Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Miguel Covarrubias, United States of America, 1942The 1940s were, without a doubt, America’s golden age of patriotic pictorial maps. As the country emerged from the Great Depression onto the world stage, its artists and illustrators created a series of cartographic masterpieces like this one. With equal parts pride and whimsy, they embraced the challenge of depicting everything American about America — its people, culture, history and natural bounty — on a single map. The result was an exuberant mix of cowboys and coalminers, fish and factories, immigrants, industry, hogs, wagon trains, cotton buds, skyscrapers, and almost always an Alamo, all stretching from sea to shining sea. Ken Willworth Jr., Trailways Presents Vacation and Play U.S.A., National Trailways Bus System, 1949Some of these maps, like the one above, were designed as advertisements for buses and airlines. Greyhound sponsored several particularly striking ones, with a special emphasis on tourist sites and local celebrations. Rand McNally also included an elegantly stylized pictorial map as a bonus at the end of its 1944 children’s atlas, This Is My Country.Other times, the goal was explicitly political. This slightly more prosaic map, printed by the U.S. Information Agency in the 1950s, was translated into languages ranging from Greek to Persian with the aim of introducing America to the world. It’s not clear what someone from Greece was supposed to make of the fact that Allentown was a leading center for the production of railway equipment. But if they moved to Pennsylvania and got work building train engines, they would then find themselves featured in one of the many maps celebrating American immigrants, “The Makers of the U.S.A.” Aaron Bohrod, America, Its History, Associated American Artists, 1946Immigrants, not surprisingly, were also the makers of a number of
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Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Miguel Covarrubias, United States of America, 1942The 1940s were, without a doubt, America’s golden age of patriotic pictorial maps. As the country emerged from the Great Depression onto the world stage, its artists and illustrators created a series of cartographic masterpieces like this one. With equal parts pride and whimsy, they embraced the challenge of depicting everything American about America — its people, culture,
