num_pages: 120
description: Published to coincide with an exhibition at Chicagos Newberry Library Mapping Manifest Chicago and the American West charts the historic role maps have played in imagining understanding promoting and exploiting the Western frontier of North America. Featuring more than sixty full-color maps and views from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries this fascinating book documents how maps encouraged Euro-Americans to see the West as a land of promise. Maps helped visualize a nation destined to expand across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.Curators Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon present an interpretively rich carefully researched selection of items drawing on the Newberrys superb collections of historic maps and Western Americana. They have organized the book into four maps for empire maps for building a new nation maps for enlightenment and maps for business. Chicago emerges first as a dot on one of these maps but it subsequently becomes a bustling metropolis and a major center of cartographic production. 
language: English
title: Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West
publisher: Newberry Library