University of Denver Winter 2023

Spanning history to sociology, new books examine our past, present and future BOOKS By Tamara Chapman

Exploring a mapmaker’s spatial imagination

school in the 1810s. “Her textbooks— studded with these creative images— shaped students from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi frontier,” Schulten writes. “From 1822, when she created a metaphorical map of the Roman Empire, to 1860, when her ‘American Temple of Time’ was pub

History professor Susan Schulten has long been fascinated by maps. And by mapmakers. Among them: the indefatigable Emma Willard, a 19th century ed ucator known for her textbooks on history and geography. Throughout her life, Willard insisted that people learn information best when it is

lished, she spent a career picturing the past.” Map lovers know Schulten as the author of a trio of treasures published by the University of Chicago Press: “The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950”; “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America”; and “A History of America in 100 Maps.” This book—which is part of Information Graphic Visionaries, a series celebrating spectacular data visualization creators— includes a poster of the Temple of Time, sure to fascinate readers with its systematic ordering of events and people.

presented visually. Willard’s artistic atlases, maps and graphics are show cased in “ Emma Willard, Maps of History ” (Visionary Press, 2022). In it, Schulten recounts Willard’s uniquely visual approach to history, on display in her wondrous Temple of Time, a chronological chart of world history. Hers, Schulten writes, was “a mind reckoning with the very meaning of time and space through an era of expansion.” Willard’s earliest charts, maps and pictures date back to the 1820s and grew out of her experience teaching in a small

Learn more about Emma Willard and Schulten’s essay at magazine.du.edu.

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