BackStory; Here to There: A History of Mapping

This is Backstory. I'm Peter Onus. Ronald Reagan is the winner in the state of New Hampshire in the state of Vermont. We will be coloring in those in blue for Reagan. Yes, folks. Red states haven't always been red. The first state that we are calling for. In 1980, former NBC News anchor John Chancellor colored the states that went for Reagan blue. Just another reminder that even the most ubiquitous maps have a story to tell. And today on the show, we're looking at some of those stories from Native American maps. What mattered here was how people were in relation to one another, not how much physical space separated them. To the map that gave America its name. And it's good also, I think, for people to know that America is named after this great kind of makeover artist who did every dirty little job that you wanted done for yourself. Man being America today on Backstory. But first some history in the making. Hello Backstory podcasters. I'm Tony Field, senior producer of the show. I'm here to remind you that if you like what you hear on today's show,

you can help the uninitiated find out about Backstory by leaving a positive review on our page in the iTunes store. You should also know that we're now offering individual segments of our show as downloadable MP3s on our website. You'll find those at BackstoryRadio.org. You can find all past episodes of our new weekly show there. And if you're so inspired, there's also a link to send us a financial contribution to help us cover our production costs. Backstory Radio is where you'll find us on Facebook and on Twitter. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Major production support for Backstory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the University of Virginia. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory with the American History Guy. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, 20th century guy, and I'm here with Ed Ayers, 19th century guy and Peter Onif. 18th century guy. Well, the time has come. You've seen the map. We've looked at the figures and NBC news now makes its projection for the presidency. Reagan

is our projected winner, Ronald Wilson Reagan. That's for NBC News egg or John Chancellor with the election night coverage of the 1980 presidential election. You remember that one, Peter, right? Yeah. It was a thriller, right, Peter? No. Correct. It was a landslide. Ronald Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter, but around 815 that evening, something happened. It sounds strange to us today. By our calculations, Ronald Reagan is the winner in the state of New Hampshire, in the state of Vermont, Delaware, and South Carolina. We will be coloring in those on the map now, in blue for Reagan or light gray, black and white. Blue states for Republicans. Did they miss the memo? They've got that rule. That's right. So what you're saying, Brian, is that this business of blue being Democrat and red being Republican, it wasn't always the case. That's right, Peter. Sometimes it was the Republicans were blue. Sometimes it was the opposite. They'd flip flop.

Nothing was set in stone. So when did the colors we know today? Republicans, red, Democrats, blue, when did they become standard practice, Brian? 2000, nice round number. It was a 2000 presidential election, Bush versus Gore, at a very specific moment, that things really became permanent as far as network coverage was concerned. Tim Russell was on the today show, Schmoozing with Matt Lauer. Let's revisit that moment in time. Peter, you're going to be Matt Lauer. All right. Ed, you're going to be Tim Russell. Okay? This is the moment when the two newscasters are looking at a big map of the country-colored red and blue to project election results. The red states we have here, you have gone to Al. I mean, George Bush, the blue states for Al Gore, what does the count look like so far? Well, Matt, first the viewer will see a lot more red than blue, and they'll say, uh-oh, is this race over? Far from it. And we can fast forward through some of

this stuff. Exactly. George Bush has to remind. How does he get the magical to study? And stop. Our latest track has gone up seven points in Florida, so Bush can't put that in his camp yet. So how does he get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will? And for weeks after Election Day, while Florida's votes were being counted and recounted, these colors get locked in and associated with specific parties because the whole country was looking at this red and blue map day after day as the election quite literally hung in the balance. So people had to watch red for Republican, blue for Democratic again and again. And it was in that election that these lines became fixed in the minds of millions of Americans. So on today's show, we're talking about maps like that red and blue electoral map,

maps that don't just chart the geography of the land, but ones that reflect how we see ourselves in the world. We're going to take a look at a few of these maps and try to figure out what they tell us about the Americans who made them. You know, I'm guessing this is not the first time that the map has defined a way that we've thought about American politics. And I always feel a deep impulse to go back to the beginning, Peter, and always goes back to you. And so when are the some earlier times that we've seen maps play a big role in our thinking about ourselves? Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about what boundaries we're supposed to be like in the new United States. They were supposed to be permeable. The United States was supposed to be the opposite of Europe where you'd have to stop at every boundary and pass run through the gauntlet and get to the other side. And in effect, Europe was an armed camp. The United States was going to be different. And that enabled Americans to think continentally. That is,

