Toponyms were in the news again last week, with President Donald Trump’s pithily titled Executive Order, “Honoring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America”, as a somewhat idiosyncratic escalation of a wider trade dispute between the United States and Canada over tariffs. It recalls Trump’s similar Order of January 2025, “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness”, whose most notable provision at the time was renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Famously there was controversy when Google Maps opted to conform to this order for users inside the US (see below), leading to objections from Mexico. And when the Associated Press refused to similarly toe the line, their access to White House was limited.
The Lake Ontario controversy is a glaringly obvious example of toponyms (or, to reference the Prime Minster of Canada’s response, more properly a hydronym in this case) being politically co-opted. Trump’s interventions in toponymy are unusual, not because they change or update toponyms for political reasons, but rather because of their alignment with a visceral and populist political narrative. This is a fascinating departure from the way in which toponyms have historically been documented, updated or changed for the purposes of political or administrative control. Careful surveys by trained sappers, the laying out of base lines, surveyors questioning local worthies as to the spelling and dialect of what Feature X has been known as since time immemorial; the transcription, projection and careful design of cadastral layouts and sybmologies in dusty Offices of Surveys etc… that is the path familiar to historical geographers; not the stroke of a presidential pen. An illuminating March 2025 blogpost by Violet Fox, a Cataloging and Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University’s Galter Health Sciences Library, following the Gulf of America renaming, notes the extraordinary speed at which this change appeared in the official vocabularies of the Library of Congress. Fox writes:
Although the special list was backdated to February 13th, no one was notified of these revision proposals until the morning of February 18th, and the deadline for submitting comments was the same day, February 18th. This meant that catalogers had less than 24 hours to respond to these proposals, and our international colleagues in earlier time zones had no opportunity to respond to these proposals.
Fox suggests that the cause of this unprecedented haste was “anticipatory obedience”, an inclination on the part of institutions “describing actions aligning with perceived expectations before explicit directives are given”. I think this is true; but my point here is the historical development of documented toponyms are all about the incremental evolution of such expectations over time. Normally, the process of organisation, documentation, and establishing the authority vested of the bureaucratic record is played out over years. In fact, Trump’s 2025 order makes a provision which received less coverage, but which illustrates this more familiar territory (pun intended) well. North America’s highest mountain, Mt McKinley in Alaska, is named for the US President of the same name, assassinated in 1901. Mt McKinley is also known as “Denali”, a toponym derived from a Indigenous Koyukon term, which was federally recognised in the GNIS in 2015 by the Obama adminsitration. The 2025 presidential order states:
Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior shall, consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, reinstate the name “Mount McKinley.” The Secretary shall subsequently update the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to reflect the renaming and reinstatement of Mount McKinley. The national park area surrounding Mount McKinley shall retain the name Denali National Park and Preserve.
This is, in some ways, a much more familiar and well rehearsed playing out of historic toponym disputes: two (in this case) variations of names for the same feature or place, both historically grounded, both culturally and politically charged, with different sources of authority claiming “correctness” in each case. Any historical geographer would recognise this scenario. Trump’s orders however directed the Secretary of the Interior to update the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), the Federal Government’s official gazetteer of US toponyms with completely new names, literally overnight. So how can the Lake Ontario/Gulf of Mexico orders be seen from a broader perspective of historical-geographic method?
Asking this question gives me the opportunity to trail a forthcoming paper I have coming out in a festschrift for my old friend and mentor Professor Charlotte Roueche, Tall edifices supported by strong foundations: open data in ancient and Byzantine studies, edited by Gabriel Bodard and Valeria Vitale. This paper, entitled “Engraving the soil: The challenges of defining spatial footprints in Cypriot cultural heritage” concerns the co-option of toponyms for political/colonial purposes in the history of Cyprus. It is a reflection on the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus, a project that I ran with colleagues at King’s including, primus inter pares, Charlotte herself. I have blogged about this project in the distant past – here and here. Cypriot toponyms are especially interesting because they exist in an historically contested and multilingual environment, with most places being known by both Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish name variations. These variations are inevitably a source of disagreement both inside and outside officialdom: the very first OpenStreetMap “edit war” concerned a Northern Cypriot village with the Turkish name Ozanköy and the Greek name Kazaphani. The dispute concerned which of these names should be the “primary” one, the one presented to OpenStreetMap users as the name by which the village is generally known. This inevitably introduces questions, such as what do “primarily” and “generally” mean, and “known to whom”? “The digital” introduces the capacity for conflict, as well as an instinct to reduce contested names to one “correct” form, whilst doing nothing to resolve the actual question of correctness. In the paper, I attempt to describe how networked modelling of toponyms using agnostic line strings to represent different variations can surface and visualise different representations, including competing ones. This at least allows us to consider what “correct” might mean in different contexts. Specifically, I argue that
The given name of a place in use at any one time has different textual witnesses across different textual sources. A toponym is never just a single name, it is a network of different versions of multiple names.
Where this network is hidden, whether by accident or design, toponyms exhibit what historians of cartography call “ontological stability”. An “official” version of ontological stability for Cypriot toponyms was provided by Herbert Horatio Kitchener’s Complete Trigonometrical Survey of the island, which provided an “authoritative” (and extremely accurate, by modern scientific standards) overview of the island, and the spellings of its toponymic variations:
Kitchener represents a datafication of observable reality, simultaneously containing and encoding all the ambiguities that human observation entails. In doing so, it negates ambiguity, presenting a univocal view of the world.
While Kitchener’s map provided ontological stability for island in 1885, it was nonetheless fragile; of utility primarily as a means of taxation, administration, census and military deployment. It was not a map widely, if at all, recognised by the Greek or Turkish Cypriot inhabitants of the island, unless forced to do so through interaction with governmental authority. I argue that the map was politically legitimate as far as its own purposes went, but at the same time was ontologically unstable.
So what sort of ontological stability might “Lake America” and indeed the “Gulf of Mexico” now enjoy? In the paper I go on to say:
[I]n the context of places with historically documented names (which includes physical features and settlements in existence long before their names were documented in written records), gazetteers in fact highlight toponyms’ lack of such stability
In other words, place naming is, and always has been, an exercise in bureaucratic process, documentation and direction, and thus control. As the case of Cyprus shows, you write toponyms down in official lists, providing a “univocal view of the world”, only if you have reason to do so. Those reasons are always to do with the authority to do something to or with the territory being named.
I believe these two cases of modern place-renaming highlight a very important point: “ontological stability” is certainly not just a product of linguistic, textual or cultural disagreement about a particular toponym. It can also be introduced through direct political intervention, for clear political ends. And this shows that there is surely a splendid irony in a US administration which bases its entire narrative on overthrowing old orders of establishment and bureaucracy putting out eye-catching ventures into toponymy while riffing on three hundred plus years of establishment and bureaucracy.
Stuart Dunn 