What a difference a caption makes

The NYPL Map Division just tweeted a picture of a remarkable map, included in a 2018 blog post by Artis Wright about an NEH-funded project to catalog and image pre-1900 maps of the USA (Wright 2018). Here ’tis:

“United States and Territories” Truth (1898). NYPL. Click on image for full catalog record and image.

The magazine Truth was apparently published in New York by Truth Co., between 1886 and 1906 and seems rather ephemeral, at least from the lack of catalog records in WorldCat and other online resources. This image (I don’t know about the whole magazine) was printed by the American Lithographic Co.

The Map

At first sight, the map was very recognizable as one of a common genre of geographical maps that displayed the territorial growth of the USA. Such maps can be found in official publications (statistical atlases based on the US Census, reports of the General Land Office, and so on) and in many commercial publications as well. So, an aesthetically grabbing rendition of a common image for a popular audience.

And then I saw the captions added above,

TRUTH

and below:

HOW WE GROW.

A Duplicate of an Interesting Official Map Recently Issued by the U.S. Government

At first, I read the lower caption as “How We Grew,” past tense. Okay; quite conventional. And then I realized that it is actually in the present tense. “How We GROW.”

The present tense makes explicit a sense that was normally only implicit in the wider genre. Generically, such maps—a complication of the logo map—show the expansion of the US as a matter of historical record: this is how the US expanded from the original thirteen colonies through the nineteenth century. Such maps are a record of Manifest Destiny, of the US’s inevitable acquisition of the continent through the dispossession of native peoples and the dissolution of their land claims, and also of the conquest of half of the original republic of Mexico.

But this particular map—produced at the time of the Spanish-American War when the US, ginned up by yellow journalism, sought to enter the ranks of great world empires by taking over the remaining imperial territories of Spain—takes that extra step. The manifest destiny of the USA is ongoing. It is going on right now! In particular, Cuba is colored like a US territory and labeled “Why Not?”

The map obviously calls for the annexation of that island in addition to whatever other Spanish territories the USA might consume (notably the Philippines and Puerto Rico). The map is a small part of the outpouring of public imagery that proselytized for the US to become a world-spanning empire (Craib and Burnett 1998).

An Example of the Determination of Meaning

What really struck me about this map image and its caption from an academic standpoint is the work done by the captions. One of the great essays into how imagery can be actively manipulated to determine their meanings in the eyes of readers was by the late Stuart Hall (1972). In a working paper on “The Determination of News Photographs,” Hall explored several strategies that could be followed to give a particular meaning to a photograph, to give the photograph “news value.” (To be clear, there is a great deal in Hall’s essay that addresses other elements of denotation and connotation that are more amenable to less conscious manipulation.) These strategies include the initial selection of the photograph of a subject to be reproduced in a newspaper (politician awake and engaged, or momentarily resting their eyes), where it is reproduced (above the fold, on an inside page), cropping and other manipulations, and the caption. The caption is key: it tells the reader how the photograph should be interpreted.

These strategies can be recast slightly when reading maps. The caption, or title, is equally important on a map. The main title tells the reader what the map is of—the USA and its territories. This function is more than just the denotation of a region but combines with the framing of a map (how the territory is cropped, not the use of a neatline) to connote particular spatial identities.

But here, the extra captions at top and bottom, guide the reader into an explicit reading of the map. First the map is overtly defined as a statement of truth apparently based on a recent official publication … except that this image does not “duplicate” any official publication. That is apparent from the label applied to Cuba, within the body of the map. The content of the map has been altered, but the claim is that it has not.

The use of the present tense in the lower caption calls the reader to think of the USA as a living thing. The organic metaphor for states and nations was well established by the end of the nineteenth century: nations/states were living organisms that, like any organism, had to grow at the expense of weaker ones. There is some conflation here: nations are groups of living things (“how we grow”) and the states made up of nations (the mapped-out USA) are themselves living things that need room to grow (in Friedrich Ratzel’s particular formulation of Lebensraum). Why not annex Cuba? If we don’t, we’ll cease to grow and inevitably decline, to become food for the next expanding state(s).

The problems with this perspective are legion, not least the fact that the organic analogy (states act like organisms, therefore states possess the same functions as organisms) is fundamentally flawed. The analogy developed because, early in the nineteenth century when the emergent field of sociology grappled with the complexity of social organization, the sociologists turned to biology as the field of science that had been successful in understanding and studying complex systems. (This is also a function of the turning away from the static, mechanistic cosmos of the early modern era to the modern understanding of nature as dynamic and driven by hidden forces [gravity, electricity].) There’s a large literature on this stuff; for more about how the ideology gave shape to map history as a field of study, see chapters 3 and 7 of Mapping, History, Theory, whenever I can finish it.

References

Craib, Raymond B., and D. Graham Burnett. 1998. “Insular Visions: Cartographic Imagery and the Spanish-American War.” Historian 61: 100–18.

Hall, Stuart. 1972. “The Determinations of News Photographs.” Working Papers in Cultural Studies 3: 53–88. Extracted in The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media, edited by Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (London: Constable, 1973), 176–90 (published in New York as The Manufacture of News: A Reader).

Wright, Artis Q. 2018. “Mapping the Nation with pre-1900 U.S. Maps: Uniting the United States.” NYPL Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division (15 May 2018). https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/05/15/united-states-pre-1900-map-collection