Cartographic representations of the continental United States proliferated, especially with increased automobile travel and the continual expansion of roadways based upon the old trails of a westward expansion fuelled by the ideology of Manifest Destiny. In the early twentieth century, American automobile organisations lobbied the government to build a continental highway system. In 1911, the International Good Roads Congress met in Chicago and endorsed a transcontinental route from New York City through Chicago to Kansas City, then along the historic Santa Fe Trail to Phoenix and Los Angeles. The National Highway Association printed a map in 1914 that proposed 50,000 miles of national highways to facilitate coast-to-coast travel as an alternative to the Panama Canal route. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Good Roads Act, making federal funds available for building highways. A L Westgard, a surveyor for the railroads in the nineteenth century, was considered ‘the premier ‘pathfinder’ of the early automobile days’; he was later appointed a Special Agent of the Office of Public Roads. The American Automobile Association published booklets and maps based on the notes that Westgard made during his transcontinental travels along the Old Trail Roads – his ‘Motor Trails from Atlantic to Pacific’ in a June 1919 issue of The Independent shows a close approximation of the four major routes from east to west on the Peddler’s Route Map. A national highway network would facilitate touring the country and visiting historic sites. Although the railroad played a crucial role in the colonial settlement of the western frontier, the building of a federal highway system was the basis for consolidating the nation. Emerging from WWI as a rising world power, the territory of the United States came together through the national network of road and rail; conversely the homeland of Syrians was dismembered after the war. The geo-cultural and ethno-national significance of the term Syrian and the political geography of Syria were dramatically altered in the decades following the war. The 1906 Lippincott’s New Gazetteer gives the following detailed description (paraphrased) of pre-war Syria: ‘a country … forming part of the Turkish Empire. It extends eastward from the Mediterranean Sea to the river Euphrates and the Syrian Desert, … southward from the Alma-Dagh … to the frontiers of Egypt (Isthmus of Suez). ... It comprises the vilayet of Syria, … Damascus, the vilayet of Beirut, the SW. part of the vilayet of Aleppo, and the mutessarrifliks of Jerusalem and the Lebanon. Palestine is included in Syria ...The designation Syria is sometimes used in a wider sense ... The country embraces nearly the entire E. coast of the great eastern arm of the Mediterranean Sea’. These lands in Arabic were called Bilad ash-Sham ; in English, Syria, as in Hitti’s book, The Syrians in America, or in Mokarzel’s The History of Syrian Trade in the American Migration . The postwar remapping of Syria was based on the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between the British and French who set the international borders of the contemporary nation-state of Syria, separating it from the territories that would become Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan. Lebanon, a narrow coastal strip along the Eastern Mediterranean (blue on the map) was detached from Syria (reduced to Area A on the map), which were subject to separate French colonial administrations. Ultimately, Palestine (brown on the map) and Transjordan (Area B) were also cut off from Syria and placed under British colonial administration. Although turn-of-the-century Arabic-speaking immigrants to the United States self-identified as Syrians, Hitti noted that, ‘Before 1899 the Syrians, as such, did not exist for the United States immigration authorities, having been hitherto classified with Armenians, Greeks, Arabs and Turks under Turkey in Asia.’ Subsequently, the term Syrian was reserved specifically for those people living in Area A, the future borders of the Syrian Arab Republic. In early twentieth-century USA,
AAA Road Map , used to illustrate 'Motor Trails from Atlantic to Pacific' by A L Westgarde, in The Independent, June 19, 1919.
Ottoman Syria: the land from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai Peninsula to the Euphrates, not including Upper Mesopotamia. The Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography by Samuel Butler, 1907.
'Arab' referred specifically to the people residing in the Arabian Peninsula. It is only in the 1940s that the ethnic category of Arab American came into use, and more widely claimed in the post-1960s era through participation in the civil rights movement and post-WWII Pan-Arab anti-colonial politics. League of Nations Mandate Territories: French Lebanon and Syria (1923-45), British Palestine (1923-48 and TransJordan (1923-25). The Treaties of Peace 1919-23. NY:Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
:: emigration
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