The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More

in Art, Books, Maps | January 7th, 2019

“I first took on The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven or twelve,” writes The New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane. “It was, and remains, not a book that you hap­pen to read, like any oth­er, but a book that hap­pens to you: a chunk bit­ten out of your life.” The pre­teen years may remain the most oppor­tune ones in which to pick up the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, but what­ev­er the peri­od in life at which they find their way in, most read­ers who make the jour­ney through Mid­dle-earth nev­er real­ly leave the place. And it hard­ly requires cov­er­ing much more ground to get from hun­ger­ing to know every­thing about the world of The Lord of the Rings — one rich with its own ter­rain, its own races, its own lan­guages — to hun­ger­ing to know how Tolkien cre­at­ed it.

Now the count­less Lord of the Rings enthu­si­asts in Amer­i­ca have their chance to behold the mate­ri­als first-hand. The exhi­bi­tion Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth, which runs from Jan­u­ary 25th to May 12th of this year at New York’s Mor­gan Library and Muse­um, will assem­ble “the most exten­sive pub­lic dis­play of orig­i­nal Tolkien mate­r­i­al for sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions,” draw­ing from “the col­lec­tions of the Tolkien Archive at the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Mar­quette Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries (Mil­wau­kee), the Mor­gan, and pri­vate lenders.”

All told, it will include “fam­i­ly pho­tographs and mem­o­ra­bil­ia, Tolkien’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, maps, draft man­u­scripts, and designs relat­ed to The Hob­bit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Sil­mar­il­lion.”

Men­tal Floss’ Emi­ly Pet­sko also high­lights the pres­ence of “orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions of Smaug the drag­on (from The Hob­bit), Sauron’s Dark Tow­er of Barad-dûr (described in The Lord of the Rings and The Sil­mar­il­lion), and oth­er rec­og­niz­able char­ac­ters,” as well as that of Tolkien’s draft man­u­scripts that “pro­vide a win­dow into his cre­ative process, as well as the vivid, expan­sive worlds he cre­at­ed.” You can see more of the things Tolkien­ian that will soon come avail­able for pub­lic view­ing at the Mor­gan in the exhi­bi­tion’s trail­er at the top of the post.

“The Lord of the Rings has remained com­i­cal­ly divi­sive,” Lane writes. “It is either adored, with vary­ing degrees of guilt, or robust­ly despised, often by those who have yet to open it.” But after see­ing an exhi­bi­tion like Tolkien: Mak­er of Mid­dle-Earth, even Tolkien’s harsh­est crit­ics may well find them­selves per­suad­ed to acknowl­edge the scale and depth of the books’ achieve­ment, as well as the ded­i­ca­tion and even brav­ery of its cre­ator. As Lane puts it, “The Lord of the Rings may be the final stab at epic, and there is invari­ably some­thing risky, if not down­right ris­i­ble, in a last gasp.” But “Tolkien believed that he could repro­duce the epic form under mod­ern con­di­tions,” the fruit of that belief con­tin­ues to enrap­ture read­ers of all ages more than 60 years lat­er.

If you can’t wait for the exhi­bi­tion, you might want to have a look at Wayne G. Ham­mond and Christi­na Scul­l’s book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illus­tra­tor. It’s already pub­lished.

via AM New York and Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Archive of 800+ Imaginative Propaganda Maps Designed to Shape Opinions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Persuasive Maps Collection

in Archives, Maps, Politics | November 17th, 2018

We tend to take a very spe­cial inter­est in archives and maps on this site—and espe­cial­ly in archives of maps. Yet it is rare, if not unheard of, to dis­cov­er a map archive in which every sin­gle entry repays atten­tion. The PJ Mode Per­sua­sive Car­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Library is such an archive. Each map in the col­lec­tion, from the most sim­pli­fied to the most elab­o­rate, tells not only one sto­ry, but sev­er­al, over­lap­ping ones about its cre­ators, their intend­ed audi­ence, their antag­o­nists, the con­scious and uncon­scious process­es at work in their polit­i­cal psy­ches, the geo-polit­i­cal view from where they stood.

Maps drawn as pro­pa­gan­da must be broad and bold, cast­ing aside pre­ci­sion for the press­ing mat­ter at hand. Even when fine­ly detailed or laden with sta­tis­tics, such maps press their mean­ing upon us with unsub­tle force.

