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In this regular column, geographer and Broadcast contributing editor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro roams through his favorite maps from history to examine the scientific, social, and psychological significance of cartography.

We’ve been hearing a lot, in our age of derangements and dogmas and violent acts born of mad ideas on the internet, about a vile bit of bred-on-4chan dross called “the Great Replacement.” You’d be forgiven for having the impression, from reading accounts of this “theory,” that all our ills derive from white Americans being “replaced” by non-white ones, that its embracers’ core ideas leapt into existence, from the web’s nether regions, only recently. But as is made plain in John B. Trevor’s seminal 

 (1919), their ideas are anything but new.

Trevor was a wealthy attorney who became America’s most notorious jazz age xenophobe: an unelected power broker, in the Robert Moses mold, who never won public office but nonetheless shaped U.S. immigration policy—and mainstream ideas about who counts as “white”—for decades. Trevor got his start working on Wall Street alongside the prominent eugenicist Madison Grant, whose 1916 book 

 A decorated Army veteran, Trevor became an officer in the Military Intelligence Division after World War I, charged with monitoring Communist sympathizers and foreign agents in New York. Then he moved to Washington to work as a lobbyist. As “special counsel” to the U.S. Senate, he became a key architect of the 1924 Immigration Act––the law that enshrined his and his fellow eugenicists’ obsession with “national origins” as the core of U.S. immigration policy, banning all arrivals from Asia and severely limiting those from Eastern and Southern Europe. That notorious policy, which wasn’t repealed until 1965—when the end of the “quota system” helped create our polyglot populace of today—was Trevor’s central legacy. But it was during a stint as New York’s Special Deputy Attorney General, in 1919, that he drew on his passion for surveilling immigrants to create this map that’s as much a fascinating portrait of the city’s ethnic makeup at the time as it is a twisted portrait, as telling in its gaps and conjured bugbears as in the sites its maps, of the xenophobe’s mind.

By the time Trevor and his cronies in the NYPD endeavored to chart the suspect sectors of Manhattan and the Bronx, such demography-tinged mapping of a city’s zones of ill repute wasn’t new (witness Charles Booth’s 

 of Victorian London). But one distinctive aspect of Trevor’s visualization of ethnic enclaves was its misleading depiction of them as wholly homogenous, in contrast to those “mixed” zones—left white on the map—that it saw as WASP-dominated. Another is what its color-coded areas suggest about how many people now seen as white didn’t count as such in 1919. Trevor’s map doesn’t just chart the “Negro” precincts of Central Harlem, the Chinese ones of Chinatown, and sprawling swaths of urban space on the Lower East Side and uptown and across the Bronx, colored red for the “Russian Jews” who were, to Trevor, perhaps most vexing of all. (This is a man who later argued fiercely against the U.S. admitting Jews fleeing Hitler.) His chart also maps an olive-tinged thicket of “Austro-Hungarians” ringing Gracie Mansion, “Syrians, Turks, Armenians, Greeks,” circling Madison Square in orange, and too, in a menacing splash of mustard above Mount Morris Park, the “Scandinavians and Finns” then clustered along Lenox Avenue.

The geography of “seditious activities” that’s overlaid onto this map of ethnicity implies a causal link—to be ethnic, here, is to be seditious—that’s made concrete in its 65 sites where “radical meetings are held” and the further 44 where such meetings’ devotees, perhaps, espoused their views in print. Among the latter category are the offices, marked by blue stars, of publications ranging from 

 to a panoply of other lefty rags—from 

—not printed in English. For “seditious” assembly, the spots indicated on this map include a predictable litany of union halls and Labor Temples, and no fewer than seventeen addresses with “socialist” in their names, from the Local Socialist Headquarters to the Greek Socialist Union of America to the Socialist Party, Bohemian Branch. There’s also a place, on Avenue A, called the Progress Casino (not to be confused with the Progress Hall, on East 10th Street), and not a few prestigious institutions of education and culture (Carnegie Hall, Cooper Union). The name of the Beethoven Club, on East 5th Street, may suggest a roomful of music-lovers, but its membership, at least according to Trevor’s map, housed more sinister goals.

