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Long description:

A comprehensive volume on historical mapping in Texas.

The Texas General Land Office’s map collection contains over 45,000 maps, some dating from the sixteenth century, making it one of the most important cartographic archives in Texas. As products and agents of history drawn by cartographers with motives and means as diverse as the places they document, maps provide a unique perspective on geopolitical, cultural, and economic processes. The maps of the GLO offer key insights into Texas’s sprawling history. They speak to issues of changing borders, social and political upheaval, and questions of sovereignty and power.

Texas Takes Shape offers an illuminating selection from the GLO archive: over one hundred maps that tell—and sometimes obscure—the stories of European colonization, Spanish and Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas, and the modern US state. There are maps here of every scale, from the hemispheric visions of European explorers to individual survey plats. Accompanying essays offer fascinating lessons on topics ranging from Indigenous cartography to military and railroad mapmaking and frontier surveys. Artful and informative, Texas Takes Shape examines a unique place through the eyes and imaginations of those who sought to govern it, profit from it, understand it, and call it home.

Table of Contents:

• List of Maps
• Foreword by Dawn Buckingham
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Defining Texas
  • Chapter 1. Mapping the New World: An Age of Discovery
  • Beyond the Neatline—Uncovering the Base Layer: Indigenous Cartography in North America
  • Chapter 2. Competing Empires: Maps as Knowledge and Power, 1671–1830
  • Beyond the Neatline—Compasses and Crucifixes: Priests and Friars in the Mapping of Spanish North America
  • Chapter 3. Mapping Mexico: Uneven Geography
  • Beyond the Neatline—From the “Dead Desert” to the “Wonderland of Agriculture and Opportunity”: Mapping the Nueces Strip 000:
  • Chapter 4. The Lone Star Rises: Maps of the Republic of Texas, 1835–1846
  • Beyond the Neatline—”A continued succession of abrupt sinuousities”: The Joint Boundary Commission and the Republic of Texas, 1838–1841
  • Chapter 5. “The Republic of Texas is no more”: The Lone Star State Takes Shape
  • Beyond the Neatline—The Art and Cartography of Eltea Armstrong
• Part II. Developing Texas
  • Chapter 6. Contested Frontier: Pathfinders, Soldiers, and Military Maps
  • Beyond the Neatline—Land for Military Service: Bounty, Donation, and Confederate Scrip
  • Chapter 7. Connecting a Continent: Texas Land and the Expanding American Railroad System
  • Beyond the Neatline—Frontier Surveying in Texas
  • Chapter 8. All Boundaries Are Local: GLO County Maps
  • Beyond the Neatline—Drawing Conclusions: Manuscript Cartouches in the GLO
  • Chapter 9. The Growth and Urbanization of Texas: City Maps at the GLO
  • Beyond the Neatline—”Complete Success” to Obsolescence: The Photographic Bureau of the GLO, 1861–1874
• Conclusions. Texas History on the Digital Frontier: Improving Access through Preservation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors