The Penguin Atlas of North American History to 1870

by Colin McEvedy

Traces the history of North America from the first appearance of man to 1870, with maps showing the development of native civilization, the arrival of European settlers, and the formative years of the U.S.

Genres: History, Atlases, Reference, Geography, American

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Colin Peter McEvedy was a British polymath scholar, psychiatrist, historian, demographer and non-fiction author.

Reviews

[Googoogjoob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically in line with McEvedy's mainline series of historical atlases (which cover Europe and varying amounts of northern Africa and western Asia). As in those books, McEvedy uses a unique format: the book is (mostly) a series of two-page spreads, with explanatory text on the left-hand leaf and a map on the right; the unique part is that the area covered by the map, its scale, or its legend, do not vary between pages, just the date depicted.

The great strength of this is that it allows for easy comparison between any two maps, and makes differences between the maps stand out more noticeably- and as such, it makes for a very accessible way to relate the political history of the area covered visually. It's this format that makes McEvedy's atlases still valuable in some ways, even when parts of his work have aged, and despite the abbreviated nature of his historical explanations. The weakness of the format, though, is that it limits the scope for thematic maps, and largely confines the descriptive text to coverage of political developments; like McEvedy's other atlases, this volume has a few (very heavily abstracted) population maps, and on top of that a map of the results of the 1860 US presidential election, and some close-up inset maps of the eastern theater of the American Civil War. Some maps are also thematically obscured to represent land that was "terra incognita" to European explorers of the time.

Written in 1988, this mostly holds up. The majority of the work is about post-European-contact America, and that material is still fine. Unfortunately, the coverage of pre-contact (pre-)history is out of date- inevitable, given the advance of knowledge. In particular, the book presents Clovis as the ur-settlement of the Americas, a view now dethroned by the discovery of numerous pre-Clovis sites. McEvedy also presents the hypothesized "Macro-Siouan" language family as true- it was and is very debatable- and this leads him to conclude that the Iroquoian-speaking peoples must've migrated across the Appalachians en masse circa AD 1400. He puts forward that the migration might've happened up to a thousand years earlier, though, during the Hopewell era, and expresses hope that future developments in glottochronology will help settle the matter; and, as it turns out, glottochronology has placed the split between North and South Iroquoian 2000 years farther back yet than the earlier date McEvedy puts forth. Oh well.

McEvedy's historical descriptions are necessarily in brief summary form, given the limited space. He has a tendency to be flip and pithy. The book ends pretty abruptly at 1870, with a map of North America in 1987 as epilogue; probably due to a limited pagecount, and also possibly because McEvedy devotes much more space to covering the American Civil War than he does any other event in any of his atlases, leaving not much space for further coverage (11 out of 51 two-page spreads are dedicated to the period between the 1860 election and the end of the war).

[Mark Mollineaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less surprises here than the other McEvedy volumes, but a beautiful book: an especially nice touch is the large white cloud that falls away as European exploration continues.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very handy visual reference.