Re-imagining US History and Statehood

Thomas Kinnahan's "Charting Progress: Francis Amasa Walker's Statistical Atlas of the United States and Narratives of Western Expansion" (one of the articles we read for this week) completely fascinated me. Because I am minoring in history and taking many of my American Studies courses in American history, I was very interested in the ways in which Kinnahan demonstrated that maps, usually seen as factual and objective, greatly reflected the history of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism.

Historicizing maps and places in this way reminded me of the messy, ambiguous process of colonial statehood. Generally, we study statehood as a steady progression from territory to state in the context of their modern state names. However, it wasn't always that simple; there was a strong claim, for example, to making a state called Franklin in a corner of modern-day Tennessee. I'm enclosing two different maps of Franklin to show how their different representations create very different effects.

Actually seeing the state in a map (below left) and referring to it as "Franklin" rather than "Franklin territory" (or some other temporary designation) legitimizes this proposed state, creating a visual counter-history and reminding us that it very well could have existed. Looking at Franklin as a shaded-in region in a modern map of Tennessee doesn't at all give the same impression. This example, along with Kinnahan's arguments about Walker's representation of Native American "territory," demonstrates that maps and other types of so-called objective sources can actually have very subjective and specific narratives.