Jack Swab, University of Tennessee

Imagine a map that allows you to see what your neighborhood looked like a century ago in immense detail. What you’re thinking of is probably very much like the fire insurance maps produced from the 1860s to the 1970s for insurance companies to identify potential fire risks.

Often referred to as Sanborn maps, after the Sanborn Map Co. that produced them, fire insurance maps were created for every city in the United States with a population greater than 1,000 people. Over a century, more than 50,000 editions of these maps were produced, comprising over 700,000 map sheets – many of which have been scanned and are publicly accessible through the Library of Congress.

Genealogists, historic preservationists, historians and urban planners commonly use these maps to understand past urban landscapes. But as a critical cartographer interested in how maps shape how people understand the world, I see these maps differently.

Fire insurance maps supply more than just detailed insights into how neighborhoods looked decades ago. Needing to turn a profit, insurers sought to minimize the amount of risk they underwrote or charged higher premiums to account for risk. These maps provide important clues into how insurance companies understood how risk was distributed across cities, revealing costly biases.

Mapping fire risk

Before zoning and land-use planning, American cities frequently mixed industrial, commercial and residential buildings in the same block. Insurance agents used the immense detail of fire insurance maps to determine whether a property was too risky to underwrite, often weighing the demographics of the neighborhoods with the flammability of the buildings in the neighborhood.

For example, an Atlanta neighborhood called Lightning was a Black, working-class district composed of a mixture of rail yards, noxious industries and residences in 1911. The neighborhood was also an immense fire hazard. Atlanta’s primary trash incinerator stood less than 150 feet from two massive natural gas storage tanks, while two gas processing plants manufactured specialized fuels just feet from homes.

Underwriters would use information from fire insurance maps to understand the local landscape. In these maps, colors correspond to the building’s construction material: pink indicates brick, while yellow indicates wood. Lightning was primarily made from wood, placing the entire neighborhood at risk if a fire broke out.

Fire insurance maps and discrimination

At the same time, fire insurance maps also highlight the social landscape of the neighborhood.

Many buildings in the Lightning fire insurance map are labeled “F.B.,” which stands for “female boarding,” a euphemism for brothels. While brothels were not a fire risk themselves, this code indicated the alleged moral hazard of a neighborhood, or the likelihood that property owners would allow riskier activities to occur on their property that could cost insurers more.

From this one map, an underwriter could quickly see that Lightning was an extremely risky place to insure. Along with disinvestment from fire insurers, marginalized communities like Lightning also experienced other forms of systemic discrimination. Scholars have documented racial discrimination in car, life and health insurance underwriting.

Indeed, in the 1970s, much of Lightning was purchased under the threat of eminent domain – the legal process through which the government takes ownership of private land for public use – to construct the Georgia Dome, now the site of Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

Although fire insurance maps are no longer used in the insurance industry, they provide researchers one way of seeing how discrimination in fire insurance and urban planning manifested in the United States during the 20th century.

Jack Swab, Assistant Professor Department of Geography & Sustainability, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Seth T. Kannarr, University of Tennessee

The culture wars have arrived at the U.S. Mint.

Commemorative coins aimed at celebrating America’s 250th anniversary in 2026 were unveiled by the mint on Dec. 10, 2025, and they reflect the country’s currently divided politics and views of history.

In an unexpected move, most of the original designs for the “America 250” coins that were approved by two official committees in 2024 were abandoned and replaced. Most notably, the Black Abolition, Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights quarters were replaced with quarters that instead commemorate the Mayflower Compact, Revolutionary War and the Gettysburg Address.

As a cultural geographer and coin collector, I believe the release of these new dimes, quarters and half-dollars offers a reminder that coins, despite their small size, share important messages about what it means to be an American.

This isn’t the first time politics has invaded the design of U.S. coins. The history contained in their designs is often negotiated and politicized, which is manifested into coins as public memory.

From Congress to your pocket

The production of these America 250 coins, part of the celebration formally referred to as the “American Semiquintennial,” was authorized by the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in January 2021.

This reflects the long-standing formal process for designing and producing U.S. coins, both regular circulating ones and commemorative ones.

First, Congress calls for the production of new coins. Then, design ideas and draft art are solicited from medallic artists at the U.S. Mint, who create the raised, three-dimensional designs that are sculpted into models.

Two groups – the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, which exists to advise the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury on the designs of all U.S. coins and medals, and the federal Commission of Fine Arts, which provides advice to the federal government on matters of design and aesthetics, including memorials, buildings and coins – work together over time, including through public meetings, to review proposed designs and recommend revisions and selections of specific designs.

