Posts from — January 2007

Robert Hamm began collecting historic maps nearly 20 years when he found an antique map in a small shop in Greenwich Village that showed Oregon bordering Nebraska. The Oregon Coast Learning Institute will sponsor an Oregon Chautauqua program entitled Mapping the West: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cartography in which Hamm will trace the development maps of the U.S. West, illustrating how the political, social, and cultural contexts of the times influenced the mapmakers’ art and science.

A mention of the lecture in the Newport News-Times notes:

As the U.S. expanded west of the Mississippi River, cartographers were busy making sense of the world by drawing maps showing rivers, mountains, and Native settlements. While these maps helped educate people about the unknown West, many of their features were inaccurate or completely fictitious. Names from New Albion to Quivera to Rupertsland all identify the area called Oregon, and geographic misinformation abounded. For example, the much searched-for River to the West never existed, despite its appearance on maps for decades, and some maps detail perilous mountain ranges that were purely inventions.

The lecture is free and will take place at 1 p.m. Tuesday, February 6, 2007 at Salishan in Gleneden Beach, and is funded by the Oregon Council for the Humanities.

[tags]Antique Maps, Antique Map Lectures, cartographic history, Mapping the U.S. West[/tags]

Over 1,100 maps of Israel from the Jewish National and University Library’s collection dating as far back as 1462 have been put online in English and in Hebrew. The collection is entitled, “Holy Land Maps” and consists of maps from the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection.

Many maps of the Holy Land are oriented to the east (orient=from the Latin word for east), reflecting the view point of European mapmakers looking in the direction of the Holy Land. However, there are a few maps oriented to the south, and to the west and naturally to the north. Many Biblical elements from the Old and New Testament can be traced in the maps, such as the route of the Exodus, the Tabernacle, the division of the Land among the Tribes, Moses and Aaron, the travels of Jesus and the Apostles, and others. Toward the end of the 18th century a new genre of maps emerged, characterized by the diminished use of pictorial elements. These were replaced by symbols such as letters and numbers, for example to mark the Tribes. The legends appear in the margins.

[tags]Antique Maps, Maps of Isreal, Online Map Collections[/tags]

The Hartford Courant reports today that a rare 1524 woodcut map printed on linen rag paper, has been returned to Yale. Yale owns one of the last surviving copies of Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés’ map of the ancient Aztec island city of Tenochtitlan, worth an estimated $150,000. The map has been missing in action for the last two years. Yale posted a picture online, and last month, a map dealer who had purchased the map from map thief E. Forbes Smiley III came forward and returned it. The map depicts aqueducts, dikes made of reeds, palaces and a royal aviary. At the center is the Great Temple, where human beings were sacrificed to the gods.

[tags]antique maps, E. Forbes Smiley III, Cortes, famous cartographers, Aztecs[/tags]

If you are in the Chicago area anytime from now until March 18th, 2007, the DePaul Art Museum Main Gallery is hosting Imperial Cartographies: Power, Strategy, and Scientific Discovery. The exhibition:

…will trace the ways cartography and other geospatial visualization and analytical technologies (such as Geographic Information Systems and satellite imagery) have shaped our perceptions of power and geopolitics, our planet, and each other. The tools of geography have supported imperial expansion, from early Dutch voyages of exploration through European colonization to the Cold War and beyond. Maps, globes, and remotely sensed imagery from the Newberry Library, the Adler Planetarium, and other collections illuminate the connection between knowledge and conquest. Cosponsored by the Department of Geography.

Via: MapHist

[tags]Antique Maps, Map Exhibitions[/tags]

Various scanned antique maps of Stockholm ranging in years from 1625 to 1922, have been made available to use with Google Earth. Google Earth has previously added added the ability to use maps from the David Ramsey antique map collection as layers. (See previous posts: Google Earth Adds Antique Maps; ABC News on Google Earth’s Antique Maps.

Via: The Map Room and Ogle Earth.

[tags]Antique Maps, Maps of Stockholm, Google Earth[/tags]

According to Scotland’s Herald, the Nicolay Rutter mentioned in a previous post went for a cool £22,610 (approximately $40,000USD) in an auction, doubling previous estimates of what it might fetch at auction. A London dealer now posesses the map.

[tags]Nicolay Rutter, Map Auctions[/tags]