The Great Basin was the last region of continental North America to be explored and mapped, and it remained largely a mystery to Euro-Americans until well into the nineteenth century. In Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin, geographer-historian Richard Francaviglia shows how the Great Basin gradually emerged from its “cartographic silence” as terra incognita and how this fascinating process both paralleled the development of the sciences of surveying, geology, hydrology, and cartography and reflected the changing geopolitical aspirations of the European colonial powers and the United States. Francaviglia’s interdisciplinary account of the mapping of the Great Basin combines a chronicle of the exploration of the region with a history of the art and science of cartography and of the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which maps are created. It also offers a compelling, wide-ranging discussion that combines a description of the daunting physical realities of the Great Basin with a cogent examination of the ways humans, from early Native Americans to nineteenth-century surveyors to twentieth-century highway and air travelers, have understood, defined, and organized this space, psychologically and through the medium of maps. Mapping and Imagination in the Great Basin continues Francaviglia’s insightful, richly nuanced meditation on the Great Basin landscape that began in Believing in Place.

Richard V. Francaviglia is professor of history and geography and director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at the University of Texas in Arlington. As both historian and geographer, he is especially interested in the way places change through time, and how that change is depicted in maps, literature, art, and popular culture. His administrative interests include working with university faculty and staff to develop proposals, and to secure outside funding, for innovative educational programs. Francaviglia received his A.A. from Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California with highest honors (1965), B.A. from University of California at Riverside with high honors (1967), and M.A. and Ph.D. (1970) from the University of Oregon (Geography major, Art History minor). He taught at the University of Minnesota, Antioch College, University of Arizona, and Wittenberg University, and is currently a Professor of History and Geography at the University of Texas at Arlington. He teaches courses in historical geography, the history of cartography, environmental history, geography of the West, historical methods, public history, history and film, and natural history images and scientific illustration. His research interests Include the role of maps and natural history illustrations in the history of discoveries; the ways in which environments are shaped by individuals, corporations, and religious groups; mining and transportation history; cartographic history; the history of geology, geomorphology, and mineralogy.