In the revolutionary year of 1848, former China merchant Asa Whitney stood before the Pennsylvania legislature to unveil a “skeleton map.” Standard world maps were marred by an epistemological error, he argued; centering where “Europe, Asia and Africa” met, they pushed North America to “one side of all, as if of no importance.” Whitney’s cartography righted this wrong, showing America as it really was: “in the centre of all.” More than a salve to hemispheric pride, Whitney thought his map demonstrated that the “belt of the globe” – the east-west band running across Europe and Asia that contained “the population and the commerce of all the world” – was missing its buckle, a gap in the zone he proprietarily called “our continent.”