In the past several years, History instructors have increasingly experimented with assignment or project design that moves beyond the confines of the traditional research essay. The resulting assignments are often referred to as “un-essays”— projects purposefully designed to empower students to take an active role in shaping their own research topics and enable them to present their research in ways other than the more conventional paper format. Requiring students to conduct rigorous research, marshal evidence in support of larger claims, and make intentional decisions about organization and audience, un-essays meet most of the same criteria expected of a research paper, but in ways that help address different learning styles. This article centers on a particular student project I assigned that brought together the growing interest in un-essays with the parallel call for more geospatial instruction in the classroom. In the fall of 2019, students in my seminar “All Over the Map: Cartography and Historical Narrative” took on various research projects to re-map a familiar geography in United States history (the Antebellum North), along with the histories we associate with it. They designed different topics to help answer a shared question: was the Antebellum North truly a place that solely promoted freedom? Yet, instead of submitting a research paper reflecting their findings, students and I worked together to re-map the region by creating a digital, interactive map that plotted the histories they elected to narrate about different regions in the Antebellum North. The resulting map, which we titled “The Free North?,” and which was influenced by the pedagogical impulse behind un-essay design, has become a pedagogical tool of its own.

Within the last three decades, the geographic dimensions of Early American History have expanded. Transregional, Atlantic, Diasporic, Continental, Hemispheric, and Transoceanic perspectives have helped bring about the conceptualization of a "Vast Early America" connected with but not limited to Britain's North American colonies. This article surveys some of the historiographical trends that have propelled that shift. Recognizing that those changes overlapped with the so-called spatial turn in the discipline of History more broadly, it approaches the topic through a spatial lens. It first considers how histories of cartography in Early America have led to a scholarly rethinking of the field's geographic dimensions. It then examines the ways historians have teased out some of the lived and imagined geographies that Native and European agents negotiated in North America. Because Native geographies were at the center of America's early history as well as the colonial encounters that reshaped it, much of the article's focus is on Native American spatial practices. 1 | INTRODUCTION In February 2015, within a now well-known book review of Bernard Bailyn's Sometimes an Art, historian Gordon S. Wood (2015) declared that the boundaries of Colonial America had become "mushy and indistinct." Although criticizing recent trends in the field of Early American history more broadly, he specifically called out those he traced in the field's leading journal, the William and Mary Quarterly, which Wood argued was in real danger of "losing its way." The Quarterly, he explained, had ceased publishing scholarship exclusively focused on the origins In the last decades of the twentieth century, American historians discovered America.