there's nothing that's going to divide us. Well, what did divide us in the Missouri controversy over the future of slavery in the new state of Missouri in 1819-21 was the period of that controversy. What it suddenly brought to the fore was a notion of a line between free states and slave states. One, that nobody had imagined before. And Thomas Jefferson, when he described the fire belt in the night that woke him up from his slumbers and he said, all of a sudden, there's this line of distinction. And these northern pseudo-anti-slavery people are making believe it's a moral distinction between the good people of the north and the evil slave power of the south. And that idea that Americans could be divided between one culture and another culture, another civilization and another civilization, that was deeply divisive and upsetting to Americans and set, I think, the whole tone of the sectional politics of the antebellum period.

You know, the Mason-Dixon line is drawn back in the 18th century, really, just to divide Pennsylvania from Maryland. But over the first half of the 19th century, Americans come to believe that we need a permanent line between slave territory and free territory. And that's what they argue about throughout the 1840s, the 1850s. Where is that line going to be? And of course, the line that actually emerges only comes through the secession crisis itself. And even then, the line is very shaky. And it's not clear until the firing actually begins that Kentucky is going to remain in the Union and that Maryland is going to remain in the Union and that Virginia is going to go to the Confederacy. And then in the Gilded Age, Brian, the saying goes that people voted the way they shot. And so the line between the North and South, ironically, becomes much more distinct electrically after the Civil War than it did before the war. And the electoral system Brian seems to suggest that, boy, people are going to keep voting as northerners and southerners forever. How does that change in the 20th century? Well, it, first of all, doesn't change from

a good half of the 20th century yet. As you know, we have the solid south. But, you know, your discussion with Peter about the relationship between lines and politics suggests that it's politics that makes those lines real. And I would propose to you that it was politics, not Matt Lauer or Tim Russert, that locked in the Red State, Blue State thing. Because, you know, between World War II and 1980, we were in the Gilded Age of what political scientists call by partisanship. We're Republicans and Democrats compromised on lots of things. But beginning with Ronald Reagan, politics got a lot more partisan. And I think those pundits locked in on Red State Blue State as a way of simply reflecting the political reality. But I also know, Ed, by drawing the lines in different ways, you can really tease out the great variety and contestation within

every state. Could you talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah. If all you do is you turn up the level of magnification one notch from the states to the counties, you'll see that every state in the union has its own internal divisions between Democrats and Republicans. You know, sometimes there are islands of Democrats and seas of Republicans. Sometimes it's the other way around. And I think it's important that we dissolve this Red State, Blue State idea a little bit because at least to the idea that geography is destiny, that we cannot have ideas that are not dictated by where we live, that politics and religion and ideas toward guns and abortion and all these things are a kind of ether in which we live. And once you begin thinking that way, the possibilities of American politics really become stunted. And it strikes me as a direct contradiction of the founding idea that we had, Peter, that you described at the beginning. I think it is, Ed. But what the founders imagine was a kind of national consensus. And where Americans have created political parties has been

intention with that notion of harmony. And I think you've got what I would describe as the majority in temptation. And that is you have the power, even if it's 51%, the 49%, you're going to, you're going to play it for all its worth and you could try to build on that. It's the temptation of creating a solid constituency for your positions in national politics at the local level. That is, make them red, make them blue. Pain in the U.S. Capitol is a famous painting called First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln. And it shows, well, the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation

of President Lincoln, you've probably seen it before somewhere on the cover of a textbook maybe or a middle school history worksheet. It's, it's a little stiff, but it depicts a very important event. A meeting in July of 1862 when Lincoln gathered members of his cabinet to let them know about a major decision he'd made. Ending slavery would now be a part of the United States war strategy. Word of that meeting captured the imagination of a portrait painter named Francis Picnell Carpenter. Carpenter was so affected by this, he called it a moment in drama in American history second only to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This is Susan Shulton and a historian at the University of Denver. She says that Carpenter was able to pull some strings to get a meeting with Lincoln himself. Mr. President, the artist said, I'd like to paint this scene for you. And Lincoln was actually pretty welcoming of the idea, so much so that he invited Carpenter to come set up shop in the studio in the White House itself. And from February of 1864 forward

