Undergraduate Study Guide Contextual Documents

Contextual Documents for UGSG

Pinterest offers many links that provide different ways to make your own maps and globes. Learning how to map their own areas and towns will provide my students with a way to think about mapping. The varied mapping techniques should provide students with an interesting view to mapping that is portrayed in early-American maps and travel diaries.

http://pinterest.com/scrapwedo/maps-globes/

 

Traveljournaling is a site that offers instructions for writing personal travel journals. They focus on both the inner and the outer aspects of travel journaling. This site will provide my students with a way to understand travel diaries which will help them to understand Trist’s travel diary and how travel diaries are composed.

http://www.traveljournaling.com/home.htm

 

The common-place site provides a high definition image of Lewis Evans’s map that will make apparent to students the detail of maps that were produced in early America as well as an explanation of how maps were used in early America.

http://www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-03/lessons/

 

This website provides many different maps of trails and roads that Elizabeth House Trist may have travel on her way to Natchez.

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gentutor/trails.html#Natchez

 

 

–

Kyle Howard Kretzer

 

Project Proposal: The Early American Frontier and Female Perception

Late-colonial America was a place of continuing exploration and discovery. The relatively new continent was still largely unmapped and its landscapes, peoples, animals, and features were still undiscovered and unknown. But although little was known about the backcountry and young frontier, there were many American’s, men and women, who were going out to map and record the landscapes. Surveyor’s like Lewis Evans and travel diarists like Elizabeth House Trist were journeying out into the frontier areas, and they recorded the sights and experiences that were to be had in the American frontier.

My project is an analysis of Elizabeth House Trist’s travel diary and Lewis Evans’s map and geography of the colonies. Both Trist and Evans would leave accounts of the frontier as they saw and experienced it. Using the work of Annette Kolodny, Richard Slotkin, R. W. B. Lewis, and Martin Brückner, I will establish the concept of place that Trist and Evans were working within, and I will use the psychological work on place that Rick Van Noy expounds to argue that both Trist’s and Evans’s interaction with the American landscape led to a simultaneous mapping of their inner consciousnesses. I propose that, in the vocabulary of Van Noy, Evans looked at the American landscape as blank space to be mapped and categorized, which led him to produce a map and geography that is almost entirely devoid of a sense of place and memory, while Trist’s diary, although not producing a cohesive or comprehensive map or landscape description, does show the American landscape as a place filled with memory and experience because she experiences the sublime of the landscape that eludes Evans.

But, I ultimately hope to go farther in my project by establishing the role that gender plays in Trist’s and Evans’s mapping of the American frontier. Keeping Van Noy’s notion of mapping inner consciousness in mind, I will apply the work of feminist geographers and feminist theories of space to distinguish how the inner consciousnesses of Trist and Evans were affected by their gender and the cultural place they occupied in early America. I ultimately hope to argue: The cultural and societal role of women in early America led them to be more in tune with the sublime and hence the American landscape because their understanding of space and place, having been affected by the patriarchal structure of society, did not carry the same sense of ownership that was customary of male surveyors like Lewis Evans.

 

-Kyle Howard Kretzer

Rick Van Noy Source Abstract

Van Noy, Rick. “Introduction: Surveying the Height of Our Mountains, the Country of Our Mind.” Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2003. 1-37. Print.

 

Literary scholar Rick Van Noy argues, in the opening chapter to his book examining American literature’s surveying heritage, that the surveyors who “set out literally to map the interior of the United States . . . also in important ways mapped the interiors of their own consciousnesses” (5). Van Noy approaches the subject throughout the rest of his book by independently analyzing the works of four American environmental writers, but he also begins to affirm his theoretical framework in chapter one by referring back to the three earlier writers: Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, and John Wesley Powell. All three men were surveyors, and it is ironic that these “boundary makers” would go on to believe they were “included in and not separate from” the landscapes they mapped and parceled (5). One of Van Noy’s major points is that landscapes are not merely quantifiable because quantification cannot detect emotional register of a place. For Van Noy, without emotional register, place is only “blank space” (6). Another of Van Noy’s major arguments suggests that all maps are authored despite the argument that they are scientific and numerically constructed. Maps are a “product of compromises, omissions, and interpretations” that are immediately suggestive of authorial biases be they political, cultural, or rhetorical (9). One of Van Noy’s last major prerequisite arguments, before he can make his case, is that people construct expectations and “fantasies” of landscape before they ever see or enter the space (16). Ultimately, Van Noy asserts that space only becomes place once the surveyor is willing and able to experience a Burkian external sublime that “marks a shift away from a purely human set of signs to the animate earth” (34). Van Noy’s larger implication is that all spaces and landscapes are imbued with memory that is directly tied to the people that have lived and been there and that that memory and our interaction with it and interpretation of it gives to us the basis of our inner, and environmental, consciousnesses.