One espe­cial­ly res­o­nant exam­ple of per­sua­sive car­tog­ra­phy, for exam­ple, at the top shows us an ear­ly ver­sion of a wide­ly-used motif—the “Car­to­graph­ic Land Octo­pus,” or CLO, as Frank Jacobs dubs it at Big Think. The CLO has nev­er gone out of style since its like­ly ori­gin in J.J. van Brederode’s “Humor­ous War Map” of 1870, which depicts Rus­sia as a mon­strous mol­lusk. Lat­er, Car­i­ca­tur­ist Fred W. Rose print­ed a reprise, the “Serio-Com­ic War Map for the Year 1877.”

A full twen­ty-sev­en years lat­er, a Japan­ese stu­dent used the very same design for his satir­i­cal map of Rus­sia-as-Octo­pus, the occa­sion this time the Rus­so-Japan­ese War. Titled “A Humor­ous Diplo­mat­ic Atlas of Europe and Asia,” the Japan­ese map cites Rose, or “a cer­tain promi­nent Eng­lish­man,” as its inspi­ra­tion. Its text reads, in part:

The black octo­pus is so avari­cious, that he stretch­es out his eight arms in all direc­tions, and seizes up every thing that comes with­in his reach. But as it some­times hap­pens he gets wound­ed seri­ous­ly even by a small fish, owing to his too much cov­etous­ness.

No doubt Russ­ian per­sua­sive car­tog­ra­phers had a dif­fer­ent view of who was or wasn’t an octo­pus. Many years after his octo­pus map, Fred Rose dropped sea crea­tures for fish­ing in anoth­er of his serio-com­ic maps, “Angling in Trou­bled Waters,” above, this one from 1899, and show­ing Rus­sia as a mas­sive incar­na­tion of the tsar, his boots posed to walk all over Europe. After the rev­o­lu­tion, the Russ­ian octo­pus returned, bear­ing dif­fer­ent names but no less men­ac­ing a beast.

Many maps in the col­lec­tion show con­tra­dic­to­ry views of Rus­sia, or Great Britain, or what­ev­er world pow­er at the time threat­ened to over­run every­one else. It’s inter­est­ing to see the con­ti­nu­ity of such depic­tions over decades, and cen­turies (Jacobs shows exam­ples of Russ­ian octopi from 1938 and 2008). The map above from 1938 reflects “Nazi expan­sion­ist goals,” notes Cornell’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, by show­ing the sup­posed “Ger­man” pop­u­la­tions scat­tered all over Europe and the need, as Hitler argued in the quot­ed speech, to pro­tect and lib­er­ate “nation­al com­rades” by means of annex­a­tion, bomb­ing, and inva­sion.

Where the blood red of the Ger­man map rep­re­sents the “blood” of the volk, in the map above, from 1917, it stands in for the blood of every­one else if the “lead­ers of Ger­man thought” get what they want. Where the Reich map took aim at Europe, the quot­ed “for­mer gen­er­als,” notes Cor­nell, “and well-known Panger­man­ists” in the WWI-era map above want­ed to col­o­nize most of the world, a par­tic­u­lar affront to the British, who were well on their way to doing so, and to a less­er degree, the French, who want­ed to. These two world pow­ers had been at it far longer, how­ev­er, and not with­out fierce oppo­si­tion at home as well as in the colonies.

The famous eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry British car­i­ca­tur­ist James Gillray’s most famous print, from 1805, shows William Pitt and Napoleon seat­ed at table, carv­ing up the world between them to con­sume it.

A steam­ing ‘plum-pud­ding’ globe, both intent on carv­ing them­selves a sub­stan­tial por­tion…. Pitt appears calm, metic­u­lous and con­fi­dent, spear­ing the pud­ding with a tri­dent indica­tive of British naval suprema­cy. He lays claim to the oceans and the West Indies. In con­trast Napoleon Bona­parte reach­es from this chair with cov­etous, twitch­ing eyes fixed on the prize of Europe and cuts away France, Hol­land, Spain, Switzer­land, Italy and the Mediter­ranean.

