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| George Washington's America: A Biography Through His Maps |
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From his teens until his death, the maps George Washington drew and purchased were always central to his work. After his death, many of the most important maps he had acquired were bound into an atlas. The atlas remained in his family for almost a century before it was sold and eventually ended up at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library. Inspired by these remarkable maps, historian Barnet Schecter has crafted a unique portrait of our first Founding Father, placing the reader at the scenes of his early career as a surveyor, his dramatic exploits in the French and Indian War (his altercation with the French is credited as the war's spark), his struggles throughout the American Revolution as he outmaneuvered the far more powerful British army, his diplomacy as president, and his shaping of the new republic. Beautifully illustrated in color, with twenty-four of the full atlas maps, dozens more detail views from those maps, and numerous additional maps (some drawn by Washington himself), portraits, and other images--and produced in an elegant large format-- George Washington's America allows readers to visualize history through Washington's eyes, and sheds fresh light on the man and his times.
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Historian Barnet Schecter is the author of The Battle for New York , the hinge battle in the American Revolution, and The Devil's Own Work , a chronicle of the Civil War draft riots in New York. He lives in New York City.
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To be clear, this coffee-table book is not a biography of George Washington; it's a study of the country as Washington came to know it, especially as indicated by the maps he collected and used over the course of his career. His personal collection of maps, including many he rendered himself, ended up in a one-of-a-kind atlas in Yale University's collections. The so-called Yale George Washington Atlas provides the bulk of the maps reproduced in this impressive volume. Schecter presents detailed map views of locations particularly germane to Washington's career and the growth of the country, masterfully aligning his historical account with applicable maps, giving readers the opportunity to study Washington's skill as a surveyor and cartographer in the process. The result is an impressive mix of history and geography, placing Washington's military and political career in geographical context. An appendix provides thumbnail images of every map included in the Yale atlas. VERDICT This lavish book, with its original approach and generous production values, is highly recommended as both a recreational and a reference work for specialists and informed lay readers of American geography, cartography, and Colonial through Federal-era history.-Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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*Starred Review* From the dispersal of George Washington's papers after his death, an intriguing item survived that today reposes in Yale University's library. It's a collection of 40 or so maps that Washington collected or personally drew and bound into an atlas. Historian Schecter (The Battle for New York, 2002) capitalizes on it to trace both Washington's travels through colonial, revolutionary, and early republican America, and military and political events that Washington followed through cartographic study. Arranged by Washington's biographical arc, starting with his expeditions of the French and Indian War and ending with his will's disposition of his land and slaves, reproductions of each whole map accompany magnifications of the particular areas where Washington journeyed in person or in mind. Due to map references embedded in the text, the narrative oscillates between image and word, inducing avid readers to flip pages back and forth to follow the action. Augmented by portraits of Washington and his contemporaries and scenes of places and episodes of the times, Schecter's conception of converting Washington's atlas into a full-scale illustrated biography results in smashing success. Conveying how Washington visualized North America from the minute to the continental scale, it will fascinate history buffs now and should be durably library-useful.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
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