Dr. S. Max Edelson is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A Michigan Map Society Lecture presented by William L. Clements Library and Stephen S. Clark Library-University of Michigan, 23 May 2019.

In the eighteenth century, Britain relied on geographic knowledge to reform its American empire. Edelson discusses maps produced by the British with the aid of digital visualizations. The schemes of colonial development and control that these maps envisioned, Edelson argues, helped provoke the resistance that led to the American Revolution. Edelson is the author of "The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence" (2017), winner of the John Lyman Book Award.