The recommendations of the advisory committee and the commission have in the past proved valuable to shaping the final depictions portrayed in coin engravings, but the final authority and decisions come from the Secretary of the Treasury.

In the case of the America 250 coins, the designs were discussed across multiple meetings in 2024, with the final report from the Commission of Fine Arts published on Oct. 24, 2024.

The final recommendations were for a dime that bears a “Liberty Over Tyranny” design; five quarters that would have the “Declaration of Independence,” “U.S. Constitution,” “Abolitionism,” “Suffrage” and “Civil Rights” as their respective designs; and a half-dollar that would bear a “Participatory Democracy” design.

Why the big switch?

The original dime and half-dollar images remained unchanged in the officially accepted designs unveiled on Dec. 10, 2025. However, all quarter designs were changed, eliminating the proposed images representing the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Abolitionism, Suffrage and Civil Rights, with the exception of the reverse side of the Declaration of Independence quarter.

No official explanation for these changes were provided during the U.S. Mint’s design unveiling event. But it is not hard to see how the nation’s current political climate, in which President Donald Trump has complained that the Smithsonian focuses too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of the country’s history, may have played a role.

This is significant for two primary reasons. One, the process for choosing the design was supposed to reflect public input, via the public meetings with the two advisory committees regarding these changes. But these fundamental changes were ultimately decided by the Secretary of the Treasury out of the public eye, likely in concert with other members of the Trump administration.

Second, these changes of the America 250 quarters reinforce a more traditional and exclusionary view of nation’s founding and continued progress. The new designs sideline Americans’ historical struggle against oppression and social injustice and are demonstrative of the Trump administration’s collective efforts to bar government statements and initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The selective editing of American memory portrayed on the America 250 coins is not only a breach in established process, but it’s also a missed opportunity to provide new and diverse representation in an easy, yet meaningful, way.

Public memory in your pocket

Ever since the U.S. Mint opened in Philadelphia in 1792, coins and currency with depictions of American figures, symbolic representations and iconic inscriptions have circulated throughout the nation and the world.

For example, the Fifty States Quarters program, which ran from 1999 to 2008, was very popular among Americans who appreciated seeing different designs on quarters that were emblematic of their own state’s identity. For example, the Vermont version of the quarter included an image of Camel’s Hump Mountain and maple trees with sap buckets hung on them.

Scholars have argued that coins and currency are examples of everyday or banal nationalism, which refers to the often unnoticed expressions of national identity that persist throughout material culture and society.

Coins occupy sparing yet evident moments throughout our lives. You can find them in routine places, with little attention given to their presence, such as the bottom of your junk drawer, in the cup holder in your car or abandoned on the sidewalk.

To cultural geographers like me, coins serve as vessels of passive and active public memory. They subtly signal values and reinforce figures and events as important to American culture and history by being portrayed on government-issued coins.

This understanding further highlights the significance of the recent design changes to the America 250 coins. The removal of imagery of women, people of color and historic events important to marginalized people are not subtle choices.

Whether someone is an active coin collector or just looking to buy a candy bar at a convenience store, all people participate in the reproduction of American public memory. And they do this regardless of which narratives of public memory are chosen to be shared by the federal government.

What comes next?

Recent controversies regarding the end of production of the U.S. penny and the proposal for a new one-dollar coin commemorating President Donald Trump illustrate the American public’s continued interest and attention to coins and currency despite an increasingly digital age. The redesign of these America 250 coins is yet another story in this ongoing saga.

Historically, designs of coins or currency that are unpopular with the general public are ripe for being defaced, such as the scratching out of public figures or the complete destruction of the piece.

Although sometimes illegal, such an act sends a powerful political message of subversion against the government. This tends to be more common in other nations, beyond minor graffiti drawn onto paper currency in the U.S.

If the U.S. Mint maintains the product schedule of previous years, the America 250 coins should begin to circulate in February 2026. It may take time for the coins to arrive at banks, and even longer for them to show up as change from grocery stores, convenience shops and beyond.

Whether you believe in the appropriateness of the new designs or not, the coins and their backstory can serve as a prompt for discussion with friends and family, or even educating children, about what it means to be an American. The power – and the coins – will soon be in your hands.

Seth T. Kannarr, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Seth T. Kannarr, University of Tennessee

Ocmulgee Mounds, a site in central Georgia with 12,000 years of Indigenous history, may be on the verge of becoming the newest U.S. national park. This is the flagship designation of the National Park Service system, which includes many types of properties in addition to formally designated national parks.

Although this redesignation may not include much change for the site itself, it could mean quite a lot to visitors, supporters and locals alike.

