Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier

Moral Geography: Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier. By Amy DeRogatis. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. xiv, 242 pp. Cloth, $52.50, ISBN 0-231-12788-X. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 0-231-12789-8.)

Making a map of a new place means much more than delineating the contours of the terrain. As Amy DeRogatis reminds us-and as numerous other scholars have also told usmapping an area for anticipated settlement most often involves imposing a set of assumptions, expectations, and conventions on an unseen landscape and projecting a preemptive pattern of spatial arrangements on a region long before the immigrants even arrive. The goal, in fact, is not just to create a coherent cartographic order that will give settlers a visual sense of the territory; it is also to lay out a familiar physical framework that will encourage those settlers to re-create in their new locale the social and cultural traditions that...