THURSDAY 18 January 2024
Location: Zoom, 7:00 PM ET/6:00 PM CT/ 5:00 PM MT/4:00 PM PT
(Arranged with assistance of Rocky Mountain Map Society, sponsored in partnership with California, Chicago, New York, Philip Lee Phillips, Rocky Mountain, and Texas Map Societies)
Title: Herman Moll and John Senex: Mapping North America in the Early 18th Century (from the British Point of View)
Speaker: J. C. McElveen, retired lawyer, Jones Day; past president of Washington Map Society; and current Vice Chair, Philip Lee Phillips Map Society, Library of Congress.
Summary: In the early 18th century, when European empire building in North America started to accelerate, mapmakers in various European countries began to produce maps with several messages other than purely geographic ones. Those messages included how much of the land mass was claimed by various countries; how inviting the land was for settlement; and where and how the indigenous people lived. Two of England’s best known early 18th century mapmakers – Herman Moll and John Senex – did their part in producing this “spin”, and this talk will describe some of their efforts.
Bio: J. C. McElveen graduated from the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia Law School. He then served in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Following his military service, he practiced law with several private firms. In 1983, he joined the law firm of Jones Day, and he practiced with that firm for 29 years, retiring in 2012.
He has served as program chair and as president of the Washington Map Society. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for the History of Discoveries and is the vice-chair of the Philip Lee Phillips Map Society of the Library of Congress. He is also a docent at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and he has volunteered at the National Museum of the American Indian. He now primarily collects maps, reports and narratives of United States westward exploration and settlement in the 19th century.
He has written several articles and book reviews on mapping and mapmakers, and he has made several presentations in his areas of interest. In the Spring of 2018, he mounted an exhibition of a portion of his collection at the Grolier Club in New York. That exhibit was called: “Westward the Course of Empire: Exploring and Settling the American West 1803-1869,” and a catalogue accompanied that exhibit.
You are invited to a Zoom meeting.
When: Jan 18, 2024 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0scuyvqzgtHddUF8FW47D0DNVGcNajqLSV
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