Van Noy’s argument works because it clearly, though discreetly, evokes literary theories, has a clear focus on what evidence to use, and he relies on some of the earliest historical instances of mapping in America. Throughout the chapter he frames his discussion through a subtle theoretical framework. Poststructuralist, postcolonial, Marxian, and Lacanian theories are present in the historians, geographers, and spatial scholars he quotes and, on the Lacanian side, in the language he uses. Perhaps the clearest failing of the chapter is that he does not describe in more detail the working of these theories in the spatial realm. He also distinguishes between what theory of the sublime he uses in his argument—the Burke theory as opposed to Kant’s. Evidence for Van Noy is always closely tied to cartography. He uses cartographic historians, cartographic spatial theorists, and surveyors as his evidence. He uses both John Smith’s and Thomas Jefferson’s early descriptions of Virginia to establish the base of his argument that American literature has a surveying heritage that looked out and saw blank spaces to be conquered and mapped.

This chapter has been a great help to my project. The largely theoretical base it establishes for reading consciousness through the use of space and landscapes will assist me in examining the surveying work of Lewis Evans and the travel diary of Elizabeth House Trist. It will particularly help me to distinguish between the Philadelphia that Evans was seeing and the Philadelphia that House Trist saw and how their different views of a similar environment comments on their consciousnesses. The two most compelling points that Van Noy makes in relation to my project is the idea of bias behind mapmaking and how space only becomes place through an interaction with nature’s sublime. It’s an illuminating argument that can be difficult to grasp but is eventually clear, and it is a highly recommendable chapter to read as I am sure the entire book must be.

 

-Kyle Howard Kretzer

Preliminary Notes on Sources

I am presenting notes on three sources I have been working with. Two of the sources noted deal with my artifact, and I have also included notes on my artifact itself. The notes for each source contain three ideas or techniques from the source. The advantages and disadvantages of each idea are then discussed, and possible uses of the idea for my final paper are put forward.

Brückner, Martin. “The Material Map: Lewis Evans and Cartographic Consumer Culture, 1750-1775.” Common-Place 8.3 (2008): n. pag. Common-Place. Web. 6 Nov. 2011.

Ideas	Advantages	Disadvantages	Uses
Maps reduce a three dimensional world into a two dimensional textual form.	We realize that maps, while being decent visual representations, are not true representations of physical space.	Depicts textual representations as not valid representations of physical space.	Shows that maps and other geographies such as travel diaries are essentially textual and not real in form. To reduce physical space to textual description is to acknowledge the author or cartographer’s hand in the creation of space.
Maps are the result of geodetic surveys and represent “reality” defined by emergent scientific standards of truthfulness.	Maps can be argued to be faithful representations based on scientific standards.	Other textual representations of geography such as travel diaries are cast as less able to represent geography than the textual form of the map.	Although maps take into account scientific surveying techniques, the accompanying geographical essays do not. In that case they are bound by the same qualitative necessity as travel diaries or other geographical narratives.
Maps were sold as objects of visual culture and interior decoration.	It levels maps as a textual and cultural object to be aesthetically admired like travel narratives.	Once again dismisses textual representations of physical space. Shows it as art and decoration and not essential tools of learning.	Finds maps and other textual representations of physical space on par with each other and entitled to the same “vital” importance “to early American material life.”

McLaughlin, Patrick. “The American Revolution in Maps.” American Archivist 37.1 (1974): 43-49. Project Muse. Web. 6 Nov. 2011.

