Mapping the French Empire in North America: An interpretive guide to the exhibition mounted at the Newberry Library on the occasion of the seventeenth ... Française, with the support of Barry MacLean

When the French Colonial Historical Society/Societe d'Histoire Coloniale Francaise decided to hold its 1991 meeting in Chicago, under the auspices of the Smith Center for the History of Cartography, it seemed a good idea to accompany this meeting with a display of maps. We wanted maps to show the actual implantation of French settlement on the ground in North America, with some detail of the way the settlers laid out their fields, organized their fortifications, built their houses and so forth. So it was no use turning to the well-worn small-scale printed maps that we have often seen; here we needed large-scale, mostly manuscript maps.