Mexico Map 1864 Regional Print - Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey

This 1864 map of the Republic of Mexico marks the final edition of a publishing lineage stretching back twenty-eight years, first launched under Henry S. Tanner's name in 1836 and passed through several Philadelphia publishers before Charles Desilver, working from a new address on Chestnut Street, issued this last iteration of the New Universal Atlas. Compiled by W.H. Holmes, the same cartographer responsible for Desilver's 1859 Mexico sheet, this edition expands the atlas to seventy-nine maps and updates several individual sheets, reflecting genuine revision work rather than a simple relabeling of older engravings. The map's territorial year of 1864 places it squarely within the French intervention in Mexico, when Napoleon III's troops had installed Maximilian as emperor and the republic's legitimate government under Benito Juarez continued resisting from the field, a political crisis the map's calm, orderly state boundaries give no hint of.

Mexico City anchors the map at the country's political center, though by 1864 actual control of the capital rested with Maximilian's French-backed regime rather than the republican government earlier editions of this same atlas had mapped under peacetime conditions. Guadalajara appears as a major western state capital, historically one of Mexico's most important interior cities and a center of resistance during the ongoing conflict. Monterrey, in the industrializing north, is likewise marked, its growing commercial importance already visible on the map before its full nineteenth-century industrial expansion. Insets of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Valley of Mexico, carried over from the atlas's 1859 edition, continue to give readers detailed views of the two regions of greatest ongoing American commercial interest.

A considered gift for a collector interested in the French intervention period of Mexican history, or anyone with family ties to Guadalajara or Monterrey specifically, both named individually on this sheet. TheMapVault also carries the 1859 edition of this same Mitchell and Holmes map, issued five years earlier and a full atlas-generation before this final 1864 printing closed out the New Universal Atlas franchise that had begun under Tanner's name in 1836. It's supplied unframed, available across the full range of nine sizes.