Author: Payton Mlakar

When discussing John Snow’s revolutionary map of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London originating at the Broad Street pump in his book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Steven Johnson states, “[T]he real innovation [of Snow’s map] lay in the data that generated that diagram, and in the investigation that compiled the data in the first place. Snow’s Broad Street map was a bird’s eye view, but it was drawn from true street-level knowledge.”[1] The dotted line that builds the Voronoi diagram on Snow’s map demonstrates the local collection of data that Snow and Henry Whitehead undertook that conglomerated which households got their water from the Broad Street Pump.

Without collecting this street-level data and representing it, as Steven Johnson notes, through a Voronoi diagram, Snow’s map does not effectively map the people’s everyday actions which almost always dictate disease transmission.[2]

In contrast to Snow’s map, Alexander Keith Johnston’s map titled The Geographical Distribution of Health and Disease in Connection chiefly with Natural Phenomena lacks much of this local data.

While Johnston clearly intended his map to cover global disease prevalence, his use of isarithmic mapping to represent regional disease prevalence reveals that he used little “street-level” data. The wide generalizations isarithmic mapping produces do efficiently map disease prevalence around the world, but they do so with little nuance.

While the small, local scale of John Snow’s map certainly facilitated local data collection, the lack of similar data in Johnston’s map dramatically decreases its utility. With its many transmission routes mapped across the seas, Johnston’s map seems to have a more artistic and historical purpose as opposed to Snow’s map’s more argumentative and scientific presentation.

However, these maps are linked by the state of European epidemiology in the mid-1800s when both these maps were produced. Johnston delineates some disease regions by latitude. The commonly held European belief that “miasma,” or bad, stench-filled air caused disease may have inspired these stark delineations as many believed certain regions contained more “miasma,” and thus higher disease prevalence.

John Snow overlaid a Voronoi diagram and used a dot density map to disprove these theories and to reveal the source of the cholera outbreak he mapped was the Broad Street water pump. In this way, the scientific beliefs of their time unite these maps and set them apart from one another.

Bibliography

[1] Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 197.

[2] Johnson, The Ghost Map, 195-196.

In her book Mapping Society, Laura Vaughan discusses how the “spatiality of redlining is even more problematic if we consider how it had the effect of setting in stone what might previously have been more fluid boundaries.”[1] Here, Vaughan highlights how racial, economic, or ethnic boundaries were codified into society much more thoroughly through intentional spatial segregation practices like redlining. When comparing redlining maps of Omaha, Nebraska from the 20th century to maps of census data from 2020, one can clearly see the social codification of what was once lawful segregation that remains a de facto spatial reality today.

In the 1937 map titled Map of Omaha and Vicinity, Omaha was broken into sections as a reference for mortgage companies to refer to when determining if offering home mortgages in neighborhoods around Omaha was going to be beneficial or “hazardous.”

At the very center of the map, clearly shaded and marked as “hazardous” in red is North Omaha.

The red coloration of this “hazardous” area not only gives the term “redlining” its name, but also connotes evil or danger to those reading this map.

As Vaughan mentions, “[A]lmost all black neighborhoods were classified as grade D, red. . .”[2] This meant that most of the people living in Northern Omaha in the red, “hazardous” zone were African Americans who suffered targeted discrimination in housing, economic opportunities, and education opportunities through the redlining of their neighborhoods.

The lasting de facto codification of the discrimination that characterizes redlining remains evident long after it became illegal on the map titled Race and Ethnicity Across The Nation created by CNN based on data from the 2020 U.S. Census. This map is a dot density map that uses different colors of dots to represent different racial or ethnic groups represented on the United State census.

If we zoom in on Omaha on this map we can see that most the dots represent people who identified themselves as “black” on the 2020 census live in North Omaha in areas strikingly similar to the boundaries of the redlining map mentioned above.

This codification of this de facto segregation that persists today in the city of Omaha is evidence of the power of mapping on the “real world.” Redlining maps manufactured hard borders separating previously fluid communities that enabled mortgage companies, the government, others to institute urban segregation that persists today long after these actions have been made illegal.

Works Cited

[1] Vaughan, Laura, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography (London, University College London Press, 2018), 158.

[2] Vaughan, Laura, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography (London, University College London Press, 2018), 156.

Map Citations (In Order of Appearance):

Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, Map of Omaha and Vicinity, 1937, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/NE/Omaha/areas#loc=14/41.2713/-95.9369, accessed February 16, 2024.

John Keefe, Daniel Wolfe and Sergio Hernandez, Race and Ethnicity Across The Nation, 2021, CNN, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/us/census-race-ethnicity-map/, accessed February 16, 2024.

