Moral Geography : Maps, Missionaries, and the American Frontier

While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been examined, this work explores the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier, giving a fresh understanding of 19th-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve, a physical and symbolic space that became a template for subsequent westward expansion.

Amy DeRogatis draws on maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives and geographical texts to recover the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of the early American frontier.Illustrated with numerous maps and engravings, "Moral Geography" traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors, imaginatively conjoined with the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land, and made space sacred.