Historical Atlas of the United States [CENTENNIAL EDITION: 1888-1988]

National Geographic

Published by National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 1988

About this Item

As new condition oversized (elephant folio: 19 inches tall slipcase; 18 1/2 inch book; and 18 1/2 inch Portfolio of Guide Maps to United States History) navy blue bonded leather slipcase with gold lettering, navy blue bonded leather boards with a 10 inch by 8 inch historical front cover pastedown map with gold front cover and spine lettering, and navy blue bonded leather portfolio folder (housing the maps, clear plastic map overlay in four scales, and magnifying glass still housed in the original unopened plastic protector). Profusely illustrated with color photographs, black-and-white photographs, color maps, black-and-white drawings, graphs, etc. and color illustrated front and rear map endpapers. Also includes the separate portfolio entitled Guide Maps to U.S. History which includes 20 maps (ten two-sided) plus new condition magnifying sheet and new condition four scale transparent map overlay. "Time" wrote Henry David Thoreau, "is but the stream I go a-fishing in." For six years the Society's Carographic Division has been fishing the streams of American history. In November 1982, I announced the first of 17 installments in a new look at the historical development of the nation. "The Making of America" map series. That project, now complete, evolved into this, the first comprehensive atlas of United States history from a geographic perspective in half a century. Maybe no other organization could have undertaken such a project; certainly no other could have done it alone. Our goal, publication in time for the Society's centennial, meant we had to start a foot-to-the-firewall, two-year race. Curators opened their collections to us, and graduate students shared their dissertations. Scholars and other consultants were brought in to advise and to review the work in progress. Our Computer Mapping Laboratory and cartographic technicians produced more than 380 maps in those two years, in addition to some 60 maps and six map supplements that appear yearly in the Society's magazine. Icing the cake are more than a hundred historical maps seen as they never have been before, thanks to ever improving photographic, engraving, and printing processes. Not every "first" and "most" is cartographic. The atlas features more than 450 photographs, some 80 graphs, and 140,000 words of text. One artist received a crash introduction to mass production when assigned to render a 1914 Model T Ford assembly line. An authority on the subject called his painting "unprecedented" - a "first" that belonged to our art department. Those of us privileged to sample the pages as the atlas took shape felt as if we had been set before a wondrous buffet, one that appealed to the eye while nourishing the intellect. Begin turning the pages, and, like me, you'll soon forget all else but the unfolding story of our nation, the first modern democracy. It is a tale evoked in vintage photographs, plotted in stunning graphs, and spun out in words as personal as an immigrant's when he tells us through his letters what brought him to America. Our centuries of history are not, of course, free of hucksterism and plain wrongheadendness - like the belief that "rain follows the plow," a 19th century fallacy to which the peopling of the Great Plains owed not a little. That and a few other fish stories surface in these pages - none fishier than the deadpan anglers .dropping their lines outside the Woodstock, Vermont, post office on a slow day in the 1880s, a good day for a joke." - from the Foreword.

Seller Inventory # 008173

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Historical Atlas of the United States [CENTENNIAL EDITION: 1888-1988]
• Publisher: National Geographic, Washington, D.C.
• Publication Date: 1988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: Centennial Edition
• Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Leatherbound Volumes