Colorado: Mapping the Centennial State through History: Rare And Unusual Maps From The Library Of Congress (Mapping the States through History) - Hardcover

In a sense, the State of Colorado was born not on August 1, 1876—when President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation admitting it to the Union as the thirty-eighth state—but on the day this great land was first depicted on a map. Over the centuries, each such map has become yet another precious link not only in the history of the state, but also in the ever evolving “Colorado” as imagined by its residents and, more broadly, by the rest of America. Colorado: Mapping the Centennial State through History provides a fascinating journey into the past of the Centennial State through gloriously detailed maps from the Library of Congress. Edited and with a foreword by renowned photo editor and author Vincent Virga, it also includes compelling historical essays by Colorado writer Stephen Grace. Together, these further weave the visually stunning cartographic record into a drama of settlement and change.  Mapping States through History is the first series to assemble—in full color, state-by-state—an in-depth collection of rare, historically significant maps of the cities, states, counties, towns, and events that make up each of America’s fifty states. Produced in collaboration with the Library of Congress, it offers an extraordinary glimpse into the history of the United States through the maps and their narrative captions, as well as Vincent Virga’s foreword and historical essays by local writers. Each map thus becomes a virtual time machine that tells us much about the places we live in today. Also available:
California: Mapping the Golden State through History
Texas: Mapping the Lone Star State through History
Virginia: Mapping the Old Dominion State through History

A stirring trip through the history of the Centennial State illustrated by gloriously detailed maps from the Library of Congress · More than fifty full-color historical maps from the Library of Congress
· Informative and enlightening captions about each map’s origins and its place in the evolution of state   history
· Evocative essays by Colorado author Stephen Grace on how maps reflect the history, culture, and   sensibilities of the state and its residents through time
· A foreword by renowned photo editor and author Vincent Virga describing the library’s collection, the  state’s maps, and the place of cartography in shaping the American imagination.
“A map is an image. It makes the world more real for us and uses signs to create an essential sense of place in our imagination. Like the movies, maps helped create our national identity, and this encyclopedic series of books aims to make manifest the changing social order that invented the United States, which is why it embraces all fifty states.”
—from the Foreword by Vincent Virga