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Book Review
The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest. Ed. by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. xiv, 227 pp. $37.50, isbn 0-8061-3047-4.)
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The story of North American cartography is a small but expanding branch of thematic history. Even so, through ignorance or scepticism, historians continue to undervalue old maps. What will historians of the Southwest find of interest in this book? And will it reinforce or mitigate the doubts of historians in general? |
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Old maps are aesthetically attractive and collectible and are the stuff of exhibitions. The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest stems from a symposium held in 1992 at the University of Texas at Arlington at the opening of an exhibition, "Entradas: The First Century of Mapping the Greater Southwest." Unfortunately, the contributors have been ill served by editors, who, in turn, seem to have assumed responsibility for six loosely related contributions. Seventeen maps are reproduced twice, and there is no integration among chapters. The preface is inadequate. Neither "Entradas" nor "Greater Southwest" is defined (although in one chapter the region is described expansively as "lying between the Missouri-Mississippi system to the east, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and the lush heartland of Mexico to the south"). Worst of all, for a field that is now so dynamic, only one reference postdates 1992. |
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