Gillray’s car­toon hard­ly counts as a “map” but it deserves inclu­sion in this fine col­lec­tion. Oth­er notable maps fea­tured include the 1904 “Dis­tri­b­u­tion of Crime & Drunk­en­ness in Eng­land and Wales,”a study in the per­sua­sive use of cor­re­la­tion; the 1856 “Reynold’s Polit­i­cal Map of the Unit­ed States,” illus­trat­ing the “stakes involved in the poten­tial spread of slav­ery to the West­ern States” in sup­port of the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date John Fre­mont; and the French Com­mu­nist Party’s 1951 “Who is the Aggres­sor?” which shows Amer­i­can mil­i­tary bases around the world, their guns—or big black arrows—pointed at Chi­na and the U.S.S.R.

There are hun­dreds more per­sua­sive maps, illus­trat­ing views the­o­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal, social, mechan­i­cal, and oth­er­wise, dat­ing from the 15th cen­tu­ry to the 2000s. You can browse the whole col­lec­tion or by date, cre­ator, sub­ject, repos­i­to­ry, and for­mat. All of the maps are anno­tat­ed with cat­a­log infor­ma­tion and collector’s notes explain­ing their con­text. And all of them, from the friv­o­lous to the world-his­tor­i­cal, tell us far more than they intend­ed with their pecu­liar ways of spa­tial­iz­ing prej­u­dices, fears, desires, beliefs, obses­sions, and overt bias­es.

“Every map has a Who, What, Where and When about it,” as col­lec­tor PJ Mode writes on the Cor­nell site. “But these maps had anoth­er ele­ment: Why? Since they were pri­mar­i­ly ‘about’ some­thing oth­er than geog­ra­phy, under­stand­ing the map required find­ing the rea­son­ing behind it.” The most recent entry in the archive, Christo­pher Neiman’s 2011 “World Map of Use­less Stereo­types” from The New York Times Mag­a­zine turns the per­sua­sive map in on itself, using its satir­i­cal devices to poke fun at propaganda’s reduc­tive effects.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Map of the U.S. Created Out of 1,000 Song Titles That Reference Cities, States, Landmarks & More

in Maps, Music | November 13th, 2018

Accord­ing to Leonard Cohen, song­writ­ing is a lone­ly busi­ness, but there’s noth­ing for it, he sings in “Tow­er of Song,” when you’re “born with the gift of a gold­en voice” and when “twen­ty-sev­en angels from the Great Beyond” tie you to a table and make you write. Just where is Cohen’s tow­er? Maybe Mon­tre­al, his home­town, or his adopt­ed city of L.A.? He doesn’t tell us, though we do know Hank Williams lives 100 floors above, so there’s a good chance that it’s not a place on earth.

Cohen the poet had a gift for mak­ing meta­phys­i­cal trips seem per­fect­ly nat­ur­al, but most song­writ­ers, lone­ly or oth­er­wise, rely on more real­ist con­ven­tions of nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling, includ­ing spe­cif­ic set­tings, whether men­tioned in pass­ing or form­ing a cen­tral theme.

Songs like “Lit­tle Old Lady from Pasade­na,” “Rock­away Beach,” “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” or “Straight Out­ta Comp­ton” helped put their respec­tive locales on the map.

Design house Dorothy has tak­en that phrase lit­er­al­ly, cre­at­ing a map of the U.S. “made up entire­ly from the titles of over 1,000 songs” that “ref­er­ence states, cities, rivers, moun­tains and land­marks.” In the playlist below, you can lis­ten to the country’s geog­ra­phy, as sung by Lynyrd Skynyrd, David Bowie, R.E.M., Pink Floyd, George Strait, Kings of Leon, Jay Z,  John­ny Cash, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, and hun­dreds more artists who have lit­tle in com­mon oth­er than their use of a U.S. city, state, land­mark, nat­ur­al for­ma­tion, etc. as an anchor for their lyrics.

