The American Revolution and Its Era: About the Collection

The maps and charts in this online collection number well over two thousand different items, with easily as many or more unnumbered duplicates, many with distinct colorations and annotations. Almost six hundred maps are original manuscript drawings, a large number of which are the work of such famous mapmakers as John Montrésor, Samuel Holland, Claude Joseph Sauthier, John Hills, and William Gerard De Brahm. They also include many maps from the personal collections of William Faden, Admiral Richard Howe, and the comte de Rochambeau, as well as large groups of maps by three of the best eighteenth-century map publishers in London: Thomas Jefferys, William Faden, and Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres. Historical cartographers can compare multiple editions, states, and impressions of several of the most important maps of the period, follow the development of a particular map from the manuscript sketch to the finished printed version and its foreign derivatives, and examine the cartographic styles and techniques of surveyors and mapmakers from seven different countries: Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Italy, and the United States.