Ideas	Advantages	Disadvantages	Uses
The maps leading up to the American Revolution shed light on the acquisition and documentation of geographic intelligence	Shows that maps did indeed attribute to geographical thinking.	Does not define geographic intelligence as quantitative or qualitative in nature.	If maps, as textual representations, did impart geographical knowledge then other textual representations of geography are also able to do the same.
Mapmakers like Lewis Evans were entrepreneurs and political arbiters.	Shows that mapmakers and those creators of other textual representations of geography did try to express certain points of view and opinions.	Perhaps disqualifies mapmakers as biased presenters of geography and space.	Textual creators of geography and space do try to express views in their work, so we can assume that textual representations of space are not wholly perfect and can allow for a multiplicity of views within reasonable bounds.
Lewis Evans maintained relationships with prominent business men, scientists, and political figures.	We are able to know what biases Evans may have had in the creation of his map and geography.	We are not told who his connections were with (but the source does lead to a biography on Evans).	Knowing Evans’s particular biases can inform us of how he comes to view geography and space.

Evans, Lewis. Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays. The First, Containing an Analysis of a General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America. 1755. Evans Digital. Web. 6 Nov. 2011.

Ideas	Advantages	Disadvantages	Uses
Lewis Evans’s map draws on past maps and the knowledge of individuals living in the areas he is mapping and writing about.	Evans’s map and geographies have the influence of previous maps and detailed knowledge about the areas he is mapping.	The detailed knowledge and opinions given by some may not be correct or they may be unnecessarily biased. He may perpetuate a problem.	It is possible to show that textual representations of space are interconnected and built off of similar principles.
Lewis Evans uses language to describe the physical characteristics of the forests, mountains, and waterways of the landscape.	Evans’s geographical essays employ similar techniques as travel diaries with his qualitative descriptions. This qualitative approach is able to add necessary descriptions of geography that his map cannot—the thicket of trees or the depths of waterways.	His descriptions never really go beyond describable details into the realms of metaphor to create a more powerful description of the landscape.	Proves that qualitative analysis of geography and space are necessary in creating a true idea of how a place is that a map cannot.
Lewis Evans’s description of the Native American tribes and position of French colonists leads him to make the case that England must settle Ohio so that the French cannot, and he claims that it can prevent desires for independence if English colonists are not forbid from moving west and if they have a common enemy to unite them.	Shows how important geography can be to both people and politics.	Shows how textual representations of physical space can be used to advance a particular agenda.	Can be compared and contrasted with other textual representations of physical space to make the case that they are all like this or if they are different depending on the perspective of the author or cartographer.

Preliminary Bibliography

Search Terms: Geographical Perception

Geographical Perception – Feminism

Space Perception

Space Perception – Feminism

Aiken, Susan Hardy, et al. Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1998. Print.

Ardener, Shirley. Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps. New York: Martin, 1981. Print.

Backhaus, Gary, and John Murungi. Ecoscapes: Geographical Patternings of Relations. Lanham: Lexington, 2006. Print.

Backhaus, Gary, and John Murungi. Symbolic Landscapes. London: Springer, 2008. Print.

Blunt, Alison, and Gillian Rose. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guiford, 1994. Print.

Brückner, Martin, and Hsuan L. Hsu. American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007. Print.

Domosh, Mona, and Joni Seager. Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. New York: Guilford, 2001. Print.

Jussila, Heikki, Walter Leimgruber, and Roser Majoral. Perceptions of Marginality: Theoretical Issues and Regional Perceptions of Marginality in Geographical Space. Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998. Print.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Print.

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955. Print.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown: Wesylan UP, 1973. Print.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. Print.

Van Noy, Rick. Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2003. Print.

 

– Kyle Howard Kretzer

 

 

Lewis Evans’s Artifact Inventory

Second Edition (Second Issue) Title Page

My artifact was chosen because I was looking for a source that incorporated maps, written descriptions of the early-American wilderness, and arguments that sought to become policy. Lewis Evans’s 1755 map of the middle colonies provided all three.

1776 Edition of Lewis Evans's Map

Artifact Inventory 

1)   When, where, and by whom was your artifact first printed?

Answer

Lewis Evans’s map and accompanying descriptive essay was originally published in Philadelphia in 1755. I have the second edition (second issue), which was also published in 1755. The map and essay were published by Benjamin Franklin and David Hall.