Like Homer’s Ili­ad, which maps the ancient Greek world with its copi­ous ref­er­ences to ports, cities, moun­tains, and so on, the pop canon could be used by some future civ­i­liza­tion to recon­struct the geog­ra­phy of the U.S. And if so, it might look quite a lot like this. But not only does the map sit­u­ate well-known songs about well-known places in their prop­er coor­di­nates, it also locates some­what obscure loca­tions name-checked  in songs like The Band’s “The Weight,” whose men­tion of Nazareth refers not to the Bib­li­cal town, but rather to Nazareth, Penn­syl­va­nia, home of Mar­tin Gui­tars. (The city gets anoth­er boost, though not on this map, in Mark Knopfler’s “Speed­way at Nazareth,” which refers to anoth­er local land­mark.)

“Some of our favorite song choic­es are the ones which require you to think a lit­tle hard­er about con­nec­tions,” Dorothy admits, “such as ‘Space Odd­i­ty’ (David Bowie) which sign­posts Cape Canaver­al, ‘After the Gold Rush’ (Neil Young) which ref­er­ences Sutter’s Mill, and ‘Home­com­ing’ (Kanye West) which is placed near the rapper’s home town of Chica­go.”

Perus­ing the map (zoom into a high-res ver­sion here) and playlist will doubt­less alert you to oth­er choic­es with oblique or implied ref­er­ences. In one instance, on the map of Flori­da, we see Green Day’s “Amer­i­can Idiot,” whose lyrics take on the whole nation, “under the new mania.” Dorothy finds a sin­gle address for the song’s vit­ri­ol, one sus­pi­cious­ly close to the so-called “Win­ter White House.” Some­how I doubt the band would object to this cre­ative geo­graph­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion.

You can pur­chase your own copy of the map here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

A Handy, Detailed Map Shows the Home­towns of Char­ac­ters in the Ili­ad

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More

in Books, Literature, Maps | November 7th, 2018

Plot, set­ting, char­ac­ter… we learn to think of these as dis­crete ele­ments in lit­er­ary writ­ing, com­pa­ra­ble to the strat­e­gy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the set­ting is a char­ac­ter? There are many lit­er­ary works named and well-known for the unfor­get­table places they intro­duce: Walden, Wuther­ing Heights, Howards End…. There are invent­ed domains that seem more real to read­ers than real­i­ty: Faulkner’s Yok­na­p­a­tow­pha, Thomas Hardy’s Wes­sex… There are works that describe impos­si­ble places so vivid­ly we believe in their exis­tence against all rea­son: Ita­lo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities, Chi­na Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Ter­tius”….

What sus­tains our belief in the integri­ty of fic­tion­al places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the peo­ple who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illus­tra­tors draw elab­o­rate maps of lit­er­ary set­tings, mak­ing their fea­tures real to us and embed­ding them in our minds.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, edit­ed by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of lit­er­ary maps—whether in non-fic­tion, real­ism, or fantasy—the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first lit­er­ary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Bran­well Brontë’s Ver­dopo­lis (above), and so many more.

The book is filled with essays about lit­er­ary map­ping by writ­ers and map-mak­ers, and it touch­es on the way authors them­selves view imag­i­na­tive map­ping. “For some writ­ers mak­ing a map is absolute­ly cen­tral to the craft of shap­ing and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For oth­ers, mak­ing maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writ­ing, which Philip Pull­man calls “a mat­ter of sullen toil.” Draw­ing, on the oth­er hand, he says, “is pure joy. Draw­ing a map to go with a sto­ry is mess­ing around, with the added fun of col­or­ing it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dream­ing of topog­ra­phy,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechan­ics of plot and char­ac­ter.”

It may sur­prise you to hear that writ­ers hate to write, but writ­ers are peo­ple, after all, and most peo­ple find writ­ing tedious and dif­fi­cult in some part. What all of the writ­ers fea­tured in this col­lec­tion share is that they love indulging their imag­i­na­tions, mak­ing real their lucid dreams, whether through the diver­sion of draw­ing maps or the grind of gram­mar and syn­tax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s draw­ing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illus­tra­tion of the desert island in The Swiss Fam­i­ly Robin­son, accom­pa­nied their books into pub­li­ca­tion. Many more remained secret­ed in authors’ note­books.

