Sandy Isenstadt

Martin Brückner

Elusive Archives asks how historians, librarians, and museum professionals can bring together scattered, lost, or otherwise forgotten objects into a provisional collection, an elusive archive. Addressing a wide range of objects, the authors' diverse approaches, varying formats, and broad scope of inquiries describe a new conceptual territory at the intersection of archival studies and material culture studies.

Material Culture in Formation

Elusive Archives

Hätte er nicht wieder auf Einsamer Wolf gemacht, dann säße Reporterlegende Fritz Graber gemütlich zu Hause in Frankfurt und bestimmt nicht in Vietnam in der Falle. Doch diesen Bericht auf crashtag.com konnte er einfach nicht ignorieren! Ein verunglückter Edel-Porsche an der Cote d'Azur mit einem toten Technologieunternehmer darin, diese Story über einen gigantischen Fall von Wirtschaftskriminalität im Bereich autonomes Fahren, sie hätte ihm seinen Job bei der Neuen Frankfurter Zeitung retten können. Apropos Rettung, vielleicht hätte er besser mal seiner jungen Kollegin Marie vertraut. Die kannte sich wenigstens mit dem ganzen Digitalzeug aus. Stattdessen muss er sich ausgerechnet in diese zwielichtige Asiatin verlieben! Dabei steckt die schöne Gloria doch mittendrin in dem Komplott. Aber so ist das halt, wenn man in Frauendingen ausschließlich mit Steve spricht. Steve McQueen, Filmstar und Stilikone der Sixties, wem sonst sollte man denn vertrauen können in einer Welt, die jetzt, mitten in den 2020ern, nur noch aus Bits und Bytes zu bestehen scheint.

Autonom. Fahren. Tödlich.

#CrashTag

The rapid rise in popularity of maps and geography handbooks in the eighteenth century ushered in a new geographic literacy among nonelite Americans. In a pathbreaking and richly illustrated examination of this transformation, Martin Bruckner argues that geographic literacy as it was played out in popular literary genres--written, for example, by William Byrd, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark--significantly influenced the formation of identity in America from the 1680s to the 1820s. Drawing on historical geography, cartography, literary history, and material culture, Bruckner recovers a vibrant culture of geography consisting of property plats and surveying manuals, decorative wall maps and school geographies, the nation's first atlases, and sentimental objects such as needlework samplers. By showing how this geographic revolution affected the production of literature, Bruckner demonstrates that the internalization of geography as a kind of language helped shape the literary construction of the modern American subject. Empirically rich and provocative in its readings, The Geographic Revolution in Early America proposes a new, geographical basis for Anglo-Americans' understanding of their character and its expression in pedagogical and literary terms.

Maps, Literacy, and National Identity

The Geographic Revolution in Early America

In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A "carto-coded" America--a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful--had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography's spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner's comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.

Martin Brückner

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