Pan-American Exposition

On February 15, 1898, scarcely a month after the Royal Palm opened its doors for a second season, the USS Maine, stationed in Havana harbor ostensibly to protect American interests against the incursion of Spanish colonialists, was blown up and sunk. While historians still debate whether or not the catastrophe was a put-up job, “…

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In 1904, two years after America’s victory in the Philippine-American War, the United States government tried to put the best face on its colonization of the archipelago of more than 7,000 islands. Thirteen hundred Filipinos from a dozen tribes were put on display at the St. Louis Exposition, in replicas of their home villages,

Indeed, there they were. The war with Spain gave rise to the only moment in U.S. history when cartographers aggressively rejected the logo map. In its place they offered maps of the empire. Publishers, cashing in on empire fever, rushed to put out atlases showcasing the country’s new dimensions. “It does look a little bit odd to see Porto Rico, Haw

The logo-map silhouette accurately captured the borders of the United States for only three years. Because in 1857, not long after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified (1854), the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no i

Geographic information

Flagler, who had never traveled to Europe, who had never been so far as California, found himself at age fifty-five, somehow arrived in Florida, in St. Augustine, and the result was transforming. “It was the oldest city in the United States,” wrote Edwin Lefevre in Everybody’s. “He saw the old slave market, he saw the old Spanish fort; he saw the o