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Title	United States 1889
Full Title	The Man of commerce : a chart showing the resemblance between the arteries of commerce, as represented by railroads, and the arterial system of man; also, the resemblance between the great vital organs of man and the commercial system of the great lakes / designed and copyrighted by A.F. McKay ; Land & River Improvement Co. ; Rand McNally & Co., Engravers.
Creator	McKay, A.F.
Contributors	Rand McNally and Company Land and River Improvement Company
Publication Date	1889
Subject	Railroads--United States--Maps United States--Commerce--Maps
Continent	North and Central America
Country	United States
Notes	Relief shown by hachures. Includes text and guide to railroad abbreviations. "Note that West Superior, Wisconsin, the head of Lake Superior, is at the heart of this wonderful man, the center of this great railroad and commercial system."
Essay Description of Item	“The Man of Commerce” is a detailed map that conflates human anatomy with the American transportation system. Published in 1889 by the Land & River Improvement Company of Superior, Wisconsin, the map promotes Superior as a transportation hub and shows the routes of 29 railroads across the United States. The outline map of North America is superimposed by a cutaway diagram of the human body. The map’s metaphor makes West Superior “the center of cardiac or heart circulation.” The railways become major arteries. New York is “the umbilicus through which this man of commerce was developed.” The explanatory notes conclude: “It is an interesting fact that in no other portion of the known world can any such analogy be found between the natural and artificial channels of commerce and circulatory and digestive apparatus of man.” Use of the human body as a cartographic metaphor dates back at least to the 16th century, to the anthropomorphic map of Europe as a queen in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography (1570). This map may be the earliest application of this metaphor to North America. The cartographer was A.F. McKay, who in 1889 briefly served as the editor of the Superior Sentinel newspaper. The map was engraved by Rand McNally. The American Geographical Society Library acquired the map in 2009, aided in part by the Map Society of Wisconsin. The only other known copy of this map is in a private collection.
Type	image
Original Collection	American Geographical Society Library - Maps
Original Item Description	1 map : col. ; 79 x 127 cm.
Original Item ID	(AGS)(RARE) (FOL) 800 M-1889
Language	en
Repository	American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
Digital Publisher	University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
Rights	The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Digital ID	am007687
Digital Format	image/tif; image/jp2
Date.Digitized	2009-08-08
Digital Collection	American Geographical Society Library Digital Map Collection

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