Date: Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Title: Book Party for Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of Americas
Speaker: Mirela Altic
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry & via Zoom
In Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Cartography of Americas, just published by University of Chicago Press, Mirela Altic analyses maps produced by the Jesuits during their missionary work in the possessions of the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Crowns in both North and South Americas. She traces the Jesuit contribution to mapping and mapmaking from their arrival in the New World into the post-suppression period, placing it in the context of their worldwide undertakings in the fields of science and art. Altic’s analysis shows the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into the Jesuit maps, effectively making them an expression of cross-cultural communication—even as they were tools of colonial expansion.
Far more than just a physical survey of unknown space, Jesuit mapping was in fact the most important link to enable the exchange of ideas and cultural concepts between the Old World and the New. The book is accompanied by 150 map reproductions (48 in color) from numerous archives and libraries worldwide, many of which have never been published. In the presentation, special attention will be given to the Jesuit cartography of New France.
Date: Thursday, October 23, 2022
Title: Teaching with Maps in a Digital Age at the Newberry Library
Speakers: Dr. Kara Johnson (Director of Teacher Programs, Newberry Library), Dr. Nicholas Kryczka (Scholar-in-Residence, Newberry Library), Sophia Croll (Program Assistant, Teacher Programs, Newberry Library)
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry & via Zoom
Alongside the Newberry’s Winter 2022 exhibit, Crossings: Mapping American Journeys, staff at the Newberry created digital educational resources that responded to exhibit themes. These materials are designed specifically for K-12 teachers, to address and, hopefully, alleviate some curricular challenges related to studying primary historical sources. This talk will provide an overview of the Newberry’s Digital Collections for the Classroom project, and how Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Nicholas Kryczka utilized the extensive digitized map collections at the Newberry to promote accessible ways to teach themes such as travel, tourism, and historical and cultural memory through American cartography.
Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Title: Florentine Topographies: The Buildings, Spaces, and People of the Renaissance City
Speaker: Dr. Niall Atkinson
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry & via Zoom
This lecture will trace the spatial and social dimensions of the urban development of the city of Florence from the late Middle Ages until the time of Botticelli at the turn of the sixteenth century. In this period Florence emerged as one of the most dynamic economies as well as one of the most innovative centers of cultural and scientific innovation in pre-modern Europe. Through a series of case studies this lecture will investigate the underpinnings of these developments and innovations through an exploration of key monuments of the built environment that led to the formation of the city that Botticelli called home.
This meeting was presented in collaboration with the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies and the Italian Cultural Center.
Date: Thursday, December 8, 2022
Title: Annual Holiday Party and Member’s Show & Tell
Speakers: Members of the Chicago Map Society
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry
After too long, we will again hold a Holiday Gala that features a full smorgasbord of holiday treats for your dining and drinking pleasure. Our tradition is to pair this party with member presentations of a special item in their personal collections. In the past, we’ve enjoyed hearing about maps, atlases, globes, surveying and drafting tools, as well as other “cartifacts.” We ask our members to spend five to ten minutes talking about their item, which can be displayed on an easel or electronically.
Please note that we will hold our annual business meeting prior to the program and that this program will not be live-streamed.
Date: Thursday, January 19, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library
Time: 5:30 pm CT
Title: A Short History of the Atlas to 1620
Speaker: Jim Akerman
Jim Akerman (Ph.D, Geography, Penn State) is recently retired from the Newberry Library (after 37 years), where he was Director of the Smith Center for the History of Cartography and Curator of Maps. He is has published widely in the history of cartography, specializing in the history of travel and transportation mapping, the social and political dimensions of mapping, the history of popular cartography, the history of atlases, and map use in education. He has directed 16 NEH summer programs in the history of cartography and has edited or co-edited six volumes of essays on map history, most recently (with Kathleen Brosnan), Mapping Nature across the Americas. In 2022, he curated a major exhibition at the Newberry titled Crossings: Mapping American Journeys. In this talk, he returns to the subject of his doctoral dissertation: the history of the structure of early atlases and their place in early modern European culture.
