Date: September 20, 2012
Title: For Better and For Worse: The Cartographic Legacy of Jesuit Era Maps of the Upper Great Lakes and the Mississippi River Valley
Speaker: David Buisseret and Carl Kupfer
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library
In 1673 Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet set out on a monumental voyage of exploration of the Mississippi River and its upper tributaries linking Lake Michigan. Two very different maps have come down to us. Marquette’s map of 1673 was the subject of our Map Society talk in March of this year. At the upcoming meeting we shall discuss a map drawn by Jean Baptiste Franquelin in 1675 that reflects Jolliet’s recollections of the same journey but depicting a very inaccurate geography of the same region. Whereas Marquette employed sound mapping techniques to draft a better map, Franquelin’s creation relied on an inaccurate map, the well-known Jesuit Map of Lake Superior of 1672, to draw his manuscript map of the Mississippi River, the Illinois Country, and the Upper Great Lakes. A number of derivative maps of both the Marquette and Franquelin models were produced in the years following the Marquette and Jolliet voyage. We will show how each of the maps influenced their derivatives, for better and for worse.
Date: October 18, 2012
Title: Ten in Forty: A Too Short History of Travelers’ Maps in the Early U.S.
Speaker: James Akerman, Director, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography and Curator of Maps, The Newberry Library
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library
Jim Akerman examines how maps made for travelers documented and mediated the changing context of travel in the United States from 1789 to 1859. Faced with such an expansive and complex topic and only forty minutes to present it, he will focus (sort of) on only ten maps, beginning with the 1789 road atlas of Christopher Colles, and ending with the Franklin Leavitt’s 1859 map made for tourists of the New Hampshire’s White Mountains. This sample is far too small to adequately represent the complex, evolving relationship between maps and the American traveler. He hopes nevertheless to sketch out the broad contours of this relationship during the formation of a transcontinental United States.
Date: November 15, 2012
Title: The Newberry 125: A Cartographic Tour
Speakers: Diane Dillon and Bob Karrow
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library
What’s a quasquicentennial? These and other questions about the Newberry Library, its history, and its map collection will be answered at this month’s meeting. Current and past Newberry staff will lead a guided tour of some of the intriguing, beautiful, and historically significant books, maps, manuscripts, art, and artifacts that the library has collected over its 125 years. The tour will, of course, place special emphasis on the many maps in the celebratory exhibition currently on display at the Newberry. Come and join us for a festive evening of exploration.
Date: December 20, 2012
Title: Members’ Night
Speaker: Members of the Chicago Map Society
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library
Do you have a particular map or map-related item you wish to share? Curious about what others are collecting? Here’s your opportunity. On this special night we invite Chicago Map Society members to bring their own maps and say a few words about them, be it a one-of-a-kind item bargained for at a flea market or the long sought-after piece that ties your collection together.
Date: January 17, 2013
Title: Maps and Map Use in the Naturalization of the Argentinean National Territory
Speaker: Carla Lois, University of Buenos Aires
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library
During the formation of the Argentinean state in the second half of the nineteenth century its ruling elites sought both to organize state administration and to promote a new national identity. To achieve these goals they promoted education, the professionalization of the national army, the creation of common currency, and, of course, the definition of the national territory. Cartography contributed to this process by communicating and disseminating an idea of the national territory that naturalized official territorial policies. This presentation will describe how cartographic discourses helped to crystallize some specific geopolitical ideas that defined the Argentinean national identity.
Date: February 21, 2011
Title: On the Possible Lessons of Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas, 1881-1937
Speakers: Peter Nekola, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library
Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas emerged in the first decade of the unified German state; designed for the upper-middle class households of one of the world’s most prosperous industrial economies, it would become the best-selling world atlas published in the German language. Drawn to include as many towns, cities, and other named locations as possible, it helped create a model for what we now know as political cartography. Published in Leipzig, an important center of geographical research, successive editions of Andree’s Handatlas had come to increasingly include the new maps of the emerging science. Yet in the interwar period, when many other atlases changed their content to embrace the geographical model completely, Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas rejected that model, instead further emphasizing its political cartography, in what Jürgen Espenhorst has called the “great error of German cartography.” Its final edition is considered little more than nationalist propaganda. What possible historical, cartographic, or philosophical lessons might be drawn from the half-century of Andree’s publication?
Date: March 21, 2013
Title: Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 and 1516 World Maps
Speaker: Chet Van Duzer
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library
Chet Van Duzer will present material from the new book Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps, which he co-authored with John Hessler. The focus will be on the sources Waldseemüller used in creating his two large world maps, and on the maps as evidence for the evolution of his cartographic thought. The 1507 map is famous for being the first to apply the name “America” to the New World. His Carta marina of 1516 has always remained in the shadow of his 1507 map—less famous and less studied. In fact, the Carta marina is in several ways more interesting than the 1507 map. Van Duzer will examine the differences between the two maps and discuss the new sources that Waldseemüller used for the Carta marina, placing particular emphasis on his iconographical sources.
Chet Van Duzer recently completed a Kislak Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, where he studied Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516, and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps in journals such as Imago Mundi, Terrae Incognitae and Word & Image. He is also the author of Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study, published by the American Philosophical Society in 2010, the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes that includes the New World, and his book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps will be published by the British Library in May of this year.
There will be no April meeting this year; instead, members are encouraged to attend the Arthur and Janet Holzheimer America in Maps Lecture at the AGSL, as noted below.
Date: April 18, 2013
Title: Arthur and Janet Holzheimer America in Maps Lecture: Andrew Ellicott: Early America’s Preeminent Surveyor
Speaker: Chas Langelan, Washington, D.C. Land Surveyor (retired) and Officer of Surveyors Historical Society
Location: American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, 2311 East Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee Wis.
Date: May 16, 2013
Title: The Mapping of Global Warming
Speaker: Erik Ramberg, Fermilab
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library
Dr. Ramberg will take us through the maps and charts in his presentation, “The Fundamentals of Global Warming Science.” Here is his abstract for this presentation: Although the basic physics of global warming due to anthropogenic release of CO2 has been understood for more than 100 years, a large portion of the U.S. population mistrusts scientists on this vital issue. In this talk, I will review the fundamentals of radiation transfer in the Earth/atmosphere system. The Ice Ages will be shown to be an excellent calibration tool for the response of the global temperature to “forcing”—that is, the imbalance in radiative equilibrium. I will review the latest temperature measurements of the surface and ocean, as well as the response of the polar ice sheets to the increased temperature.