A review of the early maps of the Americas as tools for communication and cultural understanding.
Written in 2008; 2,219 words; 5 sources; APA; $ 68.95
Paper Summary:
This paper reviews and analyzes the early maps of the Americas, the men who created them, the institutions that produced and promoted them based on data and rough maps brought back to Europe by explorers, and the purposes - especially their communicative capabilities - they served in terms of the development of colonial properties for Spain, England, and Portugal among other European nations.
Outline:
Thesis Statement
Introduction: Incomplete Communication in Some Maps
Literature Review: History of Maps and the Age of Discovery
From the Paper:
"Certainly the leaders in Portugal and Spain, among the most active early exploring nations, had volumes of logs, notes, journals and other historical records of discoveries made by their intrepid sailors. But, according to Monica L. Smith, writing in Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Smith, 2005), "...the visual stimulus of a map may be more powerful than the scholarly text that accompanies it." Smith explains. Indeed, by providing a visual image "the map gives another dimension to the image it represents," Smith states in her article, "and restricts, or even overtakes, the freedom of its reader to create an image of his own." There are implications of "linguistics" within the creation of a map, Smith asserts, through the process of the cartographer's "consciously created and manipulated" images. But Smith, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, believes while ancient maps do communicate dimensions that are extremely useful to historians, "the understanding of maps as interpretive documents" has had little or no affect on portrayals of the "premodern past." That is due to the fact that scholarly illustrations of historic lands and cultures "tend to be of the absolutist variety." Smith believes the use of maps in textbooks too often communicate a narrow and shallow picture of early cultural groups. One map in a text "implies that a state or empire was always growing toward its eventual borders in a kind of long-term manifest destiny."
We have thousands of high-quality term papers, research papers, essays, book reports and dissertations on every topic. At AcaDemon, you can download those term papers to help you write yours! You can be sure that the term paper, essay, book report or research paper you download are top-quality, competitively priced and high-level work.
This Free Term Paper Abstract is a part of our Term Paper Library.Here you can purchase research papers, examples of essays, academic dissertations, articles, notes, analytical papers, book reports, stories and poems. We have thousands of persuasive, point-of-view, narrative, critical, compare and contrast and other types of essays in our Library. You can also find here Term papers on "Cartographic Communication", Essays on "Cartographic Communication", Research papers on "Cartographic Communication", Student papers on "Cartographic Communication", Book reports on "Cartographic Communication", Dissertation on "Cartographic Communication", Thesis on "Cartographic Communication", Summary of paper on "Cartographic Communication", Articles written on "Cartographic Communication".
Look for more research papers, essays and book reports on