Date: Thursday, February 16, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library
Time: 5:30 pm CT
Title: “The Realms of Education and Good Taste”: Atlas Design at Container Corporation of
America
Speaker: Benjamin Benus, Associate Professor of Art History (Loyola University, New Orleans)
Since its publication in 1953, the World Geo-Graphic Atlas has come to occupy a key place
within graphic design history. Created by Bauhaus-trained artist Herbert Bayer for Container
Corporation of America, this work’s imaginative approaches to data visualization and scientific illustration have had a lasting impact in the field of visual education, extending well beyond the postwar years. In this talk for the Chicago Map Society, Benjamin Benus, author of the forthcoming book Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury, will examine the creative process, sources, and intellectual exchanges through which Bayer and his scientific collaborators realized this remarkable work. Along with an assessment of its contributions to visual education, Benus considers how this midcentury-modernist atlas also advanced the interests of Container Corporation, the Chicago-based packaging company that commissioned the work. Through the story of Bayer’s attempt to balance the commission’s occasionally competing aims and functions, Benus offers broader insights into the roles that modern artists played in popularizing geographical knowledge in the mid-twentieth century.
Date: Thursday, March 16, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library
Time: 5:30 pm CT
Title: Emma Willard: Maps of Space and Time
Speaker: Susan Schulten, Professor of History (University of Denver)
Description: Emma Willard was among the most influential educators of the nineteenth century. She broke new ground in female education, shaped the advent of public schooling, and was widely known for her textbooks and atlases. Central to this success was her conviction that history and geography were not just interdependent subjects, but best learned through visuals. To that end, from the 1820s through the 1860s she produced a wide array of graphics that show us a mind reckoning with the very meaning of time and space through an era of unprecedented expansion, upheaval, and violence.
Bio: Susan Schulten is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Denver, where she has taught since 1996. She is the author of A History of America in 100 Maps (2018); Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (2012), and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (2001), all published by the University of Chicago Press. She is also co-editor of Constructing the American Past: A Sourcebook of a People’s History (Oxford University Press, 2018), and, most recently, author of Emma Willard: Maps of History (2022). Her work has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
More information on Emma Willard: Maps of History is available at the Visionary Press website here: https://visionarypress.com/collections/information-graphic-visionaries/products/emma-willard-maps-of-history
Date: Thursday, May 18th, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)/6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Maps to the Stars: California, Cartography, and Cinema
Speaker: Dr. Patrick Ellis, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Tampa
Description: This talk will introduce Ellis’ current research into the maps that surround more than a century of Hollywood cinema. It will begin with a focus on “location maps,” which aimed to showcase sites within California that could plausibly stand in for other world locations onscreen. Then, the talk will zoom in on a disreputable genre of cartography commonly known as “star maps” which, sold in the open air by street vendors in Los Angeles, purported to offer directions to the homes of celebrities. Ellis aims to take these maps seriously as at once a unique regional form of cartography and an
ephemeral history of American cinema.
Speaker Bio: Patrick Ellis is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Tampa. He works on the history of film and media, with a special interest in how these subjects interact with the histories of cartography, medicine, and technology. He is the author of Aeroscopics: Media of the Bird’s-Eye View (University of California Press, 2021) and he has otherwise published in, e.g., Early Popular Visual Culture, Film History, Imago Mundi, and The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
Date: Thursday, June 15th, 2023
Location: MacLean Collection – Lake Forest, IL
Date: September 21st, 2023
Location: Baskes Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)/6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: The Evolution of the Road Atlas, 100 Years in the Making.
Speaker: Steve Wiertz, GIS Senior Analyst at Rand McNally
Description: This engaging presentation will cover the evolution of the Road Atlas from its start in the early 1900’s to the current digital age in the 21st century. It will outline changes in map specification techniques, map production methods, and research methodologies.