The 3,000-acre park protects land and features important to the Mississippian culture, which built the mounds there starting roughly 3,000 years ago, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, for which the site is an ancestral homeland.

The site includes seven enormous ceremonial and burial mounds made of earth, the largest of which is 55 feet (15 meters) tall and covers about 2 acres, as well as a museum containing millions of cultural artifacts, including pottery, stone tools, jewelry and bells.

The National Park Service has managed the site since the 1930s, first as a national monument and since 2019, as a national historical park. There are no legal or practical differences in protection between these redesignations, though the branding and marketing of the site may change.

As a geographer who studies parks and the naming of places, I have seen that when a National Park Service unit is redesignated as a national park, as a pending bill in Congress currently proposes for Ocmulgee Mounds, it does not typically change the funding available to run the site. That’s especially true at a time when National Park Service funding and personnel are being cut. However, a park redesignation does serve political purposes and affects how visitors perceive that park.

How parks are designated

The National Park Service manages 433 units with 19 different designations, such as “national battlefields,” “national lakeshores” and “national scenic trails.” Only 63 of these units carry the formal title or designation of “national park.”

All but one of these categories can be bestowed only by Congress. National monuments, however, can be created by the president directly, under the provisions of the Antiquities Act of 1906.

For example, the Antiquities Act allowed President Barack Obama to designate 1.3 million acres in Utah as Bears Ears National Monument in a December 2016 proclamation. That same act allowed President Donald Trump to shrink the protected area to 200,000 acres in 2017 – and President Joe Biden to re-expand it to 1.3 million acres in 2021.

Other examples of redesignation

In rare cases, a community, group or other organization proposes adding an area that is not currently managed by the National Park Service to the system, but this takes a lot of time and is different from the more common process of changing the formal designation of a property already within the system.

For instance, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore became Indiana Dunes National Park in 2019. That same year, White Sands National Monument in New Mexico became White Sands National Park. And in 2020, New River Gorge National River in West Virginia became New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.

Why redesignations make a difference

My analysis of the contentious redesignation of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis to Gateway Arch National Park in 2018 found that it was not done to offer additional protection to this site of national importance. Rather, the move was meant to take advantage of the public significance of the “national park” label and thereby attract more tourists and tourism revenue to the local economy.

The effort to make it a national park was part of a local campaign to renovate the underground visitor center, revitalize the park grounds and increase tourism. But the law that formalized the change included no additional funding, resources or protections for the Gateway Arch.

Changing the designation contradicted the park service’s own declaration that the term “national park” should be used for an area that “contains a variety of resources and encompasses large land or water areas to help provide adequate protection of the resources.”

During congressional hearings, the deputy director of the National Park Service, Robert Vogel, recommended the site not be labeled a national park but rather a national monument, because the site “is too small and limited in the range of resources the site protects and interprets to be called a national park.”

Gateway Arch National Park is now the smallest-area park in the U.S., at less than 200 acres, and is home to a large steel arch, an open lawn area, a museum and a single historic building – a courthouse where one of the Dred Scott trials was heard, along with other civil rights cases. It does not have the wildlife viewing, spectacular geologic features, outdoor recreation opportunities and sense of wilderness that the public has come to expect from national parks.

The park’s website admits “it is unusual for a national park to have no natural plant life” and describes the park as adjacent to the “concrete jungle of downtown St. Louis.”

What actually would change for Ocmulgee Mounds?

The redesignation effort for Ocmulgee Mounds has two primary aspects. First, it would declare the area a national park.

Second, it would add additional land to this protected area, designating that portion as a national preserve. The distinction matters: Public hunting, including traditional Indigenous hunting, is not allowed in national parks, but it is allowed in national preserves. And while national parks are managed by the National Park Service under the Department of Interior, national preserves can be managed in collaborative partnership with other groups, including local Indigenous people with cultural ties to the land.

The changes for Ocmulgee Mounds are supported by members of both political parties in both houses of Congress. And the redesignation does not appear to have triggered opposition from local communities, who in other places have objected for several reasons, including fear of increased tourism and desire to preserve any long-standing uses of the land that would be banned if it were to become a national park.

There are redesignation efforts underway seeking to make national parks in other locations as well, including the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona, Buffalo National River in Arkansas, and Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin.

The only real changes in these places, though, would be in marketing – the signs, brochures and merchandise sold in gift shops. But these changes would have an important effect: The tagline of “new national park” markets well and is believed to help attract more visitors to the site. But it won’t actually protect these landscapes any better than they already are under the stewardship of the National Park Service.

Seth T. Kannarr, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jack Swab, University of Tennessee and Derek H. Alderman, University of Tennessee

The African Union has endorsed the #CorrectTheMap Campaign, a call for the United Nations and the wider global community to use a different kind of world map. The campaign currently has over 4,500 signatures.