It's perhaps a fair bet to claim that Trevor’s own aims, as the kind of man who saw anyone who looked or thought differently than himself as a threat, were more dangerous by far. The need to prove that that’s so, in the century since he surveyed New York, has not lessened. ♦

"Ethnic New York"

Cartophilia: John B. Trevor's "Ethnic New York"

Maps and history have always gone together. That’s true everywhere people have pondered old maps to study the past, or drawn new ones to change their current course. But in the United States, no map so dwells in the mind as an emblem of its history—of the legacies of systemic racism that define our past and bedevil our present—like the US Coast Survey’s “Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States,” first published in 1861.

The Coast Survey map, which was commissioned by the federal government and distributed widely as the Civil War began, was drawn by cartographer Edwin Hergesheimer. The demographic data to which Hergesheimer gave visual form wasn’t complex: Based on numbers from the 1860 federal census, he used “choropleth” shading to assign to each county in every state across the want-away South (including Missouri, lest we moderns forget that Ferguson and St. Louis were also bastions of bondage) a sum of inky saturation according to the portion of its populace that was enslaved. Those counties that show up blackest—upwards of 80% of their residents were enslaved—were, well, the Blackest. Thus did Hergesheimer’s map conjure a potent visual story—or stories—about the spread of the “peculiar institution” across the US’s first decades of existence, and its precise extent at the start of a war whose combatants the map’s profits went to support. (The banner across its top reads, “Sold for the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers of the U.S. Army.”)

Among these stories is the shining band that bedecks the map’s middle—from Atlanta across Alabama and on toward Houston—and foreshadows what demographers still call America’s “Black belt” today. Here too are other stories, in the shape of other dark areas on the map, to which students of Black cultural history can point: these regions include the Mississippi’s 

, in whose cotton fields musicians and laypeople, bending notes on stringed instruments like their forebears from Senegambia, birthed the blues; the bottomlands and islands of South Carolina, still home to Gullah Geechee lifeways; the Tidewater’s plains by the Chesapeake, in Virginia, from whose old plantations hundreds of thousands of people were “sold south,” across the first half of the nineteenth century, to develop the acreage and economy of Dixie. 

All these are stories upon which the modern student of America’s past, gazing at this map, can readily alight. But it’s interesting, too, to wonder what its creators—and Abraham Lincoln, who reportedly hung a copy of it in the White House—took from Hergesheimer’s lines and ink. What did Honest Abe and his advisors ponder as they studied its data, 

, throughout the War Between the States? Some of their thoughts may have been military: Did the Union’s generals approach the prospect of pitched battles in the South’s blacker counties differently? Others may have been economic: in 1861, this was a map not merely of demography but of capital—at the Civil War’s start, the bankable value of the South’s nearly four million enslaved humans, some $4 billion dollars, was greater than its real estate. For further consideration of these questions, you’ll have to ask historians. But in that truth, too, and the distance between the stories this map was created to tell and ones it may signal now, lies a great truth common to all maps made in good faith: its stories shift with time, and according to who’s looking. ♦

Cartophilia: Mapping US Slavery

Nothing melds art and science like a map. This regular column by Pioneer Works alum and advisor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, illuminating some of Jelly-Schapiro’s favorite maps from history, explores cartography’s power to mold our minds and move our feet.

“The Mississippi River created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so if it remained in one channel.” So wrote John McPhee in a classic 1987 

, about how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers endeavors to maintain the current route of North America’s greatest river across the broad alluvial plain over which its waters have continually changed course, often to significant effect, for millennia. In that article which became the basis for McPhee’s book 

, the writer focused on the Corps’ herculean efforts, a couple hundred miles above New Orleans. This is where its spillways and dikes prevent the river’s main channel from pouring into Louisiana’s Atchafayala Basin, as has been its desire for decades now, rather than continuing toward the storied port that French settlers established near its mouth in 1718, and the critical nodes of American industry (petrochemical firms, mostly) that have clustered nearby since. “For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural,” McPhee wrote, “but in the interval since the first Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature.” Across 28,000 vivid words on that nation’s efforts to control nature here, McPhee described his adventures with Cajun crawfishermen on a skiff called Mon Ark, and many arcane yet fascinating facts about hydrology and silt. But none of those 28,000 words paint a more vivid picture of his subject than an astonishing series of hand-drawn maps, from a few decades before.

