Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps - Hardcover

by Alfred E. Lemmon (Editor), John T. Magill (Editor), Jason R. Wiese (Editor)

Winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 2004 Humanities Book of the Year Award, the Louisiana Library Association's 2004 Louisiana Literary Award, and the Gulf South Historical Association's 2004 Best Book on the Gulf South Award.

The name "Louisiana" has always held a special allure, calling forth images of a rich colonial past, a land filled with exotic flora and fauna, and a territory that once extended across stretches of North America. Tracing the discovery, colonization, and development of the region, Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps relates the epic history of Louisiana. From the earliest appearance of the Gulf Coast on a 16th-century woodcut to a color-enhanced satellite view of the state, the atlas presents an extraordinary gathering of 193 manuscripts and printed maps (all full-color plates), many of them rarely made available to the public. Six essays lead the reader across the historical panorama of Louisiana as found in its cartography.

Distributed for The Historic New Orleans Collection

Front Jacket

To celebrate the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC) has pursued the ambitious goal of publishing an atlas that depicts Louisiana's history through maps. The result of those efforts is Charting Louisiana. This book, THNOC's bicentennial gift to the public, offers a rich selection of historic and contemporary maps from various sources that collectively illustrate the region's diverse history, from its multinational colonial experiences to the modern American state.

Charting Louisiana presents 104 maps from THNOC's holdings, representing the full range of the institution's cartographic treasures. The atlas also features sixty-seven important works from the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress--custodian of the largest cartographic collection in the world--and contributions from other United States repositories, including the Louisiana State Museum and Chicago's Newberry Library. Archives in France, Spain, Great Britain, and Mexico generously provided the balance, as befits Louisiana's international history.

The product of this cooperative effort is an unprecedented compilation of 193 high-quality reproductions of important maps illustrating the development of Louisiana from the early sixteenth century to the present, along with historical essays providing a broader context for understanding the maps. Complete with a detailed cartobibliography and list of selected readings, Charting Louisiana is a lush, captivating, and valuable source of information for history buffs, scholars, and map lovers, providing ample opportunities for new interpretations of the state's history as well as that of the nation.

Author Biography

Alfred E. Lemmon is Director of the Williams Research Center of The Historic New Orleans Collection. An authority on French and Spanish colonial cultural history, he has been published in numerous books, encyclopedias, and scholarly journals in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Light Townsend Cummins is the Guy M. Bryan Professor of History, Emeritus, at Austin College and served as the official State Historian of Texas in 2012. Richard Campanella, Senior Professor of Practice at the Tulane School of Architecture, is the author of ten books and over two hundred other publications on New Orleans and Louisiana geography, history, architecture, urbanism, and culture.