Date: Thursday, September 20, 2018
Title: The North American Continent: A Pictorial Map
Speaker: Anton Thomas
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry

In 2014, Anton Thomas began drawing a pictorial map of North America by hand and, four years on, it is finally at the finish line. With many thousands of features, including 600 individualized cityscapes, it has been an odyssey of sheer labor and dedication. Inspired by the majesty of Earth’s third-largest continent, this color pencil map attempts to merge art with informative cartography. By utilizing the strengths of both disciplines, his hope is to tell a geographic story that engages a wide audience. In this presentation he will unpack the story and concepts behind it, while taking the audience on a tour across this pictorial map of epic proportions: The North American Continent.

Date: Thursday, October 18, 2018
Title: Sasha’s Inferno: The Nine Circles of Viral Internet Maps
Speaker: Sasha Trubetskoy
Location: Rettinger Hall, The Newberry Library

Ever since his “snow map” spread across the web in 2014, Sasha Trubetskoy has been well-versed in the world of viral internet maps. In his presentation, Sasha will tell the story of his initial and subsequent viral map hits and take the audience on a journey deeper and deeper into the darkest pits of amateur internet mapmaking, where “real” cartographers seldom venture. The presentation will bring to light some aspects of mapmaking overlooked by the mainstream cartographic community and highlight the importance of reaching out to a new, broader audience.

Date: Thursday, November 15, 2018
Title: The Early Modern Bird’s-Eye View as a Mode of Seeing
Speaker: Mark Rosen
Location: Rettinger Hall, The Newberry Library

Mark Rosen is an art historian and historian of cartography at the University of Texas at Dallas who specializes in late medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Europe. His interests include the ways in which the sciences impacted the arts and the points of contact between these fields. In this lecture, Prof. Rosen will explore the perspectival view that between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries was the predominant means of picturing cities, discussing how they were made, what sorts of demands they made upon viewers, and how they functioned in the worlds of science, cartography, and art.

Prof. Rosen’s publications include The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy: Painted Cartographic Cycles in Social and Intellectual Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015) as well as articles and reviews in a number of international art-historical and historical journals.

Date: Thursday, December 20, 2018
Title: Annual Holiday Gala and Members’ Show-and-Tell
Speaker: Members of the Chicago Map Society
Location: Rettinger Hall, The Newberry Library

We hope that you will join us for our annual Holiday Gala, which will feature an especially full smorgasbord of holiday treats for your dining and drinking pleasure. We will continue our tradition of pairing this party with our “Members’ Night,” which allows our members to showcase a special item in their personal collections. In the past, we’ve enjoyed hearing about maps, atlases, globes, and “cartifacts”—old, new, borrowed, and blue (yes, we have seen blueprints). You will be given five to ten minutes to talk about your item, which we can display on an easel; you may also use the projector in Rettinger Hall to make a PowerPoint presentation or display a pdf image.

The Holiday Gala will also include a Silent Auction of any items that you may wish to donate to the Society—the full value of which is tax-deductible! We will email an auction catalog on December 17, which in our third year of holding this auction, continues to grow in size and quality. We think that you will be quite impressed.

Date: Thursday, January 17, 2019
Title: Melchior Huebinger and the Making of the First Automobile Atlas of Iowa
Speaker: Mike Flaherty
Location: Ruggles Hall

Mike Flaherty will present a lecture on the maps and atlases produced by the nearly forgotten German immigrant cartographer and surveyor Melchior Huebinger. His mapping of Iowa and Illinois spanned from the 1880s to the 1920s and included the production of vanity subscription atlases, military, flood, geologic and soil maps, production of a general-purpose state atlas, early automobile maps and route guides, and culminated in his incredible 1912 twenty-dollar Good Roads Automobile Atlas of Iowa.

Huebinger’s maps and atlases chronicled the development of commercial photo lithography, modern map-marketing techniques, the re-use and strategic updating of previous edition maps, and a continuing reliance on state, municipal and corporate subsidies to make his low print runs profitable. His career covered the transition from horse and buggy Victorian maps to modern twentieth-century automobile map production and had prominent displays at both the Chicago and St Louis World’s Fairs.

