MAPPING AMERICA’S PAST: A HISTORICAL ATLAS, edited by Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, with Patrick Williams (Henry Holt and Company, 287 pages, $50.00).
Nearly four hundred color maps created especially for this book, along with more than 120 paintings, engravings, and photographs, support the editors in their illustration of the history of the United States, as they chronicle the issues and influences that have helped shape the country over the centuries. Divided into nine sections–Pre-Columbian America; Colonial America; a New Nation; Slavery and the Civil War; America in the Gilded Age; America in the Early 20th Century; Post-war America; America and the World after World War II; and America, an Evolving Superpower–the atlas highlights such topics as the origins of the first Americans, the African slave trade, abolitionists and runaways, Jewish immigration, woman suffrage, the creation of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, the spread of AIDS, and the abortion controversy. Maps detailing the religious and economic forces of seventeenth-century England; the slave trade in eighteenth-century West Africa; the nineteenth-century Irish famine; Europe during World War II; and active-duty American military personnel stationed throughout the world as of 1994 complete this comprehensive look at America’s past.
