Скачать или смотреть Touring “Our USA”: Seeing U.S. Empire through the Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

[Originally presented to the Chicago Map Society at the Newberry Library on March 20, 2025]

Summary: Although widespread today, guidebooks, travel pamphlets, and maps for tourism have their origins in earlier periods, often during times when means of travel and printing technologies transformed. One of these moments came at the beginning of the twentieth century, when pictorial mapping—a distinct genre of cartography that favored narrative, illustrated styles and typically included stories about history and culture—took off alongside a booming tourism industry. Although often overlooked in histories of the United States, American women were able to participate in this type of mapping in more varied ways than in previous genres. This talk will examine the pictorial maps of one woman, Ruth Taylor White, analyzing how her cartographic and artistic practice made claims about what counted as part of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and encouraged white American women to experience different sites of U.S. empire as tourists.

Speaker Bio: Emily Lyon is a public historian committed to bringing her research and expertise to diverse audiences, and she currently works as a postdoctoral fellow in public history at the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for Cartography. She is researching and writing, assisting with public programming, creating pedagogical material, and producing digital content for the Center's many projects. She is a historian of visual culture and U.S. empire, and she received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2024. Her dissertation examined how white women, working as photographers, cartographers, travel writers, and monument makers, produced visual commodities would encourage Americans, and especially white women, to experience sites of empire as tourists and to consume U.S. imperial culture.