Assignment 2
Topic 1
An eighteenth-century historian describes New England
Amos Adams, A concise, historical view of the difficulties, hardships, and perils which attended the planting and progressive improvements of New-England (Boston, Dilly, 1770).In our forum, we read an excerpt of from Amos Adams; here you'll use Voyant Tools as a way to explore the full-text.
In this exercise, we want you to read a primary source related to colonial-era North America. It's a source by an 18th-century historian Amos Adams that we just discussed in our Forum on the Columbian Exchange.
But in this assignment we want you to read it in a particular manner. You should already have read the excerpt in our forum. We now want you to do three things:
- First "pre-read" the book, using only the titles, publication information and your now developing general knowledge.
- Second continue pre-reading using text-mining software (Voyant) as a way to examine the patterns of topics and ideas present in the text. In particular, can these "pre-reads" allow you to hypothesize about these texts? That is, can you develop questions by which you might approach reading the text?
- Then, finally, read the actual book. Do so with an eye to both reading it critically and intelligently (as you alway would) but also to testing the impressions/hypotheses you made in your pre-read.
The object here is to say something analytical about the book and how how Voyant might help that analysis. Have a look at this video for quick pointers on using Voyant.
750 words, due May 30th
Option 2 - Critical Map Reading, I:
Early Modern maps of Africa
An exercise in critical cartography: maps are not neutral data - they have points of view. Explore three maps' viewpoints.
We love maps, especially but not only historical maps. And while we love google maps and all the GIS-based tools we have at our fingertips these days, we also still own map books. Prof Samson still carries road atlases in his car because while Google offers great directions the broader map allows him to see more context, to have a physical sense of where we're going, where we are, where we should be, what’s nearby, how did we get lost?
Historical maps are packed with data. They give us a view of landscapes, territory, communication networks, political relationships – in short, views of the political and spatial organization of societies. The image link to this text is a detail from the Cantino planisphere, a Portuguese map made in 1502 outlining Europe, Africa, and the then newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. The detail shows Elmino castle, a large Portuguese trading centre and military installation in what is today Ghana. The size of the castle is obviously not to scale, and may never have been meant to be. Its size and style suggests it was meant to symbolize Portuguese power in Africa. But this unusual representation raises the question of what's meant to be accurate and what's meant to be symbolic - and for that matter if there's a difference. At minimum it asks us to read this map critically and carefully.
It's clear that maps can give us good, hard data. But it's also true that we tend to assume that such data is objective: that these lines and objects marking places/spaces are real and beyond any substantial degree of interpretation. Over the past few years, historians and geographers have demonstrated that in fact maps are, like most texts, social constructs and thus can be read in different ways. They typically bear a relationship to power and are thus historically situated in particular political, economic, and social worlds. Maps, the geographer J.B. Harley reminds us, make claims to truth, but they almost always betray that they are constructions designed to support claims to truth, more than simply "true" in any objective sense.
Maps are representations of space but because they often bear a powerful resemblance to concrete geographic features of the planet, we tend to think they are factual, or true. As we've seen, they do contain real concrete facts. But they also contain interpretations; the map makers often made choices in what to represent and how to represent it. This human process of interpreting and selecting data adds complexity to how we must understand maps as sources and ask the same critical questions we'd ask of any sources. Are maps biased? Of course they are, but so is all human-produced data. Almost all maps contain elements that are objective, as well as elements that are subjective. The trick is to read it carefully, and critically. How then do we "read" historical maps as data?
There's lots to look for. Some maps have a lot of textual data in addition to the basic details of names and locations. Look, for example, at this detail from John Mitchell's famous map of the territory Britain and France claimed in North America on the eve of the Seven Years War. Here we're looking at a tiny section of the map which includes the area east and north of Lake Huron. The map is exquisitely detailed, but also contains over 3000 words of text (not including place names!) referring to history, territorial claims, navigation routes, distances, and much else. Such information was useful, practical information for someone (one might ask for whom?); it was also felt to add credibility, additional proof of its careful and accurate research. But is the information accurate? This text points to a real event - the Mississauga people were defeated in a war with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the 17th century, but neither they nor any other peoples ever became "the eighth nation" of the Iroquois League. Does this matter? Does it matter that this information is only partly true, or misleading at best? Would it have mattered to an eighteenth-century observer? What inferences might such an observer have about this and similar information on the map? Think too about its production. Remember that maps are authored, like any text, and are usually intended for a particular audience.There were literally 100s of maps of North America available in this period. Why commission another one? Why one with this level of detail? Who would have wanted such a map? Why? Why was this map produced when it was produced? What about that moment made this information important?