In his essay “Maps and the Social Construction of Race,” Jeremy W. Crampton highlights how, after World War II, geographers, cartographers, and anthropologists “generally adopted a geographically continuous notion of human variation, rather than discrete, bordered territories” [1]. Both choropleth maps depicted below were produced prior to the end of World War II and depict race in “discrete, bordered territories” as opposed to geographic continuities.

While choropleths make mapping data visually appealing and easy to digest, they fail to depict continuity and non-uniformity across the areas they map as they divide their data with imagined, human-imposed boundaries. The mapmakers of Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States even admit to this failing of the choropleth map in a note in the map’s right margin.

By dividing the data depicted on the map into imaginary, human-imposed counties, this map fails to communicate urban/rural divides in the number of enslaved individuals within the counties that encompass both urban and rural areas. By shading entire counties without regard for the racial makeup of cities, towns, and sub-regions within counties and the geographic continuity that characterizes race, this map misleads readers into believing that enslaved individuals lived uniformly across these counties when they may have only inhabited specific areas or regions of these counties.

The map Races of the World and Where They Live similarly weaponizes the choropleth and its flaws to explicitly propose the superiority of white Europeans over other races, something the statue above the map’s title makes abundantly clear.

Across this map, the mapmaker imposed “racial boundaries” onto the planet where she proposed definitive boundaries existed between races. In sharp contrast to the post-WWII, continuity-focused approach Crampton discussed, this map proposes that you can definitively define one’s race and place in the racial hierarchy based on where they or their ancestors were born.

Additionally, both these maps “color” their representations of Africans and the African Diaspora by depicting areas they predominantly inhabit in black, brown, or other dark colors.

This furthers racist narratives about the “darkness” of Africa, Africans, and those of African descent as these maps portray them as being on the lowest level of the global racial hierarchy, while white Europeans and those of European descent are depicted in white or tan, reinforcing the proposal that they lie at the top of the global racial hierarchy as an enlightened race.

Works Cited:

[1] Crampton, Jeremy W., “Maps and the Social Construction of Race,” in The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Monmonier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1237.

Map Citations (In order of appearance):

Hergesheimer, E., Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States, 1860, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3861e.cw0013200/?r=0.317,0.538,0.62,0.282,0, accessed February 10, 2024.

Hoffman, Malvina and Field Museum of Natural History, Races of the World and Where They Live, 1944, David Rumsey Map Collection, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~291599~90063129:Races-of-the-world-and-where-they-l sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&qvq=q:race;sort:Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=45&trs=216#, accessed February 10, 2024.

In his article “How the US Has Hidden its Empire,” Daniel Immerwahr asserts that most Americans have a mental map of the United States that consists of the “Lower 48” states in one contiguous body. Immerwahr calls this the “Logo Map” of the United States that permeates popular culture and imprints onto the American psyche.[1]

The “Logo Map” serves as a mental reference map for Americans to quickly think about U.S. geography. Despite its ease of use, Immerwahr points out how the “Logo Map” of the United States is deeply flawed because it excludes a critical component of U.S. territorial possessions: U.S. territories. The “Logo Map” gives the misleading impression that “the US is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another.”[1] In this way, the “Logo Map” most Americans use to think about the United States is not at all reflective of the true extent of U.S. territorial possessions and the extent of the “American Empire.”

One expansive thematic map that attempts to remedy this glaring flaw of the “Logo Map” is The Territory of The United States: A Patchwork of Jurisdictions and Rights by Bill Rankin.

This map uses several colors, legends, and inset maps to emphasize the extent of U.S. territorial claims.

While I understand why many Americans default to their mental snapshot of the “Logo Map,” I believe that if Americans began to map the United States similar to how Bill Rankin mapped the nation and its expansive territorial claims and varied political subdivisions, Americans would have a better understanding of the nature and composition of their own country. This shift in perception through mapping could even make many Americans view the United States as an empire. In his article, Daniel Immerwahr proposes that the “Logo Map” of the United States gives the impression the United States is not an empire with vast, world-spanning territories. However, a map that actually depicts all American possessions, no matter their location or political status gives readers a significantly different impression. The idea of the United States as an empire is an idea that Americans often overlook in our domestic national discourse due to how we engineer the propositions of U.S. maps to align with our conception of the “Logo Map.” By changing how we map the United States, we can dramatically change how we perceive and imagine the nation.

Works Cited:

[1] Daniel Immerwahr, “How the US Has Hidden Its Empire,” The Guardian, February 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa.

Map Citations (In order of appearance):

Daniel Immerwahr, Logo Map, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa, accessed February 3, 2024.

Bill Rankin, The Territory of The United States: A Patchwork of Jurisdictions and Rights, “Radical Cartography,” radicalcartography.net/us-territory_12m.png, accessed February 3, 2024.