Date: Thursday, September 23, 2021
Title: Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City
Speaker: Carl Smith
Location: Zoom Meeting

Chicago historian Carl Smith’s new book, Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City, described by the Wall Street Journal as “a wonderfully thoughtful and concise retelling of the tragedy and its aftermath,” and by Rick Kogan of the Chicago Tribune as “simply put, the best book ever written about the fire,” is a comprehensive and compelling narrative of this legendary event, whose 150th anniversary is this fall. In his presentation, Smith will reflect on the fire, the rebuilding, and their place in the city’s history, including a special emphasis of the role of maps in telling the unfolding story.

Carl Smith is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northwestern University. His books include Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920; Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman; The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City; and City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago.

Date: Thursday, October 21, 2021
Title: Changing the Landscape-Building Chicago’s Expressways
Speaker: Andrew Plummer
Location: Zoom Meeting

We hope you can join us for a fascinating presentation on the development of the Cook County Expressway system. During the 1950’s, the county experienced a population boom that would make it the most populous in the United States. Much of this increase would ultimately reside in the newly incorporated suburban towns, though few of the existing expressways served them.

It wouldn’t be until 1954, with the implementation of the gas tax, that the state could become a true partner in the construction of the expanding expressway system. Soon, the city and county would become largely dependent on these contributions. Over the next ten years, the three agencies would jointly construct four major urban expressways, averaging nearly 10 miles a year. The story of that construction will be explored in detail, along with thoughts on its impacts across the city.

Local historian Andrew Plummer is likely the foremost expert on the history and development of Chicago’s expressway system. After 38 years in public transportation planning, Andy retired as the Senior Deputy Director of the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) in 1999. During the last 20 years, he worked as a consultant for various transportation agencies. In addition, he has researched, written, and made presentations on the history of transportation planning, Illinois roads, Chicago area expressways, and county surveyors/superintendents. Mr. Plummer been featured extensively in radio and television interviews, as well as through numerous presentations to conferences and related organizations. Examples include the Illinois History Conference, the Chicago Humanities Festival, UIC-Urban Transportation Planning Conference, the IDOT Fall Planning Conference, and the Chicago Architectural Foundation.

Note: Due to illness, this meeting was postponed.

Date: Thursday, November 18, 2021
Title: Orienteering and the Use of Maps in the Field
Speakers: Peter Goodwin & Joseph Huberman
Location: Zoom Meeting

Please join us for a unique presentation that will see two pioneers in orienteering share an overview of the sport, its growth in the United States, and the close relationship between orienteering and cartography. The first part of the meeting, led by Peter Goodwin, will include a brief history of the evolution of making maps for orienteering and then discuss the present-day method that involves the use of laser light to obtain data in order to make maps (LIDAR). Peter will also discuss what other information LIDAR can provide and how it’s useful for orienteering and mapmaking. The second part of the presentation will have Joseph Huberman take us on a virtual race as he navigates through an orienteering course. During which he will explain course decisions, outline details from the map, and cover differences between Orienteering and ARDF (Amateur Radio Direction Finding).

With over sixty years of combined experience and both current and former membership on the board of Orienteering USA, Peter Goodwin and Joseph Huberman are undisputed experts in the sport of orienteering. Peter was a high school science teacher for 35 years and has been making contour maps for nearly that long. As President of Orienteering USA in 2010, Peter played a crucial role in bringing the first Orienteering World Cup to the United States, in which the American women’s team made an admirable showing. Joseph Huberman is the current Vice President of Club Services for Orienteering USA and has directed championships for both orienteering and ARDF (Amateur Radio Direction Finding). He’s also the current president of the Backwoods Orienteering Klub and owns a company dedicated to producing orienteering products called TrekLite, Inc.

Date: Thursday, December 16, 2021
Title: Annual Holiday Party & Member Show & Tell
Speaker: Members of the CMS
Location: Zoom Meeting

Please join us for our annual Holiday Party/Member Show & Tell. This fun and festive event will see various members of CMS sharing cartographic highlights from their collections and/or map-related research. If you’re interested in sharing something with the group, please drop us a line.

With your registration, you will be entered into a raffle to win one of several gifts. These will be distributed next week, hopefully, to arrive prior to the meeting’s start. Have a wonderful holiday season and we hope to see you there!

Date: Thursday, January 1, 2022
Title: Indigenous Mapping: Cultural and Psychological Sources
Speaker: Benjamin B. Olshin, retired Professor of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and Design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia
Location: Zoom Meeting

In cartography and other fields, “scientific thinking” is defined as an analytic and systematic way of observing and interacting with the world. “Analytic” in this context means examining evidence and constructing models of the world based on that evidence. By contrast, what characterizes non-scientific, indigenous cultures is—rather derisively—called “magical thinking”, a belief in structures beyond observable physical reality. This talk will examine how apparently non-scientific thinking (i.e., non-analytic thinking) can nonetheless create sophisticated maps and broader systems of knowledge, with parallels in other traditional systems, such as indigenous medicine. The talk will touch upon the underlying cultural and psychological frameworks that produce indigenous knowledge systems and note that such systems still exist deep within the human psyche everywhere—and may reflect how we truly perceive the world around us.

