A History of America in 100 Maps

has most thoroughly reshaped American society, not just in

the Southwest but throughout the country (page 252).

By relaxing restrictions on immigration in 1965, Congress

fundamentally transformed the country’s racial and ethnic

profile. In that same year, Congress helped to realize African

American citizenship rights through the landmark Voting

Rights Act. The act dramatically expanded black political

participation, but it also inadvertently contributed to the

thorny problem of redistricting. Gerrymandering has a long

history in the United States, but in the 1990s it entered a new

phase with the use of computerized technology. Even in the

digital era, however, maps remained the lynchpin in those

battles over representation (page 254).

The struggle for civil rights in the 1960s inspired several

other movements for justice and recognition, notably among

gays and lesbians. In the 1970s and 1980s, the gay community

began to challenge the treatment of homosexuality as either

a sin or a perversion. The emerging recognition of gay rights

and sexual identity was partly influenced by the public health

crisis around acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

The maps on pages 246 and 248 represent two distinct yet

related efforts to understand the spatial behavior of this

deadly disease. In the first instance, the infectious disease

specialist Abraham Verghese turned to cartography to

investigate the spread of AIDS in rural Tennessee. Maps

enabled him to see patterns of patient behavior that would

have serious implications for his practice and the treatment of

AIDS in rural areas more generally. In the second instance, the

geographer Peter Gould experimented with early computer

modeling in an urgent quest to track—and thereby predict—

the path of the epidemic in the nation’s cities.

Gould’s “heat maps” underscore the terror of AIDS. They

also represent a shift in mapping that points to a more basic—

and easily overlooked—legacy of the 1960s. The research

required to send a man to the moon also improved computer

technology and led to the introduction of the microchip.

Similarly, the Internet began as a high-speed communication

network for the military in the 1960s. These technological

innovations—advanced by the Cold War—also transformed
mapmaking, and by extension cartographic and spatial

thinking. Just as new mapmaking techniques drove the first

visualizations of slavery on page 142, the advent of digital

mapping opened up new forms of inquiry and investigation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, data mapping and

modeling had proliferated into areas as diverse as public

health, politics, urban planning, and marketing.

We close this chapter with a map that marks the end of

one era and the beginning of another. The terrorist attacks

of September 11, 2001, point to the unsettled nature of

international relations in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Laura Kurgan’s map of Lower Manhattan represents an effort

to guide visitors at Ground Zero as they grappled with the

meaning of the attacks (page 256). Kurgan mapped a site that

was simultaneously a battlefield and a memorial. The map

of Ground Zero—its future uncertain—mirrors the more

general questions that bedeviled Americans as they entered

a new century.