Excerpt:
There was much debate in Europe during the sixteenth century as geographers tried to incorporate the Americas within their existing world-view. Were they the islands off eastern Asia as Christopher Columbus had presumed (1) ? Or did they constitute an entirely "New World" (2) ?
Annotation:
The Cartographic Creation of New England site is an exhibition of a collection of maps that chronicle the changing understanding of American geography by early European explorers and mapmakers. The site includes images of more than fifty historic maps with essays and captions that interpret the importance of each map. The site is sponsored by the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.