for six months, Carpenter actually lived in the White House and made a great study of the detail of the scene as Lincoln and others had described it when he actually revealed his intent to use emancipation to his cabinet. The painting was unveiled in July 1864. In it, Lincoln sits at a table surrounded by seven cabinet members. In one hand, he holds a draft of the emancipation proclamation and the other a quill. The painting is pretty dramatic. It's got the seven cabinet members aligned. And Carpenter claimed that he aligned them according to their sentiment about emancipation from most sympathetic to least. But all the details are what really makes this painting. If you look around, there's anti-slavery newspapers strewn on the bottom below. It wouldn't stand at the left. There's a military map across the table. And in the far right lower corner, there's a map that for me really tells the entire story. This was an actual map that Lincoln admired and often consulted during the war.

It was made by the US Coast Survey in 1860 and it showed the distribution of the slave population all across the South. Carpenter, the artist, thought that that map was so important, he actually took Lincoln's copy to study. He had to make sure he painted it correctly. In just a moment, we're going to take a closer look at why this map was so key to Lincoln's understanding of the Civil War. But before we dive into that, it's time for a short break. You're listening to Backstory. We'll be back in a minute. This is Backstory with the American History Guys. I'm Brian Ballot, 20th century guy. I'm Ed Ayers, 19th century guy. And I'm Peter Onough, 18th century guy. We're talking today about maps, how they've shown us not just where we are in the world, but also who we are in the world. Before the break, we introduced an 1860 map of slavery in the US. That map made a cameo appearance in a famous painting by Francis Bicknell Carpenter.

The painting showed Abraham Lincoln presenting a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. Now we're going to return to Ed's conversation with Susan Schulton to find out what made that map so revolutionary. What you're looking at, if you can take a look at the map, is the first example of an American-made map that translates statistical data into cartographic form. And it colors every county and every southern state according to its degree of dependence upon slavery. Sort of a shading, right? So it looks like there's how many different shades of gray are there? Not 50, but it's a literary illusion there. Good one. Hold on, Ed. I'm going to look that up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. There's actually nine scales of shade on the map from less than 10% of the population enslaved to over 80%. So it's got several different shades to signify each county's dependence or relative dependence, I should say, on slavery. One look at this map, just a glance, and you immediately get

the sense of not just where slavery is most dense, but that that's the exact same counties, the exact same areas that are the most ardently secessionist. So in that respect, it really gives you in an instant an explanation of what the war or what secession is really about. And so that's pretty amazing because you look at it and you realize how much calculation goes into all this. And it's interesting that they're using the most advanced statistical techniques of the time to show, as you're pointing out, basically a political and demographic fact. This is not to map where mining resources are or the nature of the harbours or anything like that. This is really showing, in many ways, the great problem of America and mapping it through the most scientific means. So what meaning did Abraham Lincoln find in this map when he was studying it so intently in 1861 and two? One of the first things you see when you look at the map is that your eye is drawn to the dark spots where slavery is heaviest. But then you notice the white spots of the map,

in Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina, Northern Alabama, Northern Mississippi, and Western Virginia. I think Lincoln looked at those areas of the map and that they reinforced mistakenly his sense that there was this latent southern unionism all across the south, that in the areas where there weren't dense populations of slaves, perhaps the people would be more sympathetic to the union and less inclined to support the Confederacy. Yeah, there have been maps of slavery before in the United States. How would they differ from this? Well, the maps of slavery that I'd come across began to spread pretty widely in 1856 when the Republican Party, which is dedicated to halting the extension of slavery into the West, uses maps repeatedly. They showcase the potential for the expansion of slavery in a way that I think is provocative and even shocking to Northerners. A lot of them

are woodcuts. They have a very crude and bold look, perhaps intentionally. A lot of them were reproduced in newspapers, some on broadsides with very alarmist language about the expansion of slavery. Perhaps an image right of the encircling of the Northeast, for instance, that might really have a very deep effect on Northerners. But this, coming only a few years later, has a completely different look and feel that those other maps look almost archaic. This map is coming out of a scientific agency. It's coming out of the Co-Serve. It is produced through engraving, but also the newest cutting-edge techniques of photography and lithography. It's purports to show only one class of information, the ratio of slave to the total population. And in that respect, it's a very restrained map, but it also has the imprimatur in the lower left of the head of the census as an accurate and original representation of the data. So in that