Harold Fisk produced his “Meander Belt Maps” in 1944 for—who else—the Army Corps of Engineers. Fisk designed his moist masterworks to accompany an otherwise bone-dry report on the Corps’ Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Divided into fifteen detailed plates, they span some 900 miles of the river’s length (500 as the crow flies), from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to Donaldsonville, Louisiana. To create them, Fisk began by overlaying a contemporary map of the river’s course with reliable charts of its route from 1880, 1820, and 1765—a first step that offered a striking vision of how Big Muddy’s bends had shifted even in the brief century between Huck Finn’s day and Fisk’s own. But then Fisk reached back further. He used fresh data whose gathering the Corps had commissioned in the wake of some catastrophic floods in the early twentieth century, to better understand the river’s whims and character over the 

The Corps’ engineers bored 16,000 holes deep into the sediment of the river’s ”meander belt.” Then they pulled up data that allowed Fisk to chart where it flowed back when the great Algonquian city of Cahokia, overlooking its waters in current-day Illison, boasted a populace equal to London’s in the 14th century—and also from much further back than that, when mastodons nosed its banks.

The result, on each of Fisk’s fifteen detailed plates, wasn’t merely a cartographic document of remarkable perspicacity and worth. His maps are astonishing visual objects: His Medusa’s heads of riverine strands, with their entwined bands of pale ochre and cobalt and lime, can’t but put one in mind, as only great paintings can, of both mathematics and myth.

Fisk’s maps, born of science, are no doubt art. But they also remind us that most maps are more akin to snapshots than to films. We look to modern maps to teach us how a city or country 

. We look at historical maps to learn how such places 

(or how their past inhabitants, in any case, saw them). In recent years, ever-more-powerful microchips have enabled us to turn gigabytes of geographic data into digital maps of astonishing complexity that often feature glowing animations, too: On our screens, the spatial charting of change across time has grown common (at least for the map geeks and programmers for whom LIDAR and GIS are holy initials). But part of what’s distinctive about Fisk’s charts is the inspired way he found to at once represent and evoke time’s passing on paper. No feature of North America’s landscape has been so freighted with meaning and metaphor as the watercourse that drains 42% of its H2O. But I know no depiction of its nature that makes those metaphors feel more real than Fisk’s stunning charts of how the great river’s waters—and its soul, if you like—wander space and time. ♦

Cartophilia: Rivers of Time

Nothing melds art and science like a map. This regular column by Pioneer Works alum and advisor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, illuminating some of Jelly-Schapiro’s favorite maps from history, explores cartography's power to mold our minds and move our feet.

Maps are nothing if not perspectival. This is Lesson One, or should be, in Cartographic Literacy 101. Every map squashes our three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional plane. Every map, whether it charts a nation’s borders or where to get dinner, betrays a point of view. This is key to how, as abstractions of the real, they work: by helping us envision the world’s places, and how they relate in space, with the help not of a few cartographic conventions we’ve internalized from the map-makers of early modern Europe (among them making North “up,” and picturing the earth’s surface from directly above).

But there’s a larger and even more basic fact about maps, remarked upon less often, that’s suggested by these words—"perspective,” “envision,” “picture”—and which we’d do well to consider: maps, like the way we usually conceive of geography in general, are a media predicated on 

Because our eyes, of course, are just one the organs by which we experience our planet, and attach memories and meaning to its places. We also do this with our ears and digits and tastebuds, and our noses, too. And recognizing geography’s traditional tying to visual perception, in how it has sought to model and help us understand the world, prompts a fascinating question: what might maps created for those without the capacity for sight look—or perhaps more to the point, 

Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind

, from 1837, in which this chart of Maine appears alongside similar maps—their mountains rendered as cross-hatched ridges, their edges as strands of dots—of twenty-four states.

Published in Boston by the New England Institute for the Education of the Blind, this volume  contained the first paper maps, according to its makers, intended to be used by the blind “unassisted by a seeing person.” It’s also a book about which people knew until David Rumsey, perhaps America’s greatest map collector—and the owner of one of just four extant copies of the Atlas (out of 50 originally printed)—uploaded hi-res photographs of its pages to his 

. Rumsey has spent the past couple of decades turning his astonishing collection—which numbers some 150,000 pieces of 

—into hi-res digital images available for perusal and permission-free use, by anyone on the internet, with a care typified by his photographers’ lighting of this atlas’s embossed pages from the side, so that we can glean their ridges.

These pages’ original creator, Samuel Gridley Howe, was a prominent Boston progressive and the husband of Julia Ward Howe, a prominent abolitionist who won fame, during the Civil War, for penning “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Sam Howe’s chosen battles, as director of the school which later became the Perkins Institute (which remains a leader in educating the visually impaired to this day), seem to have involved seeking ever more ways to help the blind, as he put it in his introduction to this Atlas, 

“have all amelioration to their condition which human ingenuity, prompted by benevolence, can effect.”

