Maps

Global History

Author: Jack Betterly jbetterl@nycap.rr.com
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1998 18:54:24 -0400

Does anyone know of a good historical atlas of world history for which you can obtain a companion set of the maps on color transparencies for overhead projection? "Europe is a peninsula on the western extreme of Asia. For some reason its inhabitants believe it to be a continent of its own. Other Asian peoples sometimes find these inhabitants and their cultures to be puzzling, a bit exotic and, quite often, mystical."

Author: Michelle Peck Williams mpw@millenicom.com
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1998 17:40:47 -0400

Rand McNally will make transparencies of any pages from any of their atlases for $17 each, the last I heard. You pick the pages you want. I've also heard, however, that their historical atlas is not very good.

Author: Kemba Dunham Kemba.Dunham@news.wsj.com
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 14:52:01 -0400

I'm working on a special issue of the wall street journal on the past millennium. We are looking to replicate a graph, but in order to do this for our newspaper, we need a graph from circa 1000 A.D, a graph of anything. Does anyone have a graph from the year 1,000, not a mock graph, but a picture of one from the turn of the last millennium?

Author: Ruth Mosternruth@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 21:00:17 -0400

Kemba -- Would a map count? There is a very famous Chinese map from the turn of the last millenium depicting China's river systems and current and historical place names, with a grid superimposed on it. It's a great document, and copies of it are widely available. There is one in the geography volume of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China_. This series is also a good source for other Chinese mathematical and scoeintic texts.

Author: Pien Versteegh PVersteegh@aol.com
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 21:55:34 -0400

I am writing a paper on the history of cartography and would like to include ethnicity. I am looking for readings on Eurocentric maps in which Africa and South-America are portrayed too small, such as the Mercator map (most studies address to this only briefly) or early maps of America and Africa that show them as "empty" which had disastrous consequences for the native population. Are there any readings on these topics?

Author: John Sloan JohnS426@aol.com
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 23:18:58 -0400

I am writing a paper on the history of cartography and would like to include ethnicity. I am looking for readings on Eurocentric maps in which Africa and South-America are portrayed too small, such as the Mercator map (most studies address to this only briefly) or early maps of America and Africa that show them as "empty" which had disastrous consequences for the native population. Are there any readings on these topics? >> Certainly one of the best books on the history of cartography is Lloyd Brown's book titled The Story of Maps. I have it in front of me and on the Mercator map of 1538 which for the first time named North and South America South America and Africa don't look to small at all. What you are refering to is a "Mercator's projection" which is an adaption of an orthographic projection of the world. It is not that the southern continents appear too small but an intrinsic characteristic of all orthographic projections made to a cylinder tangent at the equator that the polar regions will appear TOO LARGE. This has nothing to do with Eurocentrism. Since the purpose of the map is navigation, so compass headings will appear as straight lines it is enevitable that the polar regions and in fact all areas are distorted. This is well known and Lambert, to name one, produced in Europe a well designed equivalent projection (that means areas are shown true to scale) in the18th century. It is an inherent property of maps that the spheroidal surface of the earth cannot be reproduced on a flat map without distortions of one or more kinds. As for the as yet unknown areas appearing blank - would it be better to fill them in with guess work? As a matter of fact too much guess work was a problem as it was. I wonder what an African or Inca map of Europe looked like in 1550. I fail to see any connection between a map in Europe showing unknown regions as blanks and 'disasters' occuring to the native populations in those regions who were as unknown to the Europeans as the regions themselves. Now Ptolemy who lived in Africa produced a map of the then known world on which the American continents and most of Africa didn't even appear at all. I haven't heard that among his shortcomings was the charge that he was Egyptocentric.

Author: Jay Green <jdgreen@covenant.edu>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 09:15:40 -0800

A desperately mundane question: Can someone send me information about ordering VERY GOOD QUALITY classroom maps for use at our college? We are embarrassingly undermapped. It looks like we may have monies to equip 2 or 3 classes with maps of the highest quality. I need companies and ordering information. Thanks.

Author:Gary Shanafelt GSHAN@mcmurry.mcm.edu
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 11:11:57 -0800

We got a lot of our classroom maps from Denoyer-Geppert in Chicago. They are now part of Rand McNally, which can be contacted at Rand McNally Educational Publishing Division P.O. Box 1906 Skokie, Ill 60076-8906 (800) 678-7263 The maps aren't cheap, but they last a long time with careful usage.

Author: Michael Wilson MWilsonRed@aol.com
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 09:08:19 -0800

I found some excellent maps from Nystrom. They have a web site you should ask for information there.

Author: Dan Vogt <dcvogt@ccaix.jsums.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 11:13:11 -0800

I have two catalogs of maps from 1995-1996. One company is George F. Cram - 1-800-227-4199; the other is Rand McNally - 1-800-678-7263. I hope these phone numbers are still current.

Author: Dr. Rhiman A. Rotz <rrotz@iunhaw1.iun.indiana.edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 15:05:37 -0800

If it's *historical* maps you want, our experience is that they are now very hard to get. It's true that Rand McNally bought out Denoyer-Geppert but a couple of years ago they killed off the entire line. I remember because they had a last chance sale, and I had to run around finding money to fill in some gaps before the Denoyer series was gone forever. I think they still sell the ones they did for Palmer's textbook but there are a lot fewer of those. Anyway we have had most of the historical maps we own laminated and mounted in the hopes they'll last forever, because they'll have to. Apparently there just is no market any more. If you have enough apparatus in your classroom you might try projecting the maps you can generate from a historical map program like Centennia. If it's maps in general, i.e. for geography and such, that can still be gotten. There's an outfit called Map Link in Santa Monica, California that has a particularly outstanding selection including things generated outside the U.S. I don't have their address with me but if that might help let me know and I'll find it.

Author: Gary Shanafelt <GSHAN@mcmurry.mcm.edu>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 09:08:07 -0800

Dr. Rhiman Rotz mentioned the computer map program Centennia.  Do you know if
the company is still in business?  We ordered a copy a few years ago but could
never get the Windows version to work right; and eventually when we called the
number, all we got was a message that it had been discontinued.

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