A Literary & Historical Atlas of AmericaBartholomew, J. G. (John George)
History
A Literary & Historical Atlas of America
Bartholomew, J. G. (John George)
America -- Maps
As with the great rivers, so with the great American cities. You can
compare "old New York," as represented in one page, with the new New
York and its environs which are a world's wonder to-day. Then again
you can take the chart of the Early Highways that ran westward into
the wilderness and estimate how the power of the engineer has, since
the railway came, caught the States in an iron network and rearranged
the Americas. Battlefields and sieges, by which the right of the new
country to its national life and individuality was "wrenched," as
Tennyson said in his address to the old country,[1] are not forgotten.
Note among the less familiar documents that we are able to include,
the rare map of the territory in Virginia and North Carolina traversed
by John Lederer in his three marches. Lederer was sent out by Governor
Berkeley in 1669-70, and journeyed west as far as the top of the
Apalatoean mountains. It seems doubtful how far he went in South
Carolina. He did not penetrate far enough, according to Professor
W. J. Rivers, to meet "the new-comers who were about founding the
Commonwealth of Locke."
As for the local associations that have become familiar in American
literature, you have a chart of the Concord neighbourhood showing
Walden Pond, Forest Lake, Lexington, and Punkatasset Hill, associated
with the name and fame of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
H. D. Thoreau. Fenimore Cooper recalls the old Indian Territory as it
was in the wild prime of the Red Men; and you travel from the land of
"Hiawatha" in Longfellow's poem southwards to the Mexico and Peru of
Prescott, and then pause over something more amazing than any record in
imaginative verse or prose—the plain statistics figured in the map of
South America, and the emergence of Buenos Ayres with its million and
a quarter inhabitants, Rio de Janeiro with its 860,000, San Paulo with
350,000, and Santiago with 330,000. Here are the elements of an immense
new Latin civilisation which is going to count, and count enormously,
just as China and its millions are bound to count enormously in the
twentieth century.
We might have spoken at large of Canada and its huge dominion; of
Newfoundland, New Brunswick, New "Scotia," and the chain of the Great
Lakes in the North. But an Atlas speaks for itself with the accent of
a world-bearer if one treats its pages as they ought to be treated,
with a sense of the great perspective of history and of men and nations
advancing along it to their fulfilment in the world. The Old World and
the New have lately been drawn closer by the mysterious nerves that
underrun the Atlantic and the understanding of a true world polity;
and it is hoped that this volume will do something to foster that amity
between states and nations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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