Date: Thursday, February 21, 2019
Title: A Celebration of the Publication of Neighborhood
Speaker: Emily Talen
Location: Ruggles Hall

Please join us as we celebrate the publication of Emily Talen’s book Neighborhood, which is a critical evaluation of the idea of neighborhood. Through the exploration of cross-cultural and cross-temporal commonalities of the ways in which neighborhood articulation exposes conflicting purposes, and the varying levels of realization of neighborhood design, this book assesses the historical record and current relevance of neighborhood. While the idea of neighborhood has attracted substantial scholarly interest for more than a century, each discipline dissects the idea and reality of neighborhood from their own vantage point—sociology, urban history, urban planning, urban design, sustainability, economic development, anthropology, geography, public policy. There have been few attempts to synthesize the disparate range of perspectives involved to develop a fuller understanding of the meaning and complexity of this enduring urban ideal.

Emily Talen is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she holds a PhD in urban geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Emily has written extensively on the topics of urban design, New Urbanism, and social equity and she has previously published four books (New Urbanism and American Planning, Design for Diversity, Urban Design for Planners, and City Rules). Copies of her new book will be available at the meeting.   

Date: Thursday, March 21, 2019
Title: How Maps Reveal (and Conceal) History
Speaker: Susan Schulten
Location: Ruggles Hall

Across five centuries, America has been defined through maps. Whether handmaidens of diplomacy, tools of statecraft, instruments of reform, or advertisements, maps document particular moments in time but also shape the course of history. Join us as we explore a diverse array of materials (with some special treasures from the Newberry) that both illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past.

Susan Schulten is Professor of History at the University of Denver. She is the author of Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Date: Thursday, April 18, 2019
Title: The Development of Illinois’ Counties
Speaker: Kevin Lewis
Location: Ruggles Hall

In honor of the bicentennial of the state of Illinois, Kevin Lewis, President of IG Consulting, will give a presentation on the origin and development of the counties of Illinois. Mr. Lewis will present materials ranging in date from the late-eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries in order to illustrate how the counties of Illinois were formed and how they evolved. The presentation will take us from the birth of the first counties in Illinois through to an Illinois county map much closer to the one we still use today.

Date: Thursday May 16, 2019
Title: Chicago Diagrammed: Frank Glossop and the Mapping of Business Before and After the Fire
Speaker: Michael Conzen
Location: Ruggles Hall

As befits any great metropolis, Chicago lays claim to a rich history of being mapped as a city, despite its relatively short history. (We are still nearly two decades shy of the city’s bicentennial). The pantheon of Chicago’s well-known cartographers, however, lacks one figure who should be in the line-up. The name of Frank Glossop (1838-1889) does not easily roll off the tongues of Chicago’s map historians, but it should. This talk will review his life story and assess the role that his unusual mapping ultimately played in his restless search for a stable living and for respect as a Chicago booster. Mr. Conzen will conclude the talk by arguing that we should regard Frank Glossop as an unheralded but nevertheless, from the perspective of urban tourism, broadly influential cartographer of the heart of Chicago during its phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the Great Fire.

Date: Thursday June 20, 2019  5:30 PM
Title: What Does it Mean to Map a Forest? Cartography and Geographical Knowledge in the Lake Superior Country in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Speaker: Peter Nekola, Luther College
Location: The MacLean Collection, Lake Forest Illinois

Many of us have almost instinctively come to think of maps as representing locations;where things are as opposed to how they work. But mapping a forest as a simple location may tell us very little about the forest itself. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the thickly forested “Northwoods” of the Lake Superior Country provided the world with vast amounts of timber, while the rocks beneath them offered some of the world’s largest deposits of iron and copper. Both endeavors relied on extensive mapping initiatives to locate and extract these resources, in the process changing the landscape drastically. It is no coincidence that these forests were also the site of several of the world’s first published ecological surveys. Locating, assessing, extracting, and, eventually, managing, conserving and preserving the Northwoods demanded sophisticated reasoning, which was made possible by developing increasingly complex maps that represented not just objects but patterns, conditions, and relations. In the end such maps would allow future generations to “see the forest for the trees.” This talk will offer a brief history of these maps and an explanation of how they worked. It will be accompanied by an exhibition including many of the original maps from the MacLean Collection that will appear in Professor Nekola’s forthcoming book, Mapping the Northwoods: Cartography and Geographical Knowledge in the Lake Superior Country, from Industry to Conservation.