Founded in 1976, the Chicago Map Society is the oldest map society in North America. Meetings are held during the academic year at the Newberry. They begin with a social half-hour, followed by a 45-minute presentation and a brief question-and-answer session. The society occasionally arranges excursions to local map libraries or mapping institutions and often dedicates one meeting a year as an opportunity for members to share their own maps with the group.
Meetings are held monthly during the academic year (September – May/June) at 5:30 pm at the Newberry. Meetings are open to the public. We do, however, ask for a $5 donation from non–Map-Society members to help support program costs, which are covered by members’ annual dues.
There are no special qualifications for membership; the only requirement is an interest in maps. Members of the Chicago Map Society are automatically subscribed to Mapline, the newsletter of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry. If you would like to join the society, please send your name, mailing address, email address, and $25 for academic-year dues to:
Treasurer
Chicago Map Society
60 West Walton Street
Chicago, IL 60610
To see a list of past meetings, please select a year below:
Meeting Schedule
In 1673 Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet set out on a monumental voyage of exploration of the Mississippi River and its upper tributaries linking Lake Michigan. Two very different maps have come down to us. Marquette’s map of 1673 was the subject of our Map Society talk in March of this year.
Jim Akerman examines how maps made for travelers documented and mediated the changing context of travel in the United States from 1789 to 1859.
What’s a quasquicentennial? These and other questions about the Newberry Library, its history, and its map collection will be answered at this month’s meeting. Current and past Newberry staff will lead a guided tour of some of the intriguing, beautiful, and historically significant books, maps, manuscripts, art, and artifacts that the library has collected over its 125 years.
Do you have a particular map or map-related item you wish to share? Curious about what others are collecting? Here’s your opportunity. On this special night we invite Chicago Map Society members to bring their own maps and say a few words about them, be it a one of a kind item bargained for at a flea market or the long sought after piece that ties your collection together.
During the formation of the Argentinean state in the second half of the nineteenth century its ruling elites sought to both organize state administration and to promote a new national identity. To achieve these goals they promoted education, the professionalization of the national army, the creation of common currency, and, of course, the definition of the national territory.
Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas emerged in the first decade of the unified German state; designed for the upper-middle class households of one of the world’s most prosperous industrial economies, it would become the best-selling world atlas published in the German language.
Chet Van Duzer will present material from the new book Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps (Library of Congress / Levenger Press), which he co-authored with John Hessler.