respect, it really is remarkable for showing a wide body of data, but in a very restrained, purportedly a political way. It's made to look neutral, but it packs a really political punch. Yeah, and for me, the most interesting thing about the map is that you're looking at a map of the southern states. You're looking at a map of the slave states. And yet, it's pretty clear, once you begin to study it, that it's a statement of nationalism. It's a deeply propagandistic map, even though it tries to strip a lot of that political overt political meaning from its face. That was Susan Shulton, a professor of history at the University of Denver. Her book is Mapping the Nation. Now, in the 18th century, France, Spain, and England were busy elbowing each other for a control of the New World. And map makers in each country were happy to do their part. English map makers

drew their colony of Virginia, stretching from the Atlantic all the way to the Mississippi. French map makers showed their territory spanning from present-day Ohio to North Dakota, all the way down Louisiana. Everybody wanted their share of the continent, and maybe then some. But there was a different way to map the New World. Max Edelsson is a historian at the University of Virginia, who's looked closely at Native American maps in the colonial era. And he showed me a map from the 1720s known as the Kataba Deer Skin Map. It was drawn by the Kataba Indians and presented as a gift to the governor of South Carolina. The map shows the Kataba Indians as circles. And those circles are connected by an elaborate network of spokes or paths. And by my counting, there seem to be 12 of these circles. That's right. And at the center of the Kataba nation is NASA, which is the central community, the most powerful and prestigious community within the Kataba Confederacy. And at the periphery of these circles are other shapes.

The watery Indians who were a low country people who coalesced and became part of the Kataba network. There's the powerful Chickasaw and Cherokee Indians who are kind of in the distance. So it's a hierarchy of relationships. And while Indians on this map are represented by circles, Europeans are represented by square shaped forms. So in the lower right hand corner of this map, we see Virginia represented. And that's a sort of a square off to the side, a kind of alluming presence on the periphery. And so in some ways, it's not an inaccurate representation of space. It just privileges the details that mattered to the Katabas. And what mattered here was how people were in relation to one another, not how much physical space separated them. It's a lot like a subway map. You know, subway maps don't have an accurate representation of the space between the subway stops because you don't need to know that. Would other American Indians looking at this have known immediately how to understand it? I think other Indian groups

would have objected to this map. All those groups would want their own dominance in this region and wouldn't want to be peripheral. It's like those old New Yorker cartoons where it shows all of America from Manhattan outwards. The Katabas wanted to see themselves as the indispensable agents that were going to connect Carolina to this world. So they put themselves right in the center. Yeah. If we compared this to sort of Anglo-American colonist map of the same space as we think of it, what would that look like? So European maps had a vision of space that was focused on creating an accurate survey, a proper relationship between how any particular place might relate to any other. Very similar to the cartographic conventions we have today. So are these warning maps in any sense? How would we best think of this map? I think of this map to really serve the purposes of diplomacy rather than cartography as a scientific endeavor.

This was a map that was meant to illustrate a trade relationship. And the primary language they used to describe those relations of connection was the idea of the path. When Indians and Europeans were negotiating over anything, this language of a clear path, a straight path, the need to clean a bloodied path that had been marred by violence, all of these metaphors were literal as well as figurative. They meant the real roads that are displayed on this map that connected Indians and Europeans, but they also meant an openness to interaction. So this idea of the path was something that they used all sorts of media to talk about. Wampum was often exchanged at these diplomatic meetings. These are long strings of beads that are arrayed in a particular pattern. And often that Wampum really served as a map. It would show English Carolina on one side, and let's say the Cherokee Indians on another, and a line of connection between them.

