| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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 us—mapping 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 they had left behind in the old. Not surprisingly, when it comes to the messy business of building new communities, this sort of a priori planning almost always fails. But when it comes to the scholarly business of underscoring the persistent approaches to social control, this post hoc appreciation of coercive cartography usually works well enough—as it does in this effective study of establishing a New Connecticut on the Old Northwest.

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