There are many such “pri­vate trea­sures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscu­ra: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mor­dor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketch­es; unpub­lished maps from the note­books of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a lit­er­ary map dif­fer­ent­ly when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of mis­di­rec­tion as well as whim­si­cal visu­al aids? Should we treat them as para­tex­tu­al and unnec­es­sary, or are they cen­tral, when an author choos­es to include them, to our under­stand­ing of a sto­ry? Such ques­tions, and many, many more, are tak­en up in The Writer’s Map, a long over­due sur­vey of this long­stand­ing lit­er­ary tra­di­tion.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

12 Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Road Trips in One Handy Inter­ac­tive Map

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Radical Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Center of Planet Earth (1942)

in Maps | October 9th, 2018

We all learn the names, loca­tions, and even char­ac­ter­is­tics of the oceans in school. But unless we go into oceanog­ra­phy or some oth­er body-of-water-cen­tric pro­fes­sion, few of us keep them at our com­mand. Maybe the loss of that knowl­edge has to do with our land-cen­tric­i­ty as a species: not only do we live on the stuff, we also put it before water intel­lec­tu­al­ly. You can see how by tak­ing a glance at the design of most any world map, whose fram­ing, details, and col­or scheme all work togeth­er to high­light the land, not the water. Only the map above, the “Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion,” dares to reverse that scheme, putting Earth­’s water at the cen­ter and turn­ing it from neg­a­tive space into pos­i­tive.

Named for its cre­ator, the South African-born oceanog­ra­ph­er, geo­physi­cist, inven­tor, urban design­er (hav­ing come up with Min­neapo­lis Sky­way Sys­tem), and com­ic artist Athel­stan Spilhaus, the Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion “revers­es the land-based bias of tra­di­tion­al car­to­graph­ic pro­jec­tions,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs, plac­ing “the poles of the map in South Amer­i­ca and Chi­na, rip­ping up con­ti­nents to show the high seas as one inter­rupt­ed whole.” The result­ing “earth-sea” is “per­fo­rat­ed by Antarc­ti­ca and Aus­tralia, and fringed by the oth­er land mass­es.” If you look close­ly at the top and low­er right of the map, you’ll find tri­an­gu­lar sym­bols indi­cat­ing the Bering Strait, per­haps the best land­mark to ori­ent your per­cep­tion of this rad­i­cal­ly new view of plan­et Earth.

But the view pro­vid­ed by the Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion (ren­dered here by graph­ic design­er Clara Deal­ber­to for Libéra­tion) isn’t as new as it may look. Spilhaus designed it back in 1942, as a side project while work­ing on the inven­tion for which he is per­haps most remem­bered: the bathyther­mo­graph, a device for mea­sur­ing ocean depths and tem­per­a­tures from mov­ing ves­sels like boats and sub­marines. But Jacobs cred­its it with a new rel­e­vance today: “Our oceans pro­duce between 50% and 85% of the world’s oxy­gen and are a major source of food for human­i­ty. But they are in mor­tal dan­ger, from over­fish­ing, acid­i­fi­ca­tion, plas­tic pol­lu­tion and cli­mate change. Mar­itime ‘dead zones’ – with zero oxy­gen and zero marine life – have quadru­pled since the 1950s.”

In oth­er words, our world and the oceans that cov­er more than 70 per­cent of its sur­face already look quite a bit dif­fer­ent than they did when Spilhaus designed this re-pri­or­i­tized way of visu­al­iz­ing them. Spilhaus lived until 1998, long enough to see the emer­gence of cur­rent ideas about cli­mate change, but one does won­der whether we in the 21st cen­tu­ry have devel­oped the kind of ocean-con­scious­ness for which he must have hoped. Per­haps our times call for even more dras­tic map­ping action, not just show­ing the cen­tral­i­ty of the oceans but, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, show­ing what might hap­pen if they change much more.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Coun­tries and Coast­lines: A Dra­mat­ic View of Earth from Out­er Space

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The History of Cartography, “the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,” Is Free Online

in History, Maps | August 22nd, 2018

“Car­tog­ra­phy was not born full-fledged as a sci­ence or even an art,” wrote map his­to­ri­an Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slow­ly and painful­ly from obscure ori­gins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to repro­duce actu­al geog­ra­phy but served as abstract visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions of polit­i­cal or the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. Writ­ten geog­ra­phy has an ancient pedi­gree, usu­al­ly traced back to the Greeks and Phoeni­cians and the Roman his­to­ri­an Stra­bo. But the mak­ing of visu­al approx­i­ma­tions of the world seemed of lit­tle inter­est until lat­er in world his­to­ry. As “medi­a­tors between an inner men­tal world and an out­er phys­i­cal world”—in the words of his­to­ri­an J.B. Harley—the maps of the ancients tend­ed to favor the for­mer. This is, at least, a very gen­er­al out­line of the ear­ly his­to­ry of maps.