The map most commonly used is called the Mercator projection. Map projections are how cartographers (map makers) “flatten” the three-dimensional Earth into a two-dimensional map.

The Mercator projection was created over 450 years ago, designed for colonial exploration and maritime trade. But, over the centuries, it has become an “all purpose” projection for many governments, educators and companies.

That flat drawing inflates the size of countries closer to the North or South Pole. It exaggerates the area of North America and Eurasia while under-representing the size of much of South America and Africa. As the largest continent in the global south, Africa is a victim of this cartographic inequity.

The #CorrectTheMap campaign calls for a move to the Equal Earth map projection, developed in 2018 by an international team of cartographers. It addresses the distortions found in the Mercator projection.

Controversies over map projections are not new. Since the 1970s cartographers have discussed how certain projections distort how the Earth looks and how people imagine their place in that world.

At the heart of the debates about maps are tensions about what sort of power maps have in the world.

A change in map projections, for the African Union, is about more than correcting a technical flaw. It’s also a chance to influence how current and future map users view, talk about and value Africa.

The call is a demand for Africans to be represented on their own terms, rather than through cartographic traditions that have long diminished their scale and significance.

As cartographers, we pay attention to the social and communicative power of maps.

Given that maps help shape how we make sense of the world, the simplest decisions that go into crafting a map can have major geopolitical consequences.

Maps are not neutral

There are over 200 major projections of the world map. Each one warps the image of the Earth in different ways, making the choice of projection a consequential and complicated decision rather than a neutral one.

For example the Dymaxion projection, developed by the American engineer Buckminster Fuller, was designed to challenge ideas of the north and the south. Others, like the Lambert conformal conic projection, are used extensively in aviation to aid in flight planning.

Maps are a form of storytelling, as well as an information source. Even the lines, colours, symbols and size of regions depicted on maps communicate social meaning. They subtly but powerfully educate people, from schoolchildren to world leaders, about who and what matters.

US president Donald Trump’s recent interest in the US buying Greenland, citing its large size, was likely influenced by map distortion. The Mercator projection shows Greenland as nearly the same size as Africa, when in reality Africa is about 14 times larger.

Other projections do a better job at more accurately representing the true size of continents. Some projections are better than others for this specific task; for example the Gall-Peters projection has been used in the past as an alternative to the Mercator projection.

Cartography as a tool of control

Cartography has been a powerful tool of control throughout Africa’s history. Topographers and surveyors participated in the European conquest and colonisation of Africa, regularly accompanying military expeditions. Map-makers in Europe framed Africa as a landscape to be exploited by populating maps with trade routes, resources and blank spaces ready for development – all while often ignoring the mapping traditions and geographic knowledge of indigenous Africans.

The Berlin Conference of 1885, where European powers assembled with no African representation, was one of the pinnacles of this cartographic and colonial grab and partitioning of the continent.

The Mercator projection is joined by other kinds of western storytelling – found across popular culture, the news and diplomatic circles – that have stereotyped, degraded and undersized Africa’s place in the world.

Viewed in this light, the public reckoning over the Mercator projection can be interpreted as not just about the visual accuracy of a map, also the restoration of dignity and autonomy.

Why changing the world map is difficult

Bringing about changes won’t be easy.

Firstly, global map production is not governed by a single authority. Even if the United Nations were to adopt the Equal Earth projection, world maps could still be drawn in other projections. Cartographers are frequently commissioned to update world maps to reflect changes to names and borders. But the changes don’t always find quick acceptance. For example, cartographers changed English-language world maps after the Czech Republic adopted the name “Czechia” as its English name in 2016. While making the change was not difficult, broader acceptance has been harder to achieve.

A person’s mental image of the world is solidified at a young age. The effects of a shift to the Equal Earth projection may take years to materialise. Previous efforts to move away from Mercator projection, such as by Boston Public Schools in 2017, upset cartographers and parents alike.

Given the African Union’s larger goals, supporting the Equal Earth projection is the first step in pushing the global community to see the world more fairly and reframing how the world values Africa. Mobilising social support for the new projection through workshops with educators, diplomatic advocacy, forums with textbook publishers, journalists, and Africa’s corporate partners could help move the world away from the Mercator projection for everyday use.

Shifting to the Equal Earth projection alone will not undo centuries of distorted representations or guarantee more equitable global relations. But it’s a step towards restoring Africa’s rightful visibility on the world stage.

Jack Swab, Assistant Professor Department of Geography & Sustainability, University of Tennessee and Derek H. Alderman, Chancellor’s Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.