Look, too, beyond the geographic features of the map itself. The legend, for example, often contains important information that can be helpful in understanding the map: what it records, where, when and by whom it was made. Legends are often inside more elaborate and artistic renditions that are called a cartouche. A cartouche is usually a frame or image designed both to add additional information - often the publication information or a legend - as well as artistic embellishments. Some are more ornamental than others, but all contain potentially useful information. One can often see themes being represented in the cartouche: a kind of key to thinking about the map. The planisphere on our header was one of the first to depict the North And South America in relation to Europe and Africa. At this point, only the Portuguese were actively venturing along the western coast of Africa and thus this map presents knowledge more or less completely new to other Europeans. It's also worth noting however that Portuguese explorers had travelled as far south as modern-day Ghana, but had gone no more than a mile or two inland - the rest is pure imagination. But these images shouldn't be dismissed as mere flights of fancy. They very often offer symbolic clues to how the mapmakers understood their subjects and the purposes of these maps.
The Newberry Library offers a nice overview of questions and important issues for when approaching historic maps as primary sources.
The assignment: Write an 750-word essay on the following early modern maps of Africa. Devote roughly half of your text to a discussion of one of the maps, and the other half comparing that map with the other two. They were produced in different times and different places and probably for different purposes. Each sought to show an audience how to see Africa: how it was shaped, who its people were, how they lived and governed themselves, and so on. And yet they also made other claims of knowledge, ones rooted more in their authors and their authors' contexts than in Africa itself. What can these maps tell us about Africa? What can these maps tell us about the early modern Atlantic World?
Resist the urge to dismiss them as all being biased. They are, no doubt, but so are most sources. The real trick is to critically examine these texts so as to find as much useful information as possible. And what is useful information? Well, that depends on what question we're asking. If we're asking about the map's ability to convey accurate geographic information, then we head in one direction. If we're asking how the map tells more about the map makers and their societies, then that sends us in other directions. But if we think those questions are unrelated, then we may be missing a lot.
Here, as in your Forum entries, you will continue to practice the analysis of primary sources. Pay particular attention to the perspectives in each document. Just as historians have different interpretations of the same questions, so too did people in the past have different interpretations of their worlds. You can consider questions such as:
- When was the map made and by whom and for whom? i.e. who was the author? what economic or social or religious or political interests did that person serve?
- When did the cartographer create the source? Is there a broader historical context? (The Mitchell map above was made on the eve of the Seven Years War, after decades of political-military struggles over North America - that context informs much of the information Mitchell included, and what he didn't include.)
- What is the source about and what did the author think about that subject?
- What information did the author wish to communicate?
- We're speaking of "an author" here by which we mean the mapmaker, or cartographer. Who that individual was, matters. But you shouldn't imagine that these maps are like a book that this mapmaker thought he'd make up on a Tuesday afternoon [and sadly the vast majority are "he"]. All these maps were commissioned. That is, someone hired this mapmaker to make this map. That's not always the case. Sometimes, particularly in some of the bigger more famous firms, they would produce something believing there to be a market for such a map. In either case, you should be thinking about that context - and why there would be a demand for, or a market for, that map - i.e. a map that portrays that place in this particular way.
- Finally, two hints: (i) most of you will assume that the map reflects the mapmaker's personal knowledge: that the person surveyed that territory and produced this map. Sometimes that's true (and in a map we'll look at later in the course, that is true), but usually it's not. And in the case of these African maps, it's absolutely clear that none of these mapmakers had ever been to Africa. Thus, you should think about how the mapmakers knew what they put to paper. (ii) many of you will also assume that the maps will become more accurate with time. Sometimes that's true; sometimes that's not. Just don't assume that's true.
You can probably think of other general questions that will help you to think about the perspective in any source.
Are you required to do any outside research? The short answer is some, but not a lot and not fancy research. We're not giving you much outside resources to work with. What you'll need, you'll have to determine. Basic online googling, will get you a fair distance: be sure to cite what you use, and choose websites that don't appear random. Wikipedia's fine for many things. But try the library. There are lots of guides and handbooks that often contain quick high-quality information. But, to be clear, most fo your discussion should focus on the maps themselves.
Tip: the images included here are fairly high quality, but the links take you to much better high-quality scans from the Library of Congress. Close reading of some of the details on the high-quality scans may be very helpful.
John Senex, Africa: corrected from the observations of the Royal Society at London and Paris (London, 1725). Source: Library of Congress.
Aaron Arrowsmith, Africa: to the committee and members of the British association discovering the interior parts of Africa this map is with their permission most respectfully inscribed. London: A. Arrowsmith, 1802. Source: Library of Congress.
Emanuel Bowen, A new & accurate map of Negroland and the adjacent countries (London,1747).
