Brown Seminar: For the Love of Maps: Material Passion and Power in Eighteenth-Century America
In North America, the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century profoundly affected people’s material life and, as some argue, paved the way for other more momentous political revolutions. In this program, Martin Brückner will discuss how maps became popular consumer goods and how their material transfer as “cartifacts” came to shape everyday and political life in early America.
Martin Brückner is Professor of English and Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. The author of two award-winning books, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (2017) and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006), his other published work addresses the material and spatial imagination in early American literary and visual culture.
This talk is part of the Richard H. Brown Seminar on the Historical Geography of the American Revolutionary Era and was recorded October 22, 2024.