2009-2010 Meetings
This talk will explore the rise of wall maps as a popular decorative object during the period encompassing the first consumer revolution in North America. Taking his cue from much overlooked 18th-century definitions that declared maps to be “pictures,” Prof.
One of the major purposes for studying old maps and views is to reconstruct past geographies in order to envisage a region as people in the past conceived it. Time travel is one of the pleasures of looking at a dated map.
Join us on a springtime expedition to a great local map collection at Northwestern University. Our guide, Chieko Maene, will introduce us to the collections (containing more than 200,000 maps) and will give us an overview of the GIS resources and services they provide.
Besides our wonderfully complete collection of printed editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, the Newberry owns three manuscript editions, two in Latin and one in Greek. The only Greek Ptolemy in North America came to Chicago as early as 1895, but until now it has never been intensively studied.