Mapping colonial America. (Current and Coming).(early map exhibit; book Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America )

By the sixteenth century Europeans were aware of the location of the new world through maps. Explorers and traders returned home with hand-drawn maps that were subsequently published and were important tools for promoting emigration to the Americas. The Dutch, newly rich through an extensive trade network, became known for the accuracy of their printed maps, and publishers there were able to employ the best engravers, printers, geographers, and colorists available. However England and France soon successfully competed with the Dutch in the map market.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg Virginia, has been collecting maps for most of the seventy-five years of its existence. Margaret Beck Pritchard, the curator of prints, maps, and wallpaper there, is not only interested in examples that pertain to Williamsburg and its relationship to the American colonies, but she is also intrigued by how maps relate to the history and settlement of the nation, how they were used, and, when pertinent, how they were hung in interiors of the period. Her extensive research, along with that of Henry G. Taliaferro, a map dealer and historian, has culminated in a new book and an accompanying exhibition.

The exhibition, entitled Degrees of Latitude: Maps of America from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection, is on view at the New-York Historical Society in New York City, from October 1 to February 2, 2003. It includes seventy-two maps and one atlas. The Custis Atlas, as it is known, is a remarkable document, for it contains one hundred ...