Steven Seegel – författare

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950--Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts'kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pal Teleki--Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps. Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel recreates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations--and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two World Wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the World Wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons why East Central Europe became the fault line of these worldchanging developments. At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined--and the key people who helped define it.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the geopolitical placement of Ukraine drew the attention of some of Europe’s most influential cartographers. Many of these maps, including ones of exceptional rarity, were collected by the Ukrainian scholar and journalist Bohdan Krawciw. Krawciw traced the physical and aesthetic depiction of Ukraine across its changing borders as a means of self-recognition and as a cultural and political history of the contested nation and its peoples. Of special interest are his maps of Ukraine from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the crossroads of four empires: Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet. As part of his personal archive, Krawciw’s maps were bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1975. This book serves as both a catalog of his collection and a description of how the maps he collected serve as an invaluable source for Ukraine’s history and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity. The book contains nearly 100 examples from the collection, many in full color, as well as indices listing maps by cartographer and by place name.