Mexico & Guatemala Map 1855 Regional Print - Mexico City, Guatemala City, Yucatan

Samuel Augustus Mitchell's New Universal Atlas, published this year under the imprint of Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co. of Philadelphia, included this map of Mexico and Guatemala as one of a hundred and twenty-nine maps, plans and sections spread across seventy-five sheets, testament to how comprehensive Mitchell's atlas franchise had become by the mid-1850s. The copyright notice on the sheet still carries an 1850 date even though this printing is from 1855, a common practice among American atlas publishers who registered a copyright once and continued issuing lightly updated editions under it for years without re-filing. Mitchell marked the map with the locations of mines and battlefields alongside the standard political boundaries and state capitals, a practical touch aimed at American readers whose interest in Mexican geography had been sharpened by the recently concluded war and the mineral wealth of the newly acquired northern territories.

Mexico City anchors the map as the seat of national government, its surrounding state capitals marked individually across the country's federal divisions. Guatemala appears as a separately bounded territory, its own capital and internal geography drawn with the same careful attention Mitchell's engravers gave the Mexican states proper. The Yucatan Peninsula extends to the east, its coastline and administrative boundary distinctly rendered even as the region remained one of Mexico's more remote and thinly governed territories. Scattered battlefield markers across the map's northern reaches trace ground fought over during the Mexican-American War less than a decade earlier, giving the sheet real historical texture beyond its function as a political reference.

A meaningful gift for anyone researching family history connected to the Mexican-American War's mining districts or battlefields, both of which this map takes the trouble to mark. TheMapVault also carries the 1854 Cowperthwait edition of a related Mexico and Guatemala sheet and a later 1857 printing issued under Charles Desilver's imprint once Cowperthwait's publishing rights passed to him; this 1855 sheet sits between the two, still under the Cowperthwait name but carrying Mitchell's fuller battlefield and mining detail. It's supplied unframed, available in the full range of nine sizes.