Now this sounds like a pretty complex conversation that these folks were having. Did it ever lead to misunderstandings? Did the Indians think they'd been perfectly clear whether Wampum and the colonists just did not understand what they were trying to say? All the time. And this is really the story of Indian-European relations in the 18th century. There really is a zero-sum game over the scarce resource of land between European colonists and Native Americans. And there's constant conflict as those European settler societies are expanding deeper in the interior into Indian land. And so there were more maps that came after this one, and those maps tried to resolve these conflicts, but ultimately those conflicts weren't resolved by diplomacy. Max Edelson is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. You can take a look at the Native American map we just discussed on our website at backstoryradio.org. We're going to fast forward now to the 20th century, to a moment when the American government

thought that good maps might pave the way to a more peaceful world. In the last months of World War I, President Wilson was busy puzzling over what the peace settlement should look like in Europe. Everyone wanted to make sure that World War I really was the war to end all wars. And Wilson decided that the key to avoiding future wars lay in resolving the border disputes that had contributed to this one. Was Alsace Lorraine part of France or was a part of Germany? So in September 1917 Wilson assembled a crack team of experts. Their job? Fix Europe's messy borders. So it was a group of geographers but also political scientists, economists, and historians who convened together at the American Geographical Society headquarters in New York. This is Wes Reiser, a Geographer at George Washington University. It was up in New York partly to keep it away from the prying eyes of Congress as well as from jealous bureaucrats inside the State Department. And they wrote reports. They drew maps

and they came up with all different kinds of recommendations that the President would be able to use in a peace conference at the end of the war in order to come up with a kind of just settlement. They called themselves the inquiry and they picked that particular name because of its innocuous sound. And to make it even more innocuous I understand they produced something called the black book. That's right. The inquiry like any group of academics produced thousands of maps and thousands of reports. But senior policymakers don't have time to read all of those pages of material and absorb them. And so they distilled down those plans into a 128 page document, 26 maps. And that was sort of you could think of as the President's briefing book which he actually carried into peace negotiations every single day. It was called the outline of preliminary recommendations for the President of January 18, 1919. But that's kind of a mouthful and it was

used for a long time. So instead they started calling it the black book because it was inserted into a simple black three ring binder. How did this group of experts decide what was really important when it came to drawing boundaries? In the end it turned out it was likely negotiations. We're going to focus around pretty much the dismantling of the German austere Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. And so the black book maps are actually the maps that show how to divide and move those specific borders. The factor that they settled on for Europe was language. And the reason they selected language over something like religious affiliation or others is that it was the easiest to find in census data while also seemingly representative of a person's nationality. And so for the breakup of say Austria-Hungary they would have proposed

the borders based on whether someone spoke German, Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, etc. Sounds reasonable and of course we know that academics are always biased towards an approach where they can get good data and that makes sense. At that particular time in the early 20th century there was this huge emphasis on science being able to sort of solve all of our problems. And in this particular case we're of course talking about human problems, problems of war and peace. And so the scientific approach of the inquiry was to sort of take the latest scholarship and be driven by data by experts rather than driven by the political needs of the leaders of the different countries involved in the war. Was this approach markedly different than peace negotiations in the past? Very different. I think principally in that pretty much prior to World War I every time

that a war came to an end the victorious party just sort of dictated terms to the other side. And President Wilson really strongly felt when the United States chose to join World War I that the two the victor goes the spoils model had not worked in the past and actually usually just promulgated further conflict. Well that just prompts me to ask whether there was something particularly American in this approach. I think there very much was the idea of self-determination, the idea that a person should have the right to determine their own political destiny is very much grounded in the American spirit and the American tradition. And the American peace proposals in the borders realm was around granting self-determination by breaking up empires and recreating nation states in their place. Creating states that were actually based around the people who lived there rather than just which family had owned that land for the last 500 years.

So how would you rate the effectiveness of this approach? Did it work? I would give it a mixed rating. The United States proposed this so-called Polish corridor which was a narrow piece of territory up to the Baltic Sea that connected to the rest of Poland and cut Germany in two. And so Hitler's justification for the Second World War for launching it was to reconnect East pressure with the rest of Germany by attacking Poland. So clearly in certain places the borders were a tremendous failure as proposed. But in a lot of other places I'd actually rate them as quite successful. And I think actually the most remarkable thing are places where American scholars proposed based on on our knowledge, our geographic knowledge, new borders that ended up not being implemented. The borders of the Russian Empire couldn't be broken apart because of the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. But the United States proposed

