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    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame
    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame
    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame
    Ebook216 pages4 hours

    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame

    By Mark Monmonier

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    About this ebook

    Brassiere Hills, Alaska. Mollys Nipple, Utah. Outhouse Draw, Nevada. In the early twentieth century, it was common for towns and geographical features to have salacious, bawdy, and even derogatory names. In the age before political correctness, mapmakers readily accepted any local preference for place names, prizing accurate representation over standards of decorum. Thus, summits such as Squaw Tit—which towered above valleys in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California—found their way into the cartographic annals. Later, when sanctions prohibited local use of racially, ethnically, and scatalogically offensive toponyms, town names like Jap Valley, California, were erased from the national and cultural map forever. 

    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow probes this little-known chapter in American cartographic history by considering the intersecting efforts to computerize mapmaking, standardize geographic names, and respond to public concern over ethnically offensive appellations. Interweaving cartographic history with tales of politics and power, celebrated geographer Mark Monmonier locates his story within the past and present struggles of mapmakers to create an orderly process for naming that avoids confusion, preserves history, and serves different political aims. Anchored by a diverse selection of naming controversies—in the United States, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, and Antarctica; on the ocean floor and the surface of the moon; and in other parts of our solar system—From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow richly reveals the map’s role as a mediated portrait of the cultural landscape. And unlike other books that consider place names, this is the first to reflect on both the real cartographic and political imbroglios they engender. 

    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is Mark Monmonier at his finest: a learned analysis of a timely and controversial subject rendered accessible—and even entertaining—to the general reader.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2008
    ISBN9780226534640
    From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame
    Author

    Mark Monmonier

    Mark Monmonier is Distinguished Professor of Geography at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He is the author of twenty books, including How to Lie with Maps, and was editor of Cartography in the Twentieth Century, the million-word encyclopedia published as volume 6 in the History of Cartography series. His awards include the American Geographical Society’s O. M. Miller Medal (2001), the German Cartographic Society’s Mercator Medal (2009), and induction into URISA’s (Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) GIS Hall of Fame (2016).

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    • 2/5
      The title grabbed me! I did find some of the information interesting as to how places receive official names and what part the federal government is involved. However, it was a dry read. Also, there was a piece of metal in the spine of my copy that cut my finger. Reading can be a danger activity.

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