Published to coincide with an exhibition at Chicago’s Newberry Library, Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West charts the historic role maps have played in imagining, understanding, promoting, and exploiting the Western frontier of North America. Featuring more than sixty full-color maps and views from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, this fascinating book documents how maps encouraged Euro-Americans to see the West as a land of promise. Maps helped visualize a nation destined to expand across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.

Curators Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon present an interpretively rich, carefully researched selection of items drawing on the Newberry’s superb collections of historic maps and Western Americana. They have organized the book into four sections: maps for empire, maps for building a new nation, maps for enlightenment, and maps for business. Chicago emerges first as a dot on one of these maps, but it subsequently becomes a bustling metropolis and a major center of cartographic production.