the creation of Ukraine which doesn't come about until the breakup of the Soviet Union. They proposed the three republics in the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which also come about in 1991. So when you look at those particular regions of the world especially it's kind of amazing to see what could have been versus what happened. So it's the places where the U.S. got our way the least I think that the borders failed the most markedly. That was Wes Reiser, adjunct professor of geography at George Washington University. He's the author of The Black Book, Woodrow Wilson's Secret Plan for Peace. It's time for a short break. When we come back we'll find out how America got its name

from a 16th century Italian pimp. You're listening to Backstory. We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back to Backstory. I'm Peter Runoff, 18th century guy. I'm Ed Ayers, 19th century guy. And I'm Brian Ballot, 20th century guy. Today we're talking about maps. Now when you look at a map of the American West today you'll notice a whole lot of right angles. State lines meet each other in neat corners. Zoom in to the county level and you'll see that the middle third of the country is composed almost entirely of boxes. The person most responsible for the sea of rectangles is a man we talk about a lot here on Backstory, Thomas Jefferson. It was his idea to map out the West as a gigantic grid for the most part. Political lines have followed his vision. But in the 1890s one map maker came along with a radical new proposal. He thought outside the box,

Alison Quance has the story. So can you describe to me what the 1890 map looks like? Yes, I have a copy of it right in front of me. This is Donald Worcester, an historian at the University of Kansas. It's beautiful. It is a map of irregular shapes, all in different colors, blues, reds, yellows, greens, browns, pinks. You've got this map that looks like well you could say a jigsaw puzzle. The lines are all very irregular. The map he's talking about was drawn by a man named John Wesley Powell. John Wesley Powell was the last of a string of great explorers of the American West. Powell was a civil war vet, a science professor, and the first white American to successfully boat through the Grand Canyon. In 1881 he was named head of the US Geological Survey, and that's when he began a new program of mapping out the arid regions of the West. By then

the federal government had been giving away land to homesteaders for about two decades, and most of the good land was already gone. When new settlers started arriving in these drier areas, that's when Paul said, hold on a second, this isn't going to work. He said there is not enough water in that whole region to do all that you will want to do, and the whole land system of the United States, the Homestead Act, the 168th or homestead, he said we'll never survive out there, because 160 acres in general was land that was handed out to people on the assumption that every 160 acre box was just like every other 160 acre box. They were all full of water and good soils and good climate, and nobody needed to worry about who got what. The Homestead Act in 1862 had followed Jefferson's grid, but after years as an adventurer, Paul really knew this region, and he knew that all boxes were not created equal. Some didn't have any access to water at all. This is when he came up with that colorful map

with all the squiggly lines. What he was proposing is that all of the western states subdivide themselves into these watershed districts, identify new political boundaries within the states, and also crossing the states. Paul was totally convinced that fights over water would be bitter, even more so when they cross state borders. We could avoid a lot of that, he argued, if government was framed around the flow of water. Instead of organizing their counties as a series of little boxes, organize these lands as collective common wells, where all the people who live in these districts have a vote on how the water and land are to be used. Paul took his map and his settlement proposal to congressional committees around the country, and put it up in front of the congressman and said, this is the west we ought to be building. The once great explorer thought that his map could put a halt to the Homestead Act and the 160 acres

and rearrange the system, but it was too late. For railroad companies and all the other emerging corporations, westward expansion was big business. How long would this take, Mr. Powell, I would say? You're going to hold us up for decades when there are people out there coming into the country who want homes and farms and immigrants coming into the United States, and we haven't got the time to mess around with these newfangled ideas. Besides timing, there was a deeper concern too, one that got at the heart of American ideals. The Homestead Act was about self-sufficiency, and the west promised riches untold to whoever could claim valuable resources first. Up against that, Powell's collective resource management smacked of socialism. In the end, Powell's predictions about water struggles have come true. One of the longest court cases in American history came out of a dispute between California and Arizona over the Colorado River. Legal battles between all of the states have been going on for years, and shortages are

getting worse. Powell's map wasn't a cure all, there would still be water shortages, but his proposal reframed community focus around sustainable living instead of winter takes all. He was making a point about how maps change the way we perceive our land. It can be hard to recognize shared interests, when a border says you don't have any. That's Ellison Quance, one of our producers. Okay guys, we just heard a really good case for following topography, and who can argue with that? Well, we could argue with it, and there's an argument against topography. Jefferson Thomas Jefferson, when he first sketched out proposed boundaries for western states in the 18th century, when the big problem was that the interests, the land speculators, the big

