San Antonio College Library

For more than thirty years, the History of Cartography Project has charted the course for scholarship on cartography, bringing together research from a variety of disciplines on the creation, dissemination, and use of maps. Volume 6, Cartography in the Twentieth Century, continues this tradition with a groundbreaking survey of the century just ended and a new full-color, encyclopedic format.--Amazon.com, viewed November 3, 2023.

In this concise introduction to the history of cartography, Norman J. W. Thrower charts the intimate links between maps and history from antiquity to the present day. A wealth of illustrations, including the oldest known map and contemporary examples made using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), illuminate the many ways in which various human cultures have interpreted spatial relationships. The third edition of Maps and Civilization incorporates...

As long as there have been maps, cartographers have grappled with the impossibility of portraying the earth in two dimensions. To solve this problem mapmakers have created hundreds of map projections - mathematical methods for drawing the round earth on a flat surface. Yet of the hundreds of existing projections, and the infinite number that are theoretically possible, none is perfectly accurate. Any projection inevitably distorts the geography it...

"Focusing on historical examples and the practices of modern cartography, J.B. Harley (1932-1991) offers an alternative to the dominant view that Western cartography since the Renaissance has been a progressive technological, scientific, and objective trajectory of development. This traditional view asserts that maps produce an accurate relational model of terrain and, as such, epitomize representational modernism, which is rooted in the project of...

"Representing the Republic provides an account of the mapping of America from its colonial origins to 1900. The most significant maps and mapmakers are discussed in a survey that begins with the first European mappings of New Netherlands in the early seventeenth century and concludes with the Rand McNally atlases of the 1890s." "Maps tell us a great deal about the transformation of America's national identity. Having undertaken extensive research...

"The Self-Made Map argues that during the Renaissance in France a 'new cartographic impulse' affected both the 'graphic and imaginary forms of literature.' In this wide-ranging and fascinating work, Tom Conley demonstrates that as new maps were plotted during this period, a new sense of self emerged, one defined in part by the relationship of the self to space. Conley traces the explosion of interest in mapmaking that occurred with the discovery of...

Restrictive cartography has boomed in recent decades as governments seek to regulate activities as diverse as hiking, building a residence or opening a store; but the practice is as ancient as mapping itself. This volume explores mapping as a means of control.

"David Rumsey's collection of historical maps is one of the largest and most complete of its kind. Focused for the most part on North and South America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the collection is comprised of more than 150,000 items: maps, atlases, and contextual supporting documents. Unlike similar collections, the delicacy and rarity of which necessitate careful storage and restricted-use policies, The Rumsey Collection is available...