Scans from a 1776 atlas of the Americas, published in London as the American revolution was getting under way, have been posted by JSTOR. The story from JSTOR Daily:
In the summer of 1775, shortly after George Washington took charge of the newly formed Continental Army in Boston, a small advertisement appeared in the London newspapers, announcing the publication of The American Atlas: Or, A Geographical Description of the Whole Continent of America. The volume—which bore the name of the late Thomas Jefferys, who had held the title of Geographer to the King—promised a view of the continent’s “several Regions, Countries, States, and Islands, and chiefly the BRITISH COLONIES.”
The atlas was designed to capitalize on public interest in the “rebellion,” as King George III would call it in an August 1775 proclamation. Through the war, the well-to-do English reader with two pounds, twelve shilling and six pence to spare could follow news from this faraway land across a series of maps. (In editions published in subsequent years, the maps even included descriptions of Britain’s tactical victories, such as at the Battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain.)
Two hundred and fifty years later, the modern reader can do the same, for free, thanks to a larger edition of the atlas, dated 1776, shared via JSTOR by the Leighton Library and the University of Stirling. As geographer Rita Ann Gardiner wrote for the Royal Geographical Society, this was the extent of “the knowledge of the topography of the New World available to London mapmakers in 1776.”
