Willard is well-known to historians of the early republic as a pioneering educator, the founder of what is now called the Emma Willard School, in Troy, New York. But she was also a versatile writer, publisher and, yes, mapmaker. Her maps are both literal and figurative, growing stranger and more surreal depending on what she was trying to capture. For example, Willard designed a “map of time” to convey to her students the interdependence and totality of human history.