Canadian-American Center Director Awarded Geography Prize

 

The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize

This award encourages and rewards American geographers who write books about the United States which convey the insights of professional geography in language that is both interesting and attractive to lay readers.

Stephen J. Hornsby, Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps (University of Chicago Press). A visual feast, Picturing America combines gorgeously reproduced examples of the many types of pictorial maps with erudite yet deft and graceful text. Hornsby defines this previously underappreciated and understudied genre of popular cartography, which he shows to be a mirror of American society from the exuberant, confident 1920s through World War II and the Cold War. He is particularly attentive to the mapmakers, including women, many of them graphic artists, who defied or skirted cartographic convention to create delightful, clever maps that connected immediately with their audience. This book is likely to make an impact beyond the discipline while it contributes to geographers’ and cartographers’ current interest in story maps and emotional, spatial narrative.