Mary Elizabeth Zundo

This dissertation examines the historic links between the rapid proliferation of cartographic technology in the United States, the emergence of government sponsored scientific exploration, and 19th-century American images of the frontier landscape. A sampling of relevant Philadelphia collections includes: in the American Philosophical Society, journals of Lewis and Clark, and the Charles Willson Peale correspondence; at the University of Pennsylvania, the many travel narratives, western history texts, and government survey reports; at Princeton University, Historic Map and Western Americana collections, and the Philip Ashton Rollins Collection, with numerous overland narratives and other 19th-century sources pertaining to culture west of the Mississippi; at the Wagner Institute, the comprehensive archive of 19th-century scientific survey reports and journals, government documents of the Interior, and travel; and at Academy of Natural Sciences, the wealth of original drawings, manuscripts, and journals of expedition artists, texts, government reports, travel narratives, maps, and illustrations having to do with the classification and “discovery” of the flora and fauna in the West.

Read Mary's <a href="http://www.pachs.net/about/news/mapping_destiny_cartography_and_nineteen... title="report">report</a> on her research as a PACHS Fellow.