Cartographic America: 

Selections from The J. Kyle Spencer Map Collection 

A rigorously curated survey of Colonial and Revolutionary-era cartography, drawn from one of the most significant private map collections in the United States.

Cartographic America (CSU Press, Tapestry Series) presents a scholarly selection from the J. Kyle Spencer Collection at Columbus State University. The book traces the visual and political evolution of the American landscape as rendered by cartographers across the Colonial and Revolutionary periods. Each map is reproduced with careful attention to historical accuracy and accompanied by contextual analysis situating it within the broader currents of exploration, imperial rivalry, and nation-building that defined the era.

The selections span a critical period in American cartographic history — from early coastal and territorial surveys undertaken by competing colonial powers, to maps that captured the shifting boundaries and contested claims of the thirteen colonies as they moved toward independence. Early maps of Georgia through the late 1800s demonstrates a young state establishing its place in the plantation economy South. Together, these maps document not only geographic knowledge as it existed at the time, but the ideological and political forces that shaped how the American continent was seen, claimed, and represented on paper.

Drawing on the depth and rarity of the Spencer Collection, this volume offers historians, cartographic scholars, and serious collectors a substantive resource for understanding how maps functioned as instruments of power, persuasion, and record during America's founding era. Each entry balances visual presentation with historical commentary, making the collection valuable both as a reference work and as a document of material and intellectual history. Cartographic America is historical geography represented through competing lenses of European hegemons and post-independence Southerners. 

Cartographic America contributes to the growing scholarly interest in cartographic history as a lens onto colonialism, territorial dispute, and the construction of national identity.