 In 1835, he acquired a printing press for the school. Then he busied himself perfecting a technique for producing “tactile books” whose words were comprised not of ink but raised bumps of paper. Braille had been invented in 1825, but it wasn’t yet in wide use. The books that Howe and his associates produced in Boston—among them a complete text of the New Testament, a Universal History, and textbooks on grammar, geography, and spelling—utilized an all-lower-case alphabet of embossed Roman letters, with a few adjustments for unsighted readers (note here the upper-case-like shape of letters—g, p, y—which in lower-case would have descenders).

Similar adjustments were made to the atlas’s maps by their chief designer, Howe’s friend Stephen P. Ruggles. Every cartographer knows that making a good map, like telling a good story, is as much about what one chooses to leave out as what one includes. But Ruggles seems to have well-gleaned that this onus of simplification—the need to include only “principle features” (Maine’s Penobscot and Kennebec Rivers are included here; its Saco and Allagash are not)—is only heightened in a map of the blind. Its legibility depends on maintaining plenty of blank space between its raised lines (and, here, on an accompanying text which explains for its intended users that the Penobscot and Kennebec are labeled with the abbreviations “P.R.” and “K.R.,” respectively).

As to how and whether those intended users found enjoyment and edification from Howe’s and Ruggles’ maps, we’ll have to take Howe’s word for it that his school’s students “soon understood [what] sheets of stiff pasteboard, marked by certain crooked lines, represented …[and] were delighted to go on with tireless curiosity.” The fact that similar maps didn’t grow widespread is perhaps most attributable to the cost and complexity of their making. It may also have to do with the truth that the mental effort required to ingest such charts by touch, as one scholar recently explained, in describing the sum of memory it takes to stitch those impressions into a coherent map, is akin to a sighted person “looking through a soda straw and moving it around [to try and] figure out its layout.”

But the context of that last remark—an article hailing a new 

 for its cantons’ blind, and the pleasure with which they met it—speaks to an apparent resurgence, of late, in map-making for the visually impaired. So does an ambitious new 

, for that vast nation’s 50 million citizens who are blind. It’s striking, in examining its contents, to note their resemblance in form to Howe’s maps from 1837—and their distinctions. The Indian atlases maps, like that Swiss one, of course, don’t employ Howe’s now-outmoded embossments to convey their contents in Hindi, English, Gujarati, and Telugu: they use Braille. ♦

Cartophilia: Atlas of the United States for the Blind (1837)

Cartophilia is a regular column by Pioneer Works alum and current advisor Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, illuminating hidden stories and ways of knowing revealed by some of Jelly-Schapiro’s favorite maps from history and today.

Few emblems of a culture signal more about its values than its maps of how people move. Nothing evokes old Europe’s Age of Exploration like maritime charts crisscrossed with rhumb lines. We Americans, during a century defined by the automobile, came to know our country not through charts of its rivers or rainfall but from highway maps picked up at gas stations. No New Yorker isn’t familiar with an iconic chart of infrastructure—the subway map—by which city-dwellers get around.

During the past year of lockdown and strife, many of us haven’t gotten around as much as we’re used to. But that lack of physical movement has only accelerated our reliance on another breed of infrastructure: the fiber optic strands encased in plastic, mostly, by which we access the digital signals through which we work and play and fill our days, with digital gestures like this Broadcast, conjuring Pioneer Works’ mores and mortar in Brooklyn. The world-wide-web is now essential, as everyone knows, to how culture shifts and grows. But it’s a striking fact of this era that the internet’s literal geography—the means by which our data travels—isn’t better known.

I thought of this fact, and that geography, the first time I glimpsed this gem of a map, from the collections of the NYPL, that charts wires of a different era. Produced by the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1893, it recalls an era whose technological magic involved not staring at liquid crystal displays, but causing an orb of glass to exude light at a switch’s flick. It was only a few years after Lewis Latimer, a Black inventor in Queens who perfected the filament that allowed Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs to glow, that Edison’s namesake company rushed to lay the braided copper twine beneath Manhattan’s streets, by which its office-towers’ lamps would spark. But one thing that’s striking about this early map of the electric “mains” laid under New York by the company that become Consolidated Edison, when viewed from the vantage of today, are the way its wires’ lines mirror current-day efforts to 