companies of the period, the corporations, if you will, they wanted to use the old traditional way of surveying land in Virginia, in Kentucky, in order to acquire vast stretches of land and to dominate the development of the west. Jefferson and fellow reformers saw that prior survey, according to the grid, was a way to liberate the land from the interests. So the corporate domination of development, that's precisely what Jefferson was worried about in his own context, and prior survey in the grid, were going to preempt the kind of conflicts and controversies that would make lawyers rich and give corporations the upper hand. And the idea that state boundaries that reflected nature and the geography of the land would somehow have led to collective solutions and development of the national domain, that just seems romantic to me. I mean Brian, what would

you say about the history of the states and state government as a steward of the land? Is there any reason to think that governments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would have done a better job? No Peter, we know that they did a worse job and although state lines were not withdrawn along John Wesley Powell's plans, in fact entire states out in the west were pretty much organized around single natural resources. You had the mining states in Nevada and Utah, you had lumbering out in California, and those states were really the first to be captured by those large corporations that John Wesley Powell was so worried about. So we like to think that maps represent opportunity to project a future onto a landscape that the way we draw a map can really make a difference. Jefferson certainly thought that was true and John Wesley Powell,

the great critic of Jefferson, thought that there would be another and better way to draw maps for the new western landscape. Well, I think we have some serious doubts about whether that's true, but that dream of drawing the future on the landscape is a powerful, intonationist one. Whether you're talking about the United States of America or the continents of North and South America, it's generally accepted that things on the left side of any modern map of the world fall under the same headline America. If I were to ask you why that is, you'd probably drop the name, America, Vespucci, you know, the explorer, but it's tough to get much further than that. We know Columbus was first, and America came after. So how come we're not called Columbia? I asked a Vespucci expert, Felipe Fernández Armesto, what America did to earn naming rights to an

entire hemisphere? Oh, nothing. I mean, he did nothing to earn. Okay. And he was in his youth, he was a pimp. I always think it's rather chasening for Americans to know that the country, the greatest country in the world is named after a pimp. And it's good also, I think, for people to know that America is named after this great kind of makeover artist. He was continually reinventing himself. And he was a pimp, then he was a commissioned agent working and selling jewels, a figure I call him the figure of Florence, the factoton de la chita, who did every dirty little job that you wanted done for yourself. The story of how this makeover artist became our namesake is actually the story of a map, a very popular map with two creators looking for their big break. And they were Matthias Ringman and Martin Valdsebular. Ah yes, the famous duo of Ringman and Valdsebular. Ringman was a sort of humanist and wordsmith at the time in Valdsebular. He was an

graver with a special map for engraving maps. And these guys really looking for a project that would launch them into wealth and fame. And like most people at the time, they were banking on a new addition, what was recognized as being at the time, the greatest geographical book in the Western world, the geography written by the second century cosmographer, Toulamy. Toulamy's geography was one of the first great works of mapping the known world. But with the discovery of these new continents, the world was changing for Europeans. So Ringman and Valdsebular decided Toulamy need some updating. But everybody was producing additions of this guy and they needed something special that would elevate their addition above the competition. At that time, other maps were giving this unknown landmass generic Latin names, things like Terra, Sancti, Cruces, or Antipodes,

which just means whatever is on the opposite side of the globe from you. Nobody is giving these continents their own name. This is where Ringman and Valdsebular see an opening. Remember, 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but he'd only made it so far as the Caribbean islands. Nobody actually knew that there were two whole continents to the north and to the south. Columbus didn't discover the new continents until his third voyage in 1498. Ringman and Valdsebular stumbled upon a letter written by Vespucci that recounts his own voyage to the new continents. He doesn't dispute Columbus's dates, but he does for some reason claim to have discovered the new world. So Ringman and Valdsebular find this intriguing but not entirely satisfying. Shortly after, they find what seems like confirmation. Their turns are a copy of what I think is a kind of pirate book, a sort of yellow press book, Station Bookstall Paupe, which is based on the forages of the Sputia, but which

