Brill Research Perspectives in Map History – serie

Maps in newspapers generated many discussions among cartographers and geographers working from different approaches and theoretical backgrounds. This work examines these maps from a historiographical as well as a historical perspective. It considers three main questions, namely how maps in the press should be conceptualized, how cartographic images in newspapers have been studied, and how these images changed over time. In order to provide a perspective on the origins, development, and impact of war maps in the press, we will explore maps representing three geopolitical conflicts for Brazilian audiences: The War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), the World War II (1939–1945) and the War on Drugs in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (1994–2010). By exploring maps on these wars, we will identify specific cartographic practices used in this genre as well as the connections that this mode has with other types of map production and consumption.

When does a depiction of the moon become a lunar map? This publication addresses this question from theoretical and historical standpoints. It is argued that moon maps are of crucial importance to the history of cartography, for they challenge established notions of what a map is, how it functions, what its purposes are, and what kind of power it embodies and performs. The publication also shows how terrestrial cartography has shaped the history of lunar mapping since the seventeenth century, through visual and nomenclature conventions, the cultural currency of maps, mapmakers’ social standing, and data-gathering and projection practices. It further demonstrates that lunar cartography has also been organized by an internal principle that is born of the fundamental problem of how to create static map spaces capable of representing a referent that is constantly changing to our eyes, as is the visible face of the moon. It is suggested that moon maps may be classed in three broad categories, according to the kinds of solutions for this representational problem that have been devised over the last 400 years.

Mountains appear in the oldest known maps yet their representation has proven a notoriously difficult challenge for map makers. In this essay, Ernesto Capello surveys the broad history of relief representation in cartography with an emphasis on the allegorical, commercial and political uses of mapping mountains. After an initial overview and critique of the traditional historiography and development of techniques of relief representation, the essay features four clusters of mountain mapping emphases. These include visions of mountains as paradise, the mountain as site of colonial and postcolonial encounter, the development of elevation profiles and panoramas, and mountains as mass-marketed touristed itineraries.

More often than not, readers of travel narratives can expect to find at least one map—if not several—showing, as English privateer William Dampier wrote, “the Course of the Voyage,” that is, where the author-traveler went and, implicitly, a sense of what was seen and experienced. Dampier used a now-common cartographic strategy to tell the story from beginning to end as well as around significant places on the way by marking the journey with a ‘pricked’ line. Despite the lines’ popularity and present ubiquity, the complex intellectual and material process of considering travel as a continuum rather than as a series of stops along the way and of plotting a journey onto a map have attracted relatively little academic attention. Drawing on a thousand years of European travel writing and map-making, Jordana Dym suggests that after centuries of text-based itineraries and on-the-spot directions guiding travelers and constituting their reports, maps in the fifteenth century emerged as tools for Europeans to support and report the results of land and sea travel. Called in subsequent centuries 'route maps,' 'itinerary maps,' and 'travel maps,' often interchangeably, what Dym defines as journey maps added lines of travel to show where travelers had been. Sine their emergence, most have taken one of two forms: itinerary maps, which connected stages as points with a line, and route maps, which tracked unbroken lines between endpoints. In the seventeenth century, the conventions of journey mapping were codified and increasingly incorporated into travel writing and other genres that represented individual travel. With each succeeding generation, these linear journey maps have become increasingly common and complex, responding to changes in forms of transportation, such as air and motor car ‘flight’ and print technology, especially the advent of multi-color printing. This is their story.

With a multi-perspective approach and transdisciplinary methods (humanities and sciences), this book offers an in-depth and systematic study of hand-drawn and hand-coloured maps from East Asia. Map colouring provides an insight into past societies, landscapes and territories. Colour is an important key to a more precise understanding of the map’s content, purposes and uses; moreover, colours are also an important aspect of a map’s materiality. The material scientific analysis of colourants makes it possible to find out more about maps’ material nature and their production as well as the social, geographical and political context in which they were made. ‘Reading’ colours in this way gives a glimpse into the social lives of mapmakers as well as map users and reveals the complexity of the historical and social context in which maps were produced and how the maps were actually made.

Sketch maps, despite their intuitive, informal appearance and seemingly naïve use, are intellectual devices and efficient tools that shape the geographical imagination, regardless of the drawing skills of their makers. By delineating the silhouettes of nations, we express territorial knowledge and geopolitical stereotypes that, although shaped at school from an early age, organized the way we interact with the world. why do we still need to draw maps? What is behind our common and naturalized practice of sketching maps? This innovative book deciphers why and how the intuitive mechanisms behind sketch mapping activate multiple conscious and unconscious knowledges about place and space.

This is the first serious book wholly devoted to games based on maps. The authors are experts in their respective fields: board games, playing cards and dissected puzzles. They bring an informed historical approach to the development and diffusion of these games up to about the beginning of the twentieth century, including games from Western Europe and America in all their intriguing variety. This book is an essential reference source for those wishing to research this neglected area, while those new to the field will be pleasantly surprised at the interesting and unusual maps that these games exploit.

What lies behind an island? Is an island just a piece of land surrounded by water? Or is it from a cultural, symbolic, and even geographical perspective much more than that? Considering the symbolic nature of islands as a longue durée and through the analysis of maps, texts, and historical accounts, this book explores how the depiction of insularity encodes specific meanings and analytical levels which shed light on medieval and modern worldviews.

The apparently centuries-old field of “the history of cartography” was invented after 1950 through incomplete historiographies by leading map historians. This monograph uses an empirically grounded analysis of the ways in which early maps have been systematically studied since the early 1800s to offer an innovative account of the practices and institutions of comparative map history in support of Western imperialism and nationalism, and of how the field was reconfigured as the core of a newly idealized discipline of “the history of cartography.”