Texas Takes Shape

A History in Maps from the General Land Office

By: Mark Lambert, James Harkins, Brian A. Stauffer, Patrick Walsh

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Hardcover | 29 September 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover
360 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
30.48 x 27.94

Hardcover

$114.75

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A comprehensive volume on historical mapping in Texas. The Texas General Land Office's map collection contains over 45,000 maps, some dating from the sixteenth century, making it one of the most important cartographic archives in Texas. As products and agents of history drawn by cartographers with motives and means as diverse as the places they document, maps provide a unique perspective on geopolitical, cultural, and economic processes. The maps of the GLO offer key insights into Texas's sprawling history. They speak to issues of changing borders, social and political upheaval, and questions of sovereignty and power. Texas Takes Shape offers an illuminating selection from the GLO archive: over one hundred maps that tell-and sometimes obscure-the stories of European colonization, Spanish and Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas, and the modern US state. There are maps here of every scale, from the hemispheric visions of European explorers to individual survey plats. Accompanying essays offer fascinating lessons on topics ranging from Indigenous cartography to military and railroad mapmaking and frontier surveys. Artful and informative, Texas Takes Shape examines a unique place through the eyes and imaginations of those who sought to govern it, profit from it, understand it, and call it home.

Industry Reviews

Texas Takes Shape is a beautifully illustrated and designed book of the most comprehensive map collection relating to Texas. Texas is unique in the Union in that it retained ownership of its public land, and this book makes clear that the creative and judicious use of that land is, in many ways, the creation story of present-day Texas. - Ron Tyler, University of Texas at Austin, author of Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images Texas Takes Shape is an astoundingly beautiful work of visual history. Surveying the Texas past through more than a hundred historical maps, this collection offers readers a remarkable new window into how individuals and empires have imagined, explored, and fought over the lands that became Texas. For anyone interested in understanding how maps have literally shaped the modern landscape of Texas, this is an absolute must-read. - Andrew J. Torget, University of North Texas, author of Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 Texas Takes Shape is both a guide to the extensive and ever-increasing map collection of the Texas General Land Office and a remarkable study of maps of Texas and the Southwest. This handsome and colorful volume is a pleasure for the eye of the book collector but also a treat for the reader who wants to understand how maps framed understandings of the state and the region over several centuries. - Kenneth Hafertepe, Baylor University, author of The Material Culture of German Texans

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