John Melish, Map of the United States with the Contiguous British and Spanish Possessions (1819)

John Melish was a Scottish mapmaker and map publisher who settled in Philadelphia in 1811. After publishing a number of atlases, Melish recognized an unmet demand for a large, national map of the United States, which he began to create in 1815, just as the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain was ending. There were several editions of the map released between 1816 and the publication of the one seen here in 1819, due to the rapidly expanding geographic knowledge of the West. One of the 1818 editions was used to determine the border between the United States and Spain (later Mexico), which was codified in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. As James Akerman and Robert Karrow point out in their book, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, Melish originally intended the map to end at the Rocky Mountains, which was accepted as the western border at the time . However, he instead extended the map to the Pacific Ocean, suggesting a nation that stretched from "sea to sea" long before the term "manifest destiny" had been coined, and making it, as Akerman and Karrow argue, a good example of cartography used for nationalistic ends.