Speaker Bio: Steve Wiertz is a graduate of Illinois State University with a major in Geography and has earned two GIS Certifications, one from Elmhurst University and the other from the College of DuPage. He is currently employed as a GIS Senior Analyst with Rand McNally Publishing in Chicago, Illinois. He has been working with the Rand McNally Road Atlas in different capacities throughout the last 30 years including as primary Cartographic Researcher during the last 12 years. Steve has developed innovative solutions for annually reviewing highways, roads, and points of interest within a customized database containing hundreds of thousands of features. Road conditions change quickly, and points of interest frequently fluctuate with closings, openings, and name changes. In his spare time, Steve enjoys biking, kayaking, fishing, gardening, and planning trips involving a lot of outdoor activities.
Date: October 19th, 2023
Location: Baskes Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)/6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Chicago Reflected: A Skyline Drawing from the Chicago River
Speaker: Ryan Chester
Description: The COVID‐19 pandemic provoked Ryan to start a challenging project – to document scrupulously the street‐front views along the entire length of the Chicago River within Downtown – from Lake Michigan along the main and south branches of the river. Starting from March 2020 and over a period of six months he spent at least one hour daily on drawing his project – moving methodically and deterministically from left to right along a single roll of paper 2’ high and 55’ long. As completed, the drawing represents a unique story of dozens of accurately depicted buildings, as seen from multiple perspectives. This presentation to the Chicago Map Society will focus on how the drawing was created as an elevational map of Chicago as opposed to seeing the city as a plan.
Biography: Ryan Chester, a Chicago‐based architect spends his free time drawing the city he loves; he sees Chicago, particularly its thrilling towers, as the ultimate symbol of architectural ambition and creativity, a special place he dreamed one day to call home since childhood, while growing up in the nearby Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Working as a project architect in the heart of Chicago, Chester would typically devote most of his lunch hours to drawing the street scenes and buildings’ facades of the city around him.
Ryan graduated with a masters degree in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM) in 2005. Upon graduation he worked in New York and London before moving to Chicago in 2011. He is currently working as a project architect at JGMA as well as teaching at his alma mater UWM as an adjunct professor.
Date: November 16th, 2023 (in conjunction with the Center for Renaissance Studies)
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library/Zoom Presentation Online
Time: 5:30 pm CT (Social Time)/6:00 pm CT (Presentation)
Title: Race, Power, and Cartography
Speakers: Ricardo Padron and Risa Puleo
Description: This program will explore the relationship between maps and race in two different cartographic projects from the early modern period: a set of richly-detailed world maps created by the French mapmaker Nicolas de Fer in the 1690s; and a map of a region around the town of Tultepec made by an anonymous Indigenous inhabitant of colonial Mexico to support a legal case against a Spanish rancher.
Ricardo Padrón will use the de Fer maps to explain how Western ideas about race developed in tandem with ideas about global geography, showing how the depiction of different peoples around the world laid the groundwork for theories of biological race in the eighteenth century. Risa Puleo then turns to the Indigenous map of Tultepec, showing how this map (and others like it) functioned as tools in the effort to resist racialized notions of property ownership that colonizers used to dispossess and displace Indigenous communities.
Speaker Biographies: Ricardo Padrón is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia known for his research on the early modern cartographic imagination, tracing the relationship between mapping space, telling stories, and forging identities. He is the author of two books, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (2004) and The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (2020). Both were published by the University of Chicago Press. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Risa Puleo is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University. Her dissertation follows the Iberian Churra—the breed of Spanish sheep featured in the Farmers vs Corvarribuas map that she wrote about for the “Seeing Race Before Race” exhibition—and objects made from its wool into Central Mexico in the 16th, the American Southwest in the 19th, and into New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the early 20th century.
Date: December 21st, 2023
Location: Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library
Time: 5:30 pm CT
Title: Chicago Map Society Holiday Party
Speakers: Member Show & Tell