"Inventing the Map: " from 19th-century Pedagogical Practice to 21st-century Geospatial Scholarship

In 1823, at a small school in western Vermont, Frances Alsop Henshaw, the 14year-old daughter of a prosperous merchant, produced a remarkable cartographic and textual artifact. Henshaw’s "Book of Penmanship Executed at the Middlebury Female Academy" is a slim volume, later bound in marble boards, containing – in addition to the expected, set copy-texts of a practice-book – a series of hand-drawn, delicately-colored maps of our nineteen United States, each one paired with an edited, geometrically-designed and embellished prose passage selected from the geography books available to a schoolgirl in the new American republic.1 Henshaw’s maps and texts alike are interpretive re-presentations of this body of contemporaneous geodetic and descriptive literature. Formally, many of the textual passages that accompany her maps are designed within a framework of aestheticallyinflected cardinal coordinates, representing (either conceptually or in their spatial contours) the states they describe, and positioning political and natural boundaries in cartographically appropriate margins of the page [see Figures 1 and 2].