cartography

Maps are the Record of Humans' Imagination of the World

by Meredith F. Small

World maps have always been made without regard for practicality. Useless for navigation or for demarcating ownership, they are imaginative and expressive of a society's view of the world—which makes them important. 

A Walk Around the "Wood that Built London"

by C.J. Schüler

The remnants of the North Wood outside London posed a mystery of cartographical history to the author: how to reconstruct the forest that was timbered to build the metropolis.

New Book Revisits the Debate over NYC's Iconic Subway Maps

For fans of transit cartography, the New York Subway Map Debate of April 20, 1978, is remembered as a legendary showdown between two irreconcilable approaches.

To Grasp Geopolitical Transformations, Don't Forget to Look at the Map

by Tim Marshall

Historians and thinkers in other fields could benefit from a greater attention to geography and a greater understanding of how ideas, politics and identities are anchored to the physical space of the earth. 

In Australia, historians and artists have turned to cartography to record the widespread killing of Indigenous people

Chief among them is historian Lyndall Ryan, who says her fellow historians are in denial about the extent of the massacres.

World War II Led to a Revolution in Cartography. These Amazing Maps Are Its Legacy.

by Susan Schulten

More Americans came into contact with maps during World War II than in any previous moment in American history.

How the North Ended Up on Top of the Map

by Nick Danforth

A cartographic history of what’s up.

LoC historian publishes history of Renaissance man who named America

A DECADE AGO, the Library of Congress paid $10 million to acquire the only known original copy of a 1507 world map that has been called “the birth certificate of America.” The large map, a masterpiece of woodblock printing, has been a star attraction at the library ever since and the object of revived scholarly fascination about the earliest cartography of the New World. The research has also rescued from obscurity a little-known Renaissance man, the 16th-century globe maker Johannes Schöner, who was responsible for saving the map for posterity.Five years ago, John W. Hessler, a historian of cartography at the library, published “The Naming of America,” an account of the map’s importance in post-Ptolemy geography, its disappearance for centuries and its rediscovery in a castle near the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. Now, Dr. Hessler has dug deeper into the dynamic of the years between Columbus, in 1492, and Copernicus, in 1543. Science and exploration were stretching minds to distant horizons, once unknown. Copernican astronomy was about to dislodge Earth from the center of the universe, a start to the Scientific Revolution.