Picturing America

Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, 1st Edition, examines the history, design, and cultural role of twentieth-century American pictorial cartography. Author Stephen J. Hornsby investigates this graphic medium, which developed as an artistic form of visual storytelling rather than scientific cartography.

The volume explores how graphic artists combined geographic representation, illustration, and text between the 1920s and the 1970s. It addresses maps created for humor, instruction, regional identity, industry, wartime needs, and postwar society, emphasizing how advances in color lithography enabled wide commercial distribution.

Featuring 158 pictorial maps primarily drawn from the Library of Congress collections, the publication received the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers.