Mapping Nature across the Americas

This richly illustrated and carefully edited volume deserves high praise and will be of great interest to Latin Americanists across the geographical and temporal spectrum. Twelve focused essays, a comparative epilogue, and an eloquent introduction by the two coeditors reflect the results from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2014. As the introductory essay makes clear, this collection is likely the “first book to fully contemplate historical maps as the primary evidentiary sources in examining the evolution of environmental knowledge in the Americas” (p. 2). It draws sustenance from a longer history of attention to the relationship between mapping and human enterprise in and of the environment that is at least 500 years in the making. The authors focus with creative verve and scholarly precision on distinct scales of ecological history as expressed through the cartographic enterprise. The volume is...