"Maps of Texas and the Southwest is an engaging, instructive, essential opus for serious regional study."—Oklahoma Historical Quarterly

"James C. Martin and Robert S. Martin have given us an excellent window on the past through which we can see how successive groups of people have interpreted and reinterpreted the geography of a specific region. . . .This is an important book, one that belongs on the shelf of anyone who is interested in maps and what they can reveal about the past."—Southern California Quarterly

The almost simultaneous discovery of the New World and the art of printing has made maps among the most faithful records of the exploration and settlement of the Americas. Printed maps proved indispensable to the empire building of the great European powers, and today these same maps offer an incomparable panorama of what was known about Texas and the Southwest between 1513 and 1900. The publication of this long out-of-print classic, with a new introduction by the authors, makes this significant study with its colorful and striking maps available once again.

Hoping to use geographic knowledge to gain political and economic advantage, voyagers to New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought reliable maps of the Gulf of Mexico. Colonization efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were organized around the fragmentary information the earlier explorers brought back about landscape, rivers, Indians, and territorial claims.

Territorial rivalry was particularly intense for the land that became the American Southwest, resulting in a flurry of map making. The fifty maps collected for this volume represent many of the most historically significant maps of Texas and the Southwest from 1513 to 1900. The introductory text and the detailed descriptions of each map provide the reader with a keen appreciation of the progress of exploration, the science of cartography, and the art of printing. The products of skilled craftsmanship, these maps can be appreciated by modern readers for their purely visual appeal, as well as for their historic value.

Closely read, the maps reveal the interests of map makers and patrons; broadly viewed, they present beautifully designed records of man's changing knowledge of the world.

JAMES C. MARTIN is executive director of the San Jacinto Museum of History in Houston. ROBERT SIDNEY MARTIN is the director and librarian of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

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Maps of Texas and the Southwest, 1513–1900
0-87611-169-X cloth $39.95

9x12. 190 pp. 9 color maps, 50 b&w maps. Bib. Index.
Texas History. Cartographic History.

Publication Date: November 1998.

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