new map
of the nation became a model for others to imitate, a visual
assertion of American international power at the dawn of a
new century.
Just a few years later, the nation was gripped by similar
enthusiasm for the Panama Canal, one of the greatest
engineering feats in American history (page 172). Capping
an era of extraordinary growth and recession, the opening of
the canal in 1914 was a source of tremendous national pride
that also coincided with the outbreak of the world’s most
destructive war to date.