Explanation:
♤♤♤♤□□■■■Thousands of surviving maps allow scholars to trace how European and indigenous understandings of North America developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
These maps convey information about the continent’s physical features, practical details ranging from the contours of rivers and coastlines to the locations of settlements.
Yet as experts on cartography remind us, maps are never straightforward geographic records. Maps produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries thus outlined more than North America’s physical shape.
During the formative centuries of European exploration, cross-cultural encounter, and colonization, maps played an essential role in the process of transforming North America into a new world populated by American Indians, Africans, and Europeans.
While drawing and redrawing maps of the continent, imperial domains, colony boundaries, or individual homesteads, early Americans defined the political, economic, and cultural shapes of colonial North America.□□□○■●●■♤♤♤♤
