The Library of Congress

Mapping the National Parks

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Go directly to the collection, Mapping the National Parks, in American Memory, or view a Summary of Resources related to the collection.

Using Mapping the National Parks, students can improve their understanding of places and times in history while they develop their language arts skills. The collection's maps can form the basis for creative and expository writing activities, including travel writing, environmental essays, and biographies. Several maps can also be used to help students understand and interpret symbolism.

1) Travel Writing

Students can create a character from another time period who is traveling in the region of a national park featured in this collection. Is this person an early European explorer? A cartographer hired by the government or a private party? Or a frontiersman leaving family behind to seek out fortune and adventure?

A new & accurate map of the provinces of North & South Carolina, Georgia, 1752.

Once the students have created their characters, they can browse the Subject Index to find a map that existed when this character would have lived. Students can then use this map to write travel stories or essays for a specific audience. Is the character writing a book of adventure? A book to advise future travelers to the area? Or is he or she reporting back to the funder of the trip? Is he or she writing in a journal? Or letters home to family or friends? Imagining that they are travelling a route on the map, have students use place names and geographic features to give their writing detail. Does the character find the map to be accurate and useful? What modifications would the character have made to the map based on his or her discoveries?

To read other travelers' writings, students can search on author Mark Twain or names of western states in the collection California as I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900.

2) Environmental Essay

Conservationist John Muir described the beauty of America's landscapes in essays and books. His writings were an important influence in the conservation movement. Have students read his description of Yellowstone beginning on page 37 of Our National Parks, 1901 from the collection Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920.

...[Yellowstone National Park] is full of exciting wonders. The wildest geysers in the world, in bright, triumphant bands, are dancing and singing in it amid thousands of boiling springs, beautiful and awful, their basins arrayed in gorgeous colors like gigantic flowers; and hot paint-pots, mud springs, mud volcanoes, mush and broth caldrons whose contents are of every color and consistency, splash and heave and roar in bewildering abundance. In the adjacent mountains, beneath the living trees the edges of petrified forests are exposed to view, like specimens on the shelves of a museum, standing on ledges tier above tier where they grew, solemnly silent in rigid crystalline beauty after swaying in the winds thousands of centuries ago, opening marvelous views back into the years and climates and life of the past. Here, too, are hills of sparkling crystals, hills of sulphur, hills of glass, hills of cinders and ashes, mountains of every style of architecture, icy or forested, mountains covered with honey-bloom sweet as Hymettus, mountains boiled soft like potatoes and colored like a sunset sky.

Our National Parks, John Muir, 1901. Page 38.

After reading this excerpt, students can browse the maps of Yellowstone in the Geographic Location index. Can they find what section of the park Muir was describing? What are the names of those areas? Does one get the same sense of place from Muir's description as one does from viewing maps in the collection? What does one media portray that the other does not? Use these and the following questions in a class discussion. What imagery does Muir use to describe the park? How does Muir involve the reader's senses in his description? What do you see, hear and smell from his description? What image of the park does Muir portray? What emotions does he elicit from the reader? Does he intrigue you to want to visit the park? How does Muir make the reader feel this a unique place?

Yellowstone National Park, 1910.

Students can search on the names of other national parks In Evolution of the Conservation Movement to read other descriptions. Searching on John Muir will retrieve additional works by the author as well as photographs.

3) Written Communication

The National Park Service provides visitors with maps that both inform visitors of the wonders of the park and warn them of possible dangers. Students can search on National Park Service to read the tourist information provided on several maps. They can use the maps to study the careful use of language that entices the curious while reminding people to be cautious. In addition, students will see how the language is appropriate for a vast variety of tourists who visit the parks. Have students answer the following questions to identify these written communication skills:

What is the first or most prominent written information on the map? What is the effect of reading this first? What dangers is the visitor alerted to? Are they made to feel nervous about leaving their cars? How does the language used create that or any other feeling? To what sights are visitors directed? Is information provided for those who want to leave the heavily traveled areas? How are these people made to understand safety concerns associated with this exploration? What other types of information are represented on the map? What do you think were the goals of the national park in creating this text? Were the goals at odds with each other? What techniques and language were used to meet all of these goals at once?

Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, 1991.

4) Biography

After reading the park histories in the four special presentations Acadia, Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, and Yellowstone, students can write biographies of individuals named in the text. Try searching the collection on the person's name to find maps related to his or her life. Have students conduct further research on the lives and experiences of the individual. Try searching the names in all of the American Memory collections. They can illustrate the biographies with maps from the collection that represent places the individual traveled through or lived in.

Sheet IV - The Temples and Towers of the Virgen,
Tertiary history of the Grand cañon district, 1882. 5) Symbolism

Several of the maps contain symbolic drawings, often surrounding the key or title, providing an opportunity to work with visual symbolism. Many of these maps are the oldest in the collection and may be accessed by searching early. Examine these drawings as a class and consider the following questions:

• What is the subject of the drawing? If there are people, who are they? Where are they? What are they doing?
• Does the drawing tell a story? Does it depict an event? An idea?
• What does the drawing add to the map? Why would a cartographer include this subject on this map? How does the drawing relate to the land being depicted? How does it relate to those who might have commissioned, made, or used the map?
• Who do you think was the map's audience? What would this audience have thought of the drawing?
• What do you think was the purpose of the map? How does the drawing relate to that purpose? Does the drawing serve any other purposes?
• Why aren't drawings included in maps today? What does this suggest about how people think of maps today? What does this suggest about how people used to think of maps?

Some of these drawings include graphic material and ought to be used with older students at a teacher's discretion. Younger students may study symbolism using the map below.

The eagle map of the United States, c1832.

This map represents the cartograher's perspective of the United States. Have students consider the following questions: Why did the cartographer choose to use the image of an eagle? How would viewers of the map respond to this image? Is it an image of strength? What were the political, economic and social issues at the time the map was published? What message does the cartographer's interpretation of the country depict?