is a very ridiculous, a romanticized and fictionalized account. A scholars call that work for Soderini Letter. And this letter says, without a shadow of a doubt, that Emerigo Vespucci discovered the new continents in 1497, a year before Columbus. It also says that this new world is a land of sex-craved cannibals, but apparently that wasn't enough to tip off Valdsebular and Ringman. They ran with it. And they decided that maybe, you know, if they wrote up Vespucci's achievements and represented him as the new Tollamy, someone who had exploded the old image of the earth. That would give their own work extra cache bigger public, bigger sales. So they were kind of willing to be suckered because they had this ambition. So Ringman and Valdsebular go into their workshop and start plugging away at this map project.

And they come to this new part of the world and say, hmm, it's time to pick a name. And they named it after Emerigo Vespucci and their recourse in Latin into its feminine form, America, so that like the other continents, Africa, Asia, Europa, it was feminine in Latin. In 1507, they finished the project. And what we got was one of the most significant maps in American history. So it's a huge map. And it shows the world with the delineation of the Americas as they were then thought to be a picture of Vespucci is right there at the top, you know, kind of dominating the whole thing. And it was literally designed as wallpaper. As far as we know, this was a very inventive design. But I think when people saw this idea that you'd cover a whole study more by literally, you know, piecing the map together and piecing it onto your wall. I think people thought

that was a great gimmick and, you know, really went for it. The work that Valdsebular and Ringman produced in 1507 was so successful and so popular and so much of the academic world read it and admired it in the case of the maps literally plastered them on their walls. The world, the academic world was abuzz with the work they produced and it just became an irreversible success. Key word irreversible. A few years later, Ringman died, and shortly after that, Valdsebular realized that the letter they based their work on, the soldering letter, the one about the sex cannibals was a fake, completely fabricated. And indeed, when Valdsebular produced his next map of the world in 1513, he changed his mind about the role of Espucci, he deleted the name America from the map. He recruited specifically an inscription on the map

saying that it actually had been discovered by Columbus alone. But by then, it was too late. America had become America. It's an accident. And, and I, you know, I've got nothing against an accident. I think the world, you know, is pretty much made up of, of random events and on the whole, the things that we do deliberately, we do badly, the things that we do by accidently have some chance of turning out right. Because after all, you know, what's in a name? You know, I think we get to head up about names. In my name, Philippe, literally means lover of horses. Well, you know, I mean, I, I, I, I, I don't mind horses, but I can tell you when I try to ride them, they absolutely hate me. They don't love you. And, you know, we shouldn't worry too much about, about a name. Name's just designe. We shouldn't start reading too much, much into the line. I, I, in a way, as I say, I think it's great that America is named after a charlatan,

and a pimp, and a makeover artist. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. We know what it means, and we can admire it for what it is, and not for what it's called. Life is a story, don't you doubt, bad times, give you something to talk about. Philippe Fernandez or Mesto is an historian at the University of Notre Dame. His book is called America, the man who gave his name to America. The world is the place where it all happens. They draw lines on and call it a map, and between every line is a different flag flapping. The world is the place where it all happens. Six billion people all take turns in an happen. That's our show for today. If you've been listening to the car, and we're so immersed in the show that you got lost, it's now safe to pull over and look at your map. For more on the history of mapping in America, check out our website, BackstoryRadio.org. All of our past shows are there, and we've also posted descriptions of upcoming shows. Let us know what you think. That's BackstoryRadio.org. You'll also find us on Facebook and Tumblr. We tweet at BackstoryRadio. We'll be back again

next week. Thanks for listening, and don't be a stranger. But it's hard not to be superstitious despite all you know. Today's episode of Backstory was produced by Neil Beschenstein, Jessingabredsen, Eric Mennel, and Allison Quants. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Our senior producer is Tony Field. We had help from Alan Chen. Frank Cyrillo is our intern and Backstory's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks today, go to Emma Jacobs, Don Cresswell of the Philadelphia print shop, William DeBleese, and Char Miller. And we want to extend a special welcome today to new audience members listening on KVCR in San Bernardino. Glad to have you on board. Major support for Backstory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, and Anonymous Donor, and the History Channel. History made every day. Peter Oniff and Brian Ballot are professors in the University of Virginia's

Corcoran Department of History. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.