1932 Pictorial map of Mississippi and Louisiana
DESCRIPTION
Mississippi and Louisiana are depicted together in this excerpted pictorial map from Berta and Elmer Hader's 1932 Picture Book of the States, joining the Delta's plantation belt with the bayou and sugar country of the Louisiana coast.
The sheet runs from Mississippi's cotton-filled Delta and Jackson south to the Gulf at Biloxi, and across Louisiana's rice parishes and sugar country to New Orleans and the Atchafalaya basin. Vignettes anchor the sheet's colonial and agricultural history, among them La Salle's 1682 descent of the Mississippi, which shaped Louisiana's French colonial identity, and the Delta's cotton scenes, which include racial caricatures of African-Americans throughout. The reverse carries a corresponding fact sheet for the book's Tennessee and Kentucky entry, a consequence of the book's binding structure, in which each state's descriptive text appears on the verso of the preceding map leaf.
Berta Hoerner Hader (1890–1976) and Elmer Stanley Hader (1889–1973) were a husband-and-wife illustration team among the most celebrated collaborators in American children's publishing, having won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor in American children's book illustration, along with two additional Caldecott Honors. Picture Book of the States, their 1932 collaboration with Harper & Brothers, covers forty-eight states and the District of Columbia across twenty-eight illustrated leaves, each paired on its facing page with keyed descriptive text so that map and text could be cross-referenced at a glance. The result renders the American landscape, its industries, natural resources, and notable personalities, in the Haders' characteristic whimsical style, informative and warm at once.
CONDITION
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