Mapping Virginia: Pictures of a Moving Place, 1587–1783

On December 5, William C. Wooldridge delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "Mapping Virginia: Pictures of a Moving Place, 1587-1783." Drawing from the engaging images in Mapping Virginia: From the Age of Discovery to the Civil War, Bill Wooldridge shows the very different ways that cartographers, and by implication their audiences, conceived of Virginia from generation to generation from the sixteenth century through the Revolutionary War. Until the mid-eighteenth century, these changing visions of Virginia had only a distant connection to changes in the colony's legal boundaries. Instead, they reflected the Old World's evolving understanding of the place, from exotic Eden to much of Eastern North America to the country around Chesapeake Bay to imperial England's greatest province. William C. Wooldridge, a retired attorney and current VHS trustee, is the author of Mapping Virginia and of several articles on cartographic history. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.