Speculation

The place of publication, Philadelphia, informs me that the map and essay will deal especially with the middle colonies and not the southern colonies or New England. The publication date informs me that the map and accompanying essay will cover those lands and native populations which had been discovered by 1755. Benjamin Franklin printed mostly informative material, newspapers and almanacs, so I can assume that Evans’s map and essay are descriptive and informative in nature.

2) Did your artifact appear in print at any time in the 18^th or 19^th centuries?  (Hint: Use WorldCat and list all of the reprints.  Do not confuse dates of publisher’s/printer’s birth and death with reprint dates.)

Answer

From the information I found, it appears that the map and essay were infrequently republished. The first and second American publication appeared in 1755 and the first English edition came about in 1756. The map was subsequently republished in 1776 by David Hall, but it did not include Evans’s essay, only a pamphlet by the publisher. The map has also appeared in history books dealing with American history, but it has not been published as a standalone map since 1776 (according to Worldcat and a few other sources).

Speculation

I can speculate many things from this information, but I want to be careful not to rush judgment without further research. I’ll address the map and essay separately. Since Evans’s essay only seems to have been republished and reissued (the second edition) once in America and in the same year as the first publication, 1755, I can assume the possibility of a few things: 1) Evans’s descriptive essay was not particularly useful in understanding the landscape and native populations, 2) because the essay seemed to advocate a particular course of action in the Ohio River Valley, it became obsolete in time with a developing colonial policy, and 3) the essay’s information was supplanted by a more thorough account. Since the map was republished almost twenty years later, yet still infrequently, I can assume that it was replaced by more thorough maps but that it still provided a good general view of the middle colonies.

3) What was the actual size of your artifact in inches or centimeters?  What information can you find about its physical presence, binding, etc.?  Do you think it was expensive or inexpensive?  Is it a folio, quarto, or octavo? Can you see a price?  If you are using a magazine, find the editor’s preface to its inaugural issue and note the intended audience and keywords used to appeal to that audience.

Answer

From the information I could glean, I believe the second edition (second issue) I’m working with was a quarto, about 24 centimeters or 240 millimeters. The essay is 32 pages in length, but the document has a total of 37 pages including front matter and a map. The map, from what I can tell, was folded into the bag of the quarto. Latter publications of the map were larger—20 inches by 33 inches. Unfortunately, information on the books physical presence and pricing were not available but could become apparent with further research on geographies of the era

Speculation

I can speculate that the use of a quarto size allowed for the map and essay to be big enough to read for practical use—reference and guidance.

4) View the original title page using the digital database or microfilm.  What is included there?  Transcribe the exact words of all of the information listed on the title page. Or, make a PDF of this page if possible.

Answer

The title page contains the full title of the work as well as the author’s name and the publication information—edition, city, printers, year, and sellers.

Speculation

I can assume that Evans’s map and essay were counted among other books of the era because of the uniformity with modern book title pages.

5) If there is more than one edition, compare the title pages.  Note any differences here and keep PDFs of these pages, if possible.

Answer

The Evans database had three different versions of Evans’s map and essay available. They had the first edition, the second edition, and the second edition (second issue). I have selected the second edition (second issue). All three versions were almost identical. The only differences were minor on the title pages. The second edition (first issue) only added “The Second Edition”. The second edition (second issue) added “The Second Edition” and the London seller information.

Speculation

I can assume the only reason there were no major changes is because all three versions came out in the same year. Although I am not positive at this stage, I might be able to assume that the map and essay were rather popular if they required three versions in one year. From what I have been able to tell looking over the first and second editions, there does not seem to be any major changes between the two editions or the three versions.

First Edition Title Page

Second Edition (First Issue) Title Page

6) What miscellaneous front matter exists?  Describe it:

• Frontispiece
• Engravings
• Preface
• Dedication
• Other

Keep PDFs of these pages.

Answer

The only front matter that Evans’s essay and map has is a preface. It is short, only a page and a half. It contains a brief explanation of what the essay does and does not contain.

Speculation

I can assume that Evans’s essay is not a complete history of the native populations that it offers readers a guide to deal with. I can also assume, because the lack of graphics or a dedication, that the essay and map is a practical guide and was not published as a popular reading.