Harley’s def­i­n­i­tion occurs in the first chap­ter of Vol­ume One of The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, a mas­sive six-vol­ume, mul­ti-author work trac­ing map mak­ing from pre­his­toric times up to the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; “the most ambi­tious overview of map mak­ing ever under­tak­en,” Edward Roth­stein writes at The New York Times.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go project, begun in the mid-80s, com­bines “essays based on orig­i­nal research by author­i­ta­tive schol­ars with exten­sive illus­tra­tions of rare and unusu­al maps.” Unlike his­to­ries like Brown’s, how­ev­er, this one aims to move beyond “a deeply entrenched Euro­cen­tric­i­ty.” The project includes non-West­ern and pre-medieval maps, pre­sent­ing itself as “the first seri­ous glob­al attempt” to describe the car­tog­ra­phy of African, Amer­i­can, Arc­tic, Asian, Aus­tralian, and Pacif­ic soci­eties as well as Euro­pean. In so doing, it illu­mi­nates many of those “obscure ori­gins.”

You might expect such an ambi­tious offer­ing to come with an equal­ly ambi­tious pric­etag, and you’d be right. But rather than pay over $200 dol­lars for each indi­vid­ual book in the series, you can read and down­load Vol­umes One through Three and Vol­ume Six as free PDFs at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press’s site. In these extra­or­di­nary schol­ar­ly works, you’ll find maps repro­duced nowhere else—like the Star Fres­co from Jor­dan just above—with deeply learned com­men­tary explain­ing how they cor­re­spond to very dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing the world.

At the links below, see images of maps from all over the globe and through­out record­ed human his­to­ry, and begin to see the his­to­ry of car­tog­ra­phy in very dif­fer­ent ways your­self.

Vol­ume 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions

Vol­ume 2: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–16)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 17–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 3

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–8)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 9 –24)

Vol­ume 3: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 3: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 41–56)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 57–80)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

A Map Show­ing How the Ancient Romans Envi­sioned the World in 40 AD

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Native Lands: An Interactive Map Reveals the Indigenous Lands on Which Modern Nations Were Built

in History, Maps | August 9th, 2018

“Now when I was a lit­tle chap I had a pas­sion for maps. I would look for hours at South Amer­i­ca, or Africa, or Aus­tralia, and lose myself in the all the glo­ries of explo­ration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked par­tic­u­lar­ly invit­ing on a map (but they all look that) I would put my fin­ger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’”

                     —Joseph Con­rad, Heart of Dark­ness

In his post-WWII his­tor­i­cal sur­vey, The Sto­ry of Maps, Lloyd A. Brown observes that “the very mate­r­i­al used in the mak­ing of maps, charts and globes con­tributed to their destruc­tion.” Paper burns, rots, suc­cumbs to water-dam­age and insects. Maps and globes made from sol­id sil­ver, brass, cop­per, and oth­er met­als made too-tempt­ing tar­gets for loot­ers and thieves. In this way, maps serve dou­bly as sym­bol­ic indices of what they represent—lands that, in the very act of map­ping them, were often despoiled, over­run, and stolen from their inhab­i­tants.

More­over, in map­ping his­to­ry, it often hap­pened that “if a map were old and obso­lete and parch­ment was scarce, the old ink and rubri­ca­tion could be scraped off and the skin used over again. This prac­tice, account­ing for the loss of many codices as well as valu­able maps and charts, at one time became so per­ni­cious” that the Catholic Church issued decrees to for­bid it. What bet­ter alle­go­ry for con­quest, the wip­ing away of civ­i­liza­tions in order to write new names and bor­ders over them?

