Mapping the “National Road”: Tracing the Creation and Expansion of American Culture and Identity along a 19th-Century Highway

“Mapping the ‘National Road’: Tracing the Creation and Expansion of American Culture and Identity along a Nineteenth-Century Highway” uses period maps to investigate the many names of the National Road, a key transportation network extending from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois, in the first half of the nineteenth century. The project examines what maps reveal about the creation of the National Road, the meanings of the road’s different names, and the road’s place in American cultural memory and history. Indeed, as the first federally-funded highway, the National Road earned its name; however, it also served as a catalyst for the physical expansion of American culture as goods and people traveled between the eastern cities and western frontier. This project seeks to understand how the mapmakers, whether intentionally or not, symbolized the purpose of the road through the nineteenth-century maps.