Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> Cartography

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in "Abysmal" an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people s lives.
Aspectacular reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato,...

The early modern map has come to mark the threshold of modernity, cutting through the layered customs of Medieval parochialism with its clean, expansive geometries. Re-thinking the role played by mathematics and cartography in the English seventeenth century, this book argues that the cultural currency of mathematics was as unstable in the period as that of England's controversial enclosures and plantations. Reviewing evidence from a wide range of literary and scientific; courtly and pragmatic texts, Edwards suggests that its unstable currency rendered mathematics necessarily rhetorical:...

In the two centuries before Columbus, mapmaking was transformed. The World Map, 1300-1492 investigates this important, transitional period of mapmaking. Beginning with a 1436 atlas of ten maps produced by Venetian Andrea Bianco, Evelyn Edson uses maps of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to examine how the discoveries of missionaries and merchants affected the content and configuration of world maps.

She finds that both the makers and users of maps struggled with changes brought about by technological innovation--the compass, quadrant, and astrolabe--rediscovery of...

For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a...

From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had...

In On the Edge, Roger McCoy tells the captivating--and often harrowing--story of the 400 year effort to map North America's Coasts. Much of the book is based on the narratives of mariners who sought a passage through the continent to Asia and produced maps as a byproduct of their journeys. These...

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had...

(Note: The limited deluxe edition of Mapping Virginia has sold out.)

As one of the chief gateways to the earliest exploration and settlement of the North American continent, Virginia was the subject of much imaginative thought and practical scrutiny. Not surprisingly, it possesses a fascinating cartographical heritage. Moving from the years preceding Jamestown to the dawn of the postbellum era, Mapping Virginia represents the most comprehensive available selection of printed maps from Virginia's first three hundred years. Beginning with the first, tentative...