Texas-shaped ashtrays, belt buckles, earrings, kitchen utensils--"Texas kitsch"--fill gift shops alongside highways and in airports. The Lone Star State's unmistakable shape is appropriated by advertisers to hawk everything from beans to automobiles inside Texas' borders and beyond. As a billboard-sized neon sign glowing atop a popular honkey-tonk, the Texas map illuminates the Fort Worth night sky, attracting tourists in search of a good time--and a share of the Texas experience. Over the years America's most recognizable state outline has become one of its most potent symbols, a metaphor for Texas popular culture. In the last decade, the private, commercial, and official use of the Texas map as cultural symbol has boomed. Richard V. Francaviglia identifies this current trend as "Tex-map mania," and contends that the Texas map as icon integrates geography with history--and gives shape to a mythic landscape and to abstracted notions of what Texas is and who Texans are. Written in a lively style that engages both the scholar and the general reader in a discussion of the power of symbol and the meaning and significance of a shared aesthetic, The Shape of Texas is at the crossroads of cartography and popular culture. Francaviglia uses more than one hundred illustrations in offering a provocative visual and written account of this important, yet much neglected, aspect of Texas history and the dynamics of a still emerging Texas identity. " . . . the first serious attempt to examine the process by which a map becomes a popular symbol. Although its focus may be liminted in that it concentrates on a single cartograhic icon, the methodology will surely be applicable to the study of any popular map. . . . Francaviglia has just legitimized popular cartography as a thoughtful academic pursuit."--Jeffrey S. Murray, Association of Canadian Map Libraries -- Jeffrey S. Murray, Association of Canadian Map Libraries Over the years America's most recognizable state outline has become one of its most potent symbols, a metaphor for Texas popular culture. In the last decade, the private, commercial, and official use of the Texas map as cultural symbol has boomed. Richard V. Francaviglia identifies this current trend as "Tex-map mania", and contends that the Texas map as icon integrates geography with history - and gives shape to a mythic landscape and to abstracted notions of what Texas is and who Texans are. Written in a lively style that engages both the scholar and the general reader in a discussion of the power of symbol and the meaning and significance of a shared aesthetic, The Shape of Texas is at the crossroads of cartography and popular culture. Francaviglia uses more than one hundred illustrations in offering a provocative visual and written account of this important, yet much neglected, aspect of Texas history and the dynamics of a still emerging Texas identity. RICHARD V. FRANCAVIGLIA is an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has written more than twenty articles for geographical and historical journals. His two previous books are Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America 's Historic Mining Districts (1991) and The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a Unique Image in the American West (1978). Used Book in Good Condition