Customer Reviews

Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I purchased this volume at the Louisiana Book Festival the year it came out. I even got the authors/editors to sign it. During a presentation and discussion of the book, it fell to the floor with a loud thud. The speaker quipped that it was "heavy reading". While it is a large book, I would hardly rate it a "coffee table book". This is an excellent well done book with a lot of color and information throughout. Maps from all the countries that had an interest (and some that didn't) in the Louisiana territory from the age of exploration until the last of the twentieth century. Excellent price too! I would've waited but I really wanted the signatures. I can't ever see selling this book. It is a great aid to re-enactors and living history personnel. No museum in the Louisiana Purchase should be without this book either. Kudos!

This coffee table volume was produced to celebrate the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase. It contains 193 high-quality reproductions of important maps illustrating the development of Louisiana from the early sixteenth century to the present. Each map is accompanied by an historical essay placing the map in its cultural context. There is a detailed cartobibliography and list of selected readings.

The maps themselves are wonderfully reproduced. Here are a couple of examples of the essays:

"21. A Map of Louisiana And Of The River Mississippi by John Senex. London, [1718 or 1719]. The Historic New Orleans Collection

"A restless band of Carolina tranders--who crossed the Appalachian Mountains seeking closer economic relations with Native American nations to the west--galvanized English interest in Louisiana and the Mississippi River valley. In light of this development, English mapmaker John Senex responded to market demands with this map, copying liberally from Guillaume de L'Isle's ca.1718 Carte de la Louisiane et du Cours du Mississipi. This plagiarism did not, of course, include L'Isle's notation about French claims to Carolina. Interestingly, Senex dedicated his map to William Law, the father of financier John Law, whose scheme to develop French Louisiana eventually caused the ruin of many European investors."

***

"74. Louisiana from Mathew Carey's General Atlas Improved and Enlarged: Being A Collection of Maps of the World and Quarters...[Philadelphia, 1814]. The Historic New Orleans Collection

Mathew Carey became a pioneer American map publisher following his immigration to Philadelphia from Dublin in 1784. Carey set up a publishing firm financed by the marquis de Lafayette, with whom he had earlier become friends in Paris. His success in publishing Guthrie's Geography Improved led him to similar projects. Carey's American Atlas of 1795 was the earliest atlas of the United States. His American Pocket Atlas, in which the map of Louisiana appeared, was published in editions of 1796, 1801, 1809, 1813, and 1814. He had issued the earliest printed map of Louisiana as a state in 1813, which appears here in an enlarged version from his 1814 General Atlas. This map was probably compiled by Samuel Lewis, Carey's principal mapmaker."

This book makes for fascinating reading and study.

Robert C. Ross 2008

This beautifully produced volume deserves a prominant place on anyone's coffee table. Abstractors and professional landmen, especially if they live in Louisiana and its surrounding states, will fall in love with it.