Events › Martin Brückner: For the Love of Maps - Material Passion and Power in Eighteenth-Century America

Learn how “cartifacts” circulated in the everyday spaces of the Revolutionary War era

In North America, the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century profoundly affected people’s material life and, as some argue, paved the way for other more momentous political revolutions. In this program, Martin Brückner will discuss how maps became popular consumer goods and how their material transfer as “cartifacts” came to shape everyday and political life in early America.

Martin Brückner is Professor of English and Director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. The author of two award-winning books, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750-1860 (2017) and The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006), his other published work addresses the material and spatial imagination in early American literary and visual culture.

This talk is free and open to the public. We invite questions and comments from our live audience. Registration is not required, but we will send a calendar invitation and reminder to registered attendees.

Part of the Richard H. Brown Seminar on the Historical Geography of the American Revolutionary Era