Bio: Benjamin B. Olshin is a former Professor of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and Design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His book on the history of cartography in relation to the voyages of Marco Polo was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014, and he has presented work on maps and exploration in areas ranging from indigenous mapping systems to voyages in the Atlantic Ocean in the Classical period. Following a BA in Classical History and Languages from Williams College, Dr. Olshin completed an MA and PhD. at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto in Canada. His teaching, research and other work has taken him all over the world, with stints in Sri Lanka, the U.K., Canada, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, Ghana, and Indonesia.

Date: Thursday, February 17, 2022
Title: Panoramic City: Immersive Media and the Shape of Chicago
Speaker: Molly Briggs
Location: Zoom Meeting

Chicago’s storied park boulevard system was conceived and constructed during a period of international interest in popular didactic entertainments known as panoramas. This lecture interprets the system as a key exemplar of the “panoramic mode,” an urban visual culture defined by synthetic spectacle. The disposition of Chicago’s parks, boulevards, and panorama rotundas is revealed in contemporary bird’s-eye views, park plans, city maps, and immersive printed ephemera. These spatial relationships illuminate the role of designed landscapes in the mediated complex that constituted the nineteenth-century city.

Professor Briggs is a design theorist, landscape historian, and studio practitioner who studies immersive rhetorics in printed matter in order to distill the mediated shape of built and social space. She is an assistant professor of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, where she teaches Graphic Design and coordinates the MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation. She holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture History & Theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MFA in Art Theory & Practice from Northwestern University, and a BFA in Painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Date: Thursday, March 17, 2022
Title: A Nation of Immigrants: Mapping American 19th-Century Migration Stories
Speaker: Ronald Grim
Location: Zoom Meeting

Throughout our Nation’s history, migration—the process of people moving from one place to another to establish a new residence—has been a re-occurring theme. Maps are an essential source for studying this process. Based on his contribution to the Newberry Library’s Mapping Movement Project and previous research using maps to document the changing historical geography of the United States, this lecture will identify and illustrate a variety of maps that can be used effectively to document the spatial components of America’s 19th century migration story. The geographical questions that will be addressed include where migrants came from, where they settled, and how they arrived at their new home.

Ronald Grim retired in May 2018 as Curator of Maps for the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. He assumed this position in 2005 after working 33 years for the Federal government with the cartographic collections at the National Archives and Library of Congress. He has been a Board of Review member for the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine since the early 1990s. He is currently serving as Vice President and Program Chair for the Washington Map Society. He received his MA and PhD degrees in historical geography from the University of Maryland.

Date: Thursday, April 21, 2022
Title: Maps & American Literature: A Material History of Practice and Perception
Speaker: Martin Brückner
Location: Zoom Meeting

Maps have always played a central role in modern American literature. Who hasn’t flipped to a novel’s endpapers and, with a finger on the map, traced the adventures of a favorite character or clicked around on websites devoted to mapping the spatial configuration of fictional worlds, from William Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County to Dan Brown’s illustrated edition of The DaVinci Code, to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy? As Martin Brückner’s talk argues, the same was true for earlier periods in American literary history, but in a far more pervasive and interactive fashion. Turning our attention to the “cartoral arts” in early America, Brückner will show how works produced in the era of colonization and nation-building considered maps, mapping, and cartography in general to be a constitutive part of creating and consuming literature.

Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2022
Title: Mapping the Underground Railroad
Speaker: Karen Lewis
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry & via Zoom

What are the spaces, buildings, and landscapes that defined the Underground Railroad? For example, was the Underground Railroad a series of abolitionist nodes and virtuous establishments on a singular track, or was it an act of defiance and resistance enacted by the ingenuity of Black men and women who created the route? In this talk, Karen Lewis, Associate Professor of Architecture at Ohio State University, will share her research, mapping and visualization techniques used to describe this infrastructure, and will explore key questions about how we conceive of and imagine the Underground Railroad.

Karen Lewis is Chair of Undergraduate Studies in Architecture and Associate Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University whose research interests explore the intersection of graphic and infrastructural systems.

Join us in person at the Newberry Library or via Zoom at 6 PM. For those joining us at the Newberry, curator-led tours of Crossings: Mapping American Journeys will be offered at 4 PM and 5 PM.

Date: Thursday, June 16, 2022
Location: MacLean Collection
Title: Annual Field Trip to the MacLean Collection
Speakers: Molly Briggs, Nick Lowe, Angela Schottenhammer, and Amberly Yeo

Four scholars at the MacLean Collection will discuss their work and the collection items they are using. Topics will include ribbon maps, panoramic views, East Asian maps and Chinese maritime maps among others.

The annual field trip is for members of the Chicago Map Society who are current on their 2022 dues. If you aren’t, you can mail your dues payment or pay online using at chicagomapsociety.org.