The Electric Map of the Battle of Gettysburg, once a mainstay of Gettysburg National Military Park, closed in 2008; in 2012 it was purchased at auction for $14,000 by Scott Roland, a businessman who planned to reopen it as a tourist attraction in downtown Hanover, Pennsylvania, about 16 miles east of Gettysburg. Renovating and reassembling the map has taken Roland longer than he originally expected, the Evening Sun reports, but he believes the map will be ready by the end of the school year. [via]
Category: History
Conference on GIS and Ancient History
Mapping the Past: GIS Approaches to Ancient History, a conference hosted by the Ancient World Mapping Center (the folks behind the Barrington Atlas), takes place at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, from 7 to 9 April 2016. It’s open to the public. Here’s the full schedule. [via]
Previously: Antiquity à la Carte.
Historical Atlas of Maine Wins AAG Award
DeLorme isn’t the only one with a Maine atlas. About a year ago the University of Maine Press published the Historical Atlas of Maine, edited by Richard Judd and Stephen Hornsby. “The atlas, the result of a 15-year scholarly project led by University of Maine researchers, offers a new geographical and historical interpretation of Maine, from the end of the last ice age to the year 2000,” says the university. “The 208-page atlas features 76 two-page plates with a rich array of 367 original maps, 112 original charts and 248 other images—historical maps, paintings and photos—in addition to its text. The result is a unique interpretation of Maine, a rich visual record of the state’s history, and a major achievement in humanities research.” Last month it won the 2016 AAG Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography. Buy at Amazon or via the publisher. [via]
The North Carolina Civil War Atlas
The result of a decade’s worth of research, The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas, written by Mark Anderson Moore with Jessica Bandel and Michael Hill, is now available. The book “is a comprehensive study of the impact of the war on the Tar Heel State, incorporating 99 newly prepared maps. The large format (17″ by 11″) volume highlights every significant military engagement and analyzes the war’s social, economic and political consequences through tables, charts and text.” Produced by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, it can be ordered through their online store, at the North Carolina Museum of History or selected state historic sites. Read historian John David Smith’s review in The News & Observer. [via]
The Social Life of Maps
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Elizabeth Mosier reports on a talk last Saturday by University of Delaware English professor Martin Brückner. “Using images from the exhibit he curated at Winterthur Museum (viewable online at http://commondestinations.winterthur.org), Brückner traced maps from production to purchase to public display and personal use, as they became fashionable objects in the period before and after the Revolutionary War,” Mosier writes.
In the 18th century, maps were everywhere: advertised with luxury goods in catalogs and with necessities in the newspaper, displayed in taverns and town halls and high-traffic areas in private homes, printed on parlor screens and ceramics and neckties—“cartifacts” serving no cartographic purpose. If political conflict built the market for maps, the cartouche—or decorative map title—refined it, adding beauty to the criteria for determining a map’s value. The brisk business in maps for navigating and decorating redefined what constituted their usefulness, in material and social terms. Owning a map meant economic status, educational achievement, and national identity; showing a map showed you belonged.
This is the “performative function” of maps, to create reality by plotting it.
Brückner is the author or editor of several books on the subject of the social history of maps in early America, including The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Early Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (UNC Press, 2006). I should really check his work (and Susan Schulten’s) out; my own graduate work was going to be on the social function of music, so the social function of maps is relevant to my interests for more than one reason. [via]
A Brief History of Cartography and Maps
Here’s a short video overview of the history of cartography and maps, courtesy of GeographyHub, that’s really about what was mapped—and mappable. [via]
Around Switzerland in 80 Maps
The Local profiles
Lausanne-based game and book company Helvetiq, which last year published Diccon Bewes’s Around Switzerland in 80 Maps. Those maps range, according to the publisher, “from the circular island map of 1480 to the birth of modern Swiss cartography; from the British rail plan for Switzerland to a Soviet map of Basel during the Cold War; from the 1970s Zurich map for men to the vision of a Greater Switzerland with 40 cantons.” Buy at Amazon. [via]
A New Book About Frederick de Wit
The 17th-century Dutch cartographer Frederick de Wit, “one of the most famous dealers of maps, prints and art during the Dutch Golden Age,” is the subject of a new book: George Carhart’s Frederick de Wit and the First Concise Reference Atlas, out this month from Brill Publishing. Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.) [via]
Layers of London
Meanwhile, and speaking of georectified map viewers, a project to create a multi-layered online map of London, with maps from the 17th century onward georectified and available through a single interface, has received development funding from the Heritage Lottery. Work on Layers of London, as it will be called, will begin in May. Londonist, IHR, MOLA.
Georeferenced Historic Maps
The National Library of Scotland has an online map viewer that overlays georeferenced old maps atop a modern web map interface (Bing, I believe). Among my crowd, it’s the various 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps of London that generate the most excitement, though there are plenty of other locales (mostly but not exclusively in the U.K.) and time periods.
World Population Growth
The population of the world from 1 CE/AD through the end of the 21st century (projected) is mapped in this video and interactive map from Population Connection, a group concerned with the carrying capacity of the planet and the environmental impact of overpopulation (they used to be Zero Population Growth back in the day). In each, one dot represents one million people. [via]
The Mapmakers’ World
In Geographical magazine’s February issue, Nicholas Crane reviews The Mapmakers’ World: A Cultural History of the European World Map by Marjo Nurminen (Pool of London, September 2015). It’s a history of early European mapmaking from the early Middle Ages to the end of the 18th century. “The last few years have produced a rich harvest of map books, so newcomers have to stand tall to win notice,” writes Crane. “The Mapmakers’ World delivers an ambitious thesis with style.” [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Antiquity à la Carte
The Ancient World Mapping Center—formerly the Classical Atlas Project, the team behind the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, the expensive atlas later reborn as an iPad app (iTunes link)—has a web-based map interface to classical/late antiquity geographic data. The original (2012) version of “Antiquity à la Carte” is kind of old school and clunky; the (2014) beta version shows a bit more promise. [via]
Urban Scratchoff
Using an interactive interface to compare present-day and historical maps and aerial imagery is done all the time—on this website I use a slider plugin—but Chris Whong’s Urban Scratchoff uses a familiar metaphor to compare present-day aerial images of New York City with imagery from 1924. Give it a try. More on how Chris did it. [via]
Made in Algeria: An Exhibition of Colonial Cartography
Opening today at the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France, and running until May 2nd, Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire is an exhibition of nearly 200 “maps, drawings, paintings, photographs, films and historical documents as well as works by contemporary artists who surveyed the territory of Algeria.” The exhibition examines not only the cartography of the French colonial period, but the political and cultural narratives—to say nothing of the territory itself—created by colonial mapmaking. Lots of material on the exhibition’s website, but it’s French-only. [via]