7) How long is your text?  How is it subdivided (chapters? Volumes?)  Is the print large and easy to read or dense, with many words on each page and lines close together?

Answer

The essay and map are a total of 37 pages, but the main essay is only 32 pages. The print is a medium size, densely placed together, and the lines are relatively close together. There are no chapters or designated section breaks, but the essay does include notes in the margins for quick reference.

Specualtion

I can assume that the design of the printing suggests that the essay was not published for enjoyment but for practicality and the information included within. Evans even makes note in his preface that the essay and map were published with brevity in mind. The marginal notes seem to imply the essay’s practical use because it allows for quick reference.

8) What back matter exists (following the end of a text, usually signified by the word “finis”)?  Sometimes lists of subscribers or other works from this printer or bookseller are mentioned here. Keep PDFs of these pages.

Answer 

The only back matter the quarto contains is the map.

Speculation

I can speculate that the publication of the map and essay was not a jumping off point to go ahead and read the publisher’s other work and that it did not work off a subscription basis.

1755 Map

9) Are there other texts like yours, and how can you tell?

Answer

Yes, there are many different artifacts on the Evans database that are similar in nature to Evans’s map and essay, though none that I saw matched it exactly. Of the artifacts I found that had a mix of maps and essays, an almanac, a history, a land claim, and a boundary demarcation were included.

Speculation

I can assume that map/essay mixtures were a popular device in early America for presenting all sorts of ideas. They covered legal, historical, and informational topics. They were used to address issues of importance such as the westward expansion into the Ohio River Valley and land claims that one colony had against a neighboring colony. I can speculate that a mix of maps and essays were used for early colonists to understand their environment and the wildernesses beyond.

10) What is the relationship between your artifact and structures of power in early American culture (and how can you tell)?

Answer

The power structures that Evans’s map and essay deal with are the balance of power between the individual English colonies, the power balance between the individual colonies and the native tribes to the west, and the power balance between the English and French settled areas. The preface of the essay makes these power structures clear, as well does the map, because the different settled areas are demarcated. Evans also discusses in the essay that the waterways develop a power structure between the natives and English colonists and that the fortresses of the French seal with the balance of power between the different European colonizers.

Speculation 

If the main point of the essay is an examination of the power structures of the Ohio River Valley and a description of those landscapes from a male perspective, I can speculate that a female view of the Valley’s power relationships and view of wilderness will be absent. Also, since I have not found any geographies written by women, it is difficult to approach a female view of nature during this period on a one for one basis. I can speculate that I’ll have to look toward narratives where the female perspective of wilderness is more apparent.

11) Given all of the above, what might you wish to include as you think about creating a virtual/physical site for your project (your blog)?

Answer 

I want to include visual material that might assist in showing how power structures were arranged around the Ohio River Valley. Both new and old maps will help in this approach. Old maps will help to understand the perspective of the period, but newer maps can help convey the ideas more clearly. Also, extracts from diaries and narratives will help paint a picture of the different views of wilderness between men and women.

Speculation 

If these kinds of materials are available, my blog should be able to construct an early-American way of thinking about the wilderness.

– Kyle Howard Kretzer

The Reason for a Name

My Blog takes its name from the opening words on Eliza Wharton’s grave stone in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. I was attracted to “This Humble Stone” as a name for this blog because I believe it speaks directly to the question of a woman’s voice that we have been dealing with and will continue to deal with this semester. Women’s voices were indeed humble in early America, or were, more correctly, made so by the male dominated power structures. If there is one thing that I have seen, it is that women’s voices may be muted or made to sound the male opinion, but their incorruptible spirit of self still seems to find a way to speak to audiences long past their times.

The humble stone that marks the grave of Eliza in The Coquette seems to give a lasting voice to a woman who would act out against the power structures of New England, and it also gives a voice to “her weeping friends,” Lucy Sumner and Julia Granby, who are afforded the comfort of memorializing their friend in their own words.

The above image is a reproduction of the original inscription on  Elizabeth Whitman’s grave stone, who was the real life inspiration for Eliza Wharton. On the left side of the reproduced stone is the original marker that was chipped away over the years and taken as souvenirs.

Just as these humble stones mark the voices and lives of early-American women, I too hope that this blog can do likewise.

 

-Kyle Howard Kretzer