Make the Map All White : The Meaning of Maps in the Prohibition and Suffrage Campaigns

Maps.have long been deployed as instruments of power, protest, and reform in American history. In the antebellum era, Northerners used maps to galvanize opposition to the expansion of slavery beyond the South. These dramatic and urgent anti-slavery maps served as powerful models for two of the most ambitious challenges to American law in the twentieth century: prohibition and woman\u27s suffrage. Both movements began with regional strengths-suffrage in the West, prohibition in the South. Suffragists and prohibitionists widely circulated maps to highlight those legislative achievements and thereby generate further momentum for their respective causes. After 1913, both the suffrage and prohibition movements pursued not just state-level campaigns but also federal amendments. In this context, maps became even more critical tools to establish and amplify support across the entire nation. A closer look at the common slogan of the two movements, Make the Map All White, reveals the degree to which both suffragists and prohibitionists navigated racial, ethnic, and geographical divisions in order to achieve their legislative and constitutional goals. Maps were at the heart of these strategies

Serving with Pride: Military Experience and the Formation of the Queer Female Identity in Mid-Century America

At the inception of World War II, the United States military adapted to include women within its ranks with the creation of the Women’s Army Corps. Likewise, psychology’s implementation into military procedures legitimized systematic exclusion and removal of queer persons seeking military involvement. Such factors resulted in a particularly unique environment for queer servicewomen. The birth of the Cold War brought about a new wave of heterosexual expectations that forced queer individuals in the U.S. military even further into the closet. This project seeks to uncover how gender and sexuality expectations placed upon queer women serving in the World War II and early Cold War U.S. military influenced them in their lives after service. The conclusion of this research is that the military’s clamping down on sexuality, paired with the all-female environment of women’s units, encouraged queer women to more boldly assert their sexuality in the years following their service, which propelled the gay liberation movement forward. Their work in the post-service years, while not always manifesting as clear-cut activism, broadened the movement in often unexpected ways

Movement and Countermovement Dynamics Between the Religious Right and LGB Community Arising from Colorado’s Amendment 2

This sample of the case study of Equality Colorado will demonstrate how counter movements and litigation may limit and change how an organization surrounding a social movement acts. Colorado for Family Values helped pass Colorado’s Amendment 2 in 1992, which limited any present and future anti-discrimination legislation that would protect sexuality as a class. This ballot initiative passed by 53% of Colorado voters, and other states like Idaho and Oregon attempted to replicate this type of initiative. Amendment 2 challenged the LGB community and compelled the movement to collectively respond to the religious right with coalitions, pooled resources, and litigation. Equality Colorado, established in 1992, will exemplify how a social movement could respond to prejudicial legislation. One of Equality Colorado’s primary tactics was to reframe religion as inclusive of gay rights. It did not cede religion entirely to its opponents and attempted to delegitimize them by labeling them “radical right” as opposed to the more popular term “religious right” or “Christian Conservatives”. Additionally, Equality Colorado tried to compensate for the downsides of litigation by “translating” the legal terms to the general public and connecting litigators with the broader movement

Make the Map All White : The Meaning of Maps in the Prohibition and Suffrage Campaigns

Maps.have long been deployed as instruments of power, protest, and reform in American history. In the antebellum era, Northerners used maps to galvanize opposition to the expansion of slavery beyond the South. These dramatic and urgent anti-slavery maps served as powerful models for two of the most ambitious challenges to American law in the twentieth century: prohibition and woman\u27s suffrage. Both movements began with regional strengths-suffrage in the West, prohibition in the South. Suffragists and prohibitionists widely circulated maps to highlight those legislative achievements and thereby generate further momentum for their respective causes. After 1913, both the suffrage and prohibition movements pursued not just state-level campaigns but also federal amendments. In this context, maps became even more critical tools to establish and amplify support across the entire nation. A closer look at the common slogan of the two movements, Make the Map All White, reveals the degree to which both suffragists and prohibitionists navigated racial, ethnic, and geographical divisions in order to achieve their legislative and constitutional goals. Maps were at the heart of these strategies

The Limits of Possibility: Rand McNally in American Culture, 1898-1929

In the early twentieth century, Rand McNally held a large share of the commercial market for maps and atlases in the United States. How the company built its reputation as an American cartographic authority—by both accepting and resisting change—is the subject of this essay. Critical to the company’s success was its ability to design materials that reinforced American notions of how the world ought to appear, an indication that the history of cartography is governed not just by technological and scientific advances, but also by a complex interplay between mapmakers and consumers

The transformation of world geography in American life, 1880-1950

In the 1880s, the United States remained politically isolated from the rest of the world and inexperienced with overseas possessions. During the upheavals of industrialization and urbanization, however, Americans developed a strong national identity and, soon thereafter, a firm commitment to international stewardship. This rise to globalism fueled--and was fueled by--equally dramatic changes in the ways Americans learned about and understood world geography. This dissertation investigates the growth and reorganization of three areas of geography during this transition: university geography, school geography, and popular cartography. In the 1870s and 1880s, all these types of geography presented the world as a rigid, hierarchical, and ahistorical place where race, climate, and location were organically connected. After the Spanish American War, the United States came to control a number of territories overseas, heightening popular interest in the nation\u27s role abroad. Textbooks and atlases reflected this new activism by bringing a more immediate commercial interest to the world beyond American borders. By demonstrating the fragility of diplomatic and trade networks, the First World War entrenched American commitments to both, reinforcing a geographic ideal of the world as a marketplace that depended on America\u27s participation to ensure a peaceful future. In the 1940s the advent of aviation and the effects of a global war completely reconfigured America\u27s view of the world. With more Americans buying maps than ever before, the war illustrated not only the limits of the Mercator projection, but also the dangers of a map that did not take into account the shocking proximity of the United States to Eurasia over the north pole. The events of the 1940s also generated a new language of distance and diplomacy known as geopolitics, affecting school geography, cartography, and professional geography by drawing each away from the economic focus of the interwar years toward an explicitly strategic and political understanding of the world. The rise of American stewardship in an age of heightened proximity recast both the spatial organization of the world and the place of the United States within it