The old impe­r­i­al tropes of “blank spaces” on the map and “dark places of the earth” (like “dark­est Africa”), used with such effec­tive­ness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness, hide the plain truth, in the words of Conrad’s Mar­low:

The con­quest of the earth, which most­ly means the tak­ing it away from those who have a dif­fer­ent com­plex­ion or slight­ly flat­ter noses than our­selves, is not a pret­ty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sen­ti­men­tal pre­tence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sac­ri­fice to.…

Blank spaces rep­re­sent those areas that had not yet been forcibly brought into the Euro­pean econ­o­my of prop­er­ty, the sine qua non of Enlight­en­ment human­i­ty. “Once dis­cov­ered by Euro­peans,” writes his­to­ri­an Michel-Rolph Trouil­lot—once clas­si­fied, mapped, and made sub­ject, “the Oth­er final­ly enters the human world.” For sev­er­al decades now, post­colo­nial projects have engaged in the pro­gres­sive dis­en­chant­ment of “the idea,” in the recog­ni­tion of messy rela­tion­ships between nam­ing, map­ping, and pow­er, and the recov­ery, to the extent pos­si­ble, of the names, bor­ders, and iden­ti­ties beneath palimpsest his­to­ries.

Such projects pro­lif­er­ate out­side acad­e­mia as tech­nol­o­gy ampli­fies pre­vi­ous­ly unheard dis­sent­ing voic­es and per­spec­tives and as, to use an old post­colo­nial phrase, “the empire writes back”—or, in this case, “maps back.” Such is the intent of the online project Native Land, an inter­ac­tive web­site that “does the oppo­site” of cen­turies of colo­nial map­ping, writes Atlas Obscu­ra, “by strip­ping out coun­try and state bor­ders in order to high­light the com­plex patch­work of his­toric and present-day Indige­nous ter­ri­to­ries, treaties, and lan­guages that stretch across the Unit­ed States, Cana­da,” the Cana­di­an Arc­tic, Green­land, and Aus­tralia.

Also a mobile app for Apple and Android, the map allows vis­i­tors to enter street address­es or ZIP codes in the search bar, “to dis­cov­er whose tra­di­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry their home was built on.”

White House offi­cials will dis­cov­er that 1600 Penn­syl­va­nia Avenue is found on the over­lap­ping tra­di­tion­al ter­ri­to­ries of the Pamunkey and Pis­cat­away tribes. Tourists will learn that the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty was erect­ed on Lenape land, and aspir­ing lawyers that Har­vard was erect­ed in a place first inhab­it­ed by the Wamponoag and Mass­a­chu­sett peo­ples.

The map was cre­at­ed by Cana­di­an activist and pro­gram­mer Vic­tor Tem­pra­no, founder of the com­pa­ny Map­ster, which funds the project. Tem­pra­no pref­aces the Native Land “About” page with a dis­claimer: “This is not an aca­d­e­m­ic or pro­fes­sion­al sur­vey,” he writes, and is “con­stant­ly being refined from user input.” He defines his pur­pose as “help­ing peo­ple get inter­est­ed and engaged” by ask­ing ques­tions like “who has the right to define where a par­tic­u­lar ter­ri­to­ry ends, and anoth­er begins?”

As neo-colo­nial projects like oil pipelines once again threat­en the sur­vival of Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties, and indige­nous peo­ple find them­selves and their chil­dren caged in pris­ons for cross­ing mil­i­ta­rized nation­al bor­ders, such ques­tions could not be more rel­e­vant. Tem­pra­no does not make any claims to defin­i­tive his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy and points to oth­er, sim­i­lar projects that sup­ple­ment the “blank spaces” in his own online map, such as huge areas of South Amer­i­ca being re-mapped on the ground by Ama­zon­ian tribes enter­ing field data into smart phones, and Aaron Capella’s Trib­al Nations Maps, which offers attrac­tive print­ed prod­ucts, per­fect for use in class­rooms.

Tem­pra­no quotes Capel­la in order to illu­mi­nate his work: “This map is in hon­or of all the Indige­nous Nations [of colo­nial states]. It seeks to encour­age people—Native and non-Native—to remem­ber that these were once a vast land of autonomous Native peo­ples, who called the land by many dif­fer­ent names accord­ing to their lan­guages and geog­ra­phy. The hope is that it instills pride in the descen­dants of these Peo­ple, brings an aware­ness of Indige­nous his­to­ry and remem­bers the Nations that fought and con­tin­ue to fight valiant­ly to pre­serve their way of life.”

Vis­it Native Land here and enter an address in North or South Amer­i­ca or Aus­tralia to learn about pre­vi­ous or con­cur­rent Native inhab­i­tants, their lan­guages, and the his­tor­i­cal treaties signed and bro­ken over the cen­turies. Click­ing on the ter­ri­to­ry of each Indige­nous nation brings up links to oth­er infor­ma­tive sites and allows users to sub­mit cor­rec­tions to help guide this inclu­sive project toward greater accu­ra­cy.

The site also fea­tures a Teacher’s Guide, Blog by Tem­pra­no, and a page on the impor­tance of Ter­ri­to­ry Acknowl­edge­ment, a way for us to “insert an aware­ness of indige­nous pres­ence and land rights in every­day life,” and one of many “trans­for­ma­tive acts,” as Chelsea Vow­el, a Métis woman from the Plains Cree writes, “that to some extent undo Indige­nous era­sure.”

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

200+ Films by Indige­nous Direc­tors Now Free to View Online: A New Archive Launched by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

in History, Maps | July 5th, 2018

At its peak around the year 117 AD, the mighty Roman Empire owned five mil­lion square kilo­me­ters of land. It ruled more than 55 mil­lion peo­ple, between a sixth and a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion of the entire world. The empire, as clas­si­cist and his­to­ri­an Christo­pher Kel­ly describes it, “stretched from Hadri­an’s Wall in driz­zle-soaked north­ern Eng­land to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syr­ia; from the great Rhine-Danube riv­er sys­tem, which snaked across the fer­tile, flat lands of Europe from the Low Coun­tries to the Black Sea, to the rich plains of the North African coast and the lux­u­ri­ant gash of the Nile Val­ley in Egypt.” All that pow­er, of course, orig­i­nal­ly emanat­ed from Italy.

The builders of the Roman Empire could­n’t have pulled it off with­out seri­ous infra­struc­tur­al acu­men, includ­ing the skill to make con­crete that lasts longer than even the mod­ern vari­ety as well as the force­ful­ness and sheer man­pow­er to lay more than 400,000 kilo­me­ters of road.

Not long ago, map­mak­er Sasha Tru­bet­skoy took it upon him­self to ren­der Rome’s impe­r­i­al road sys­tem in the style of a mod­ern sub­way map; pop­u­lar demand put him to work on an aes­thet­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar map of Britain’s Roman roads not long after. Now he has turned his skills back toward the land where the Roman Empire all start­ed: above, you can see his “sub­way map” of the Roman roads of Italy.

“It was for­tu­nate enough that Italy’s Roman roads are quite well-stud­ied and doc­u­ment­ed, espe­cial­ly when it comes to their actu­al ancient names,” Tru­bet­skoy writes of this lat­est project. “This meant that I had to do less artis­tic inter­pre­ta­tion in order to make this look like a sen­si­ble, mod­ern chart. That said, there are still some cas­es where I had to cre­ative­ly recon­struct cer­tain roads, and I make it clear in the leg­end which roads those were.” As for the col­or-cod­ed sidelin­ing of Sici­ly and Sar­dinia, “this is a map of Italia (Italy) as the Romans saw it, which did not include those islands. On the oth­er hand, it did include parts of what are today Slove­nia and Croa­t­ia.”

You can buy a high-res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of Tru­bet­skoy’s Viae Ital­i­ae et Suae Vicini­tatis, or Roman Roads of Italy and Its Sur­round­ings, for $9.00 USD at his site. Print­ed at poster qual­i­ty, it could make a suit­able gift indeed for any of the car­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, his­tor­i­cal­ly mind­ed tran­sit fans, Roman Empire his­to­ry buffs, or Ital­ian patri­ots in your life. And in a way, it shows his­to­ry com­ing full cir­cle, since much of our sense of how sub­way maps should look comes from a rev­o­lu­tion­ary 1972 map of the New York sub­way sys­tem. We’ve fea­tured it before here on Open Cul­ture, along­side an inter­view with its design­er, a cer­tain Mas­si­mo Vignel­li. And where do you sup­pose he hailed from?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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