Newsletter 2000: Winter

Newsletter 2000: Winter

Route of Don Lope de Acuña through the Franche-Comté, 1573 Route of Don Lope de Acuña through the Franche-Comté, 1573
This map, which will appear in John Hale’s chapter on maps and warfare in Volume Three, depicts the passage prepared for the Army of Don Lope de Acuña through the Franche-Comté. The region from Ain to St. Loup is shown with south at the top. In addition to displaying the main rivers to be crossed (the Ain, Loue, Doubs, Ognon, and Saône), the map indicates the location of eleven étapes (villages or centers where food, lodging, and other necessities would be gathered in order to provide support for the marching Spanish troops). The étape strategy was beneficial for both the local communities and the troops.
Size of the original: 18 x 27.3 cm.
Photograph courtesy of the Archives du Doubs, Besançon, France (C 264).

The European Renaissance (Volume Three)

This past year has been a busy one, and almost all of the work in the Madison office has centered on Volume Three. We have now received drafts of thirty-two manuscripts—well over half of these are ready for publication or being worked on by our staff; the rest are being revised according to comments by editor David Woodward, and authors plan to resubmit them within the next few months. The outstanding essays are all due by the end of 2001. We plan to send a draft of the entire volume to the University of Chicago Press readers before the end of 2002.

A significant number of Volume Three essays are being submitted in languages other than English, and we have several experts translating these contributions. Jeremy Scott has been a consultant with the Project since December 1998 and has elegantly translated five essays on Italian manuscript traditions and charting in the Mediterranean. Our French translator is UW doctoral student Maria Slocum.

The Enlightenment (Volume Four)

Since the November 1999 editorial meeting, at which Graham Burnett, Matthew Edney, and Mary Pedley met with David Woodward in New York, the Volume Four editors have continued to lay preparatory work for the volume.

Graham and Matthew organized a well-attended session on science and cartography in the eighteenth century for the November 2000 meeting of the History of Science Society, held in Vancouver, B.C. Matthew gave an introductory paper; Anne Godlewska (Queen’s University), Michael Bravo (Cambridge), and Michael Dettelbach (Smith College) followed with stimulating presentations. Graham moderated the session, and the lively discussion—led by John Heilbron (Oxford)—revealed a great deal of interest in maps and mapping on the part of historians of science. It is now likely that future meetings of the History of Science Society will include at least one session on Enlightenment cartography. Such an enthusiastic response bodes well for the formulation of the interpretive essays for Volume Four and for developing its intellectual scope.

In February 2001, the Volume Four editors will meet with Project staff in Madison to refine the volume’s intellectual framework and its detailed outline. They will plan the first grant proposal for the volume, delegate editorial functions, and organize administrative tasks.

Exploratory Essays Initiative (Volume Six)

The principal Volume Six effort continues to be our Exploratory Essays Initiative, funded by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation and directed by Mark Monmonier and David Woodward. Last June, editors and board members met with authors (who are writing on diverse aspects of the history of cartography in the twentieth century), and in September the authors submitted detailed outlines for review. Feedback from this review will be useful in preparing formal oral presentations for a symposium to be held in Los Angeles in March 2002, immediately before or after the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Shortly thereafter, authors will submit manuscripts for a special double issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Science. As guest editors, Mark and David will conduct a formal peer review, and authors will deposit a copy of their research materials with the History of Cartography Project. The published essays and research will form the basis of much larger and more fully developed chapters in Volume Six.

On 28 February 2001 several authors will present preliminary research reports in back-to-back special sessions on the “History of Cartography in the Twentieth Century: Instances and Issues,” which Mark organized for this year’s AAG meeting in New York. Presenters and their titles are listed in the sidebar.

Mark will chair the sessions and present his own paper (“Aerial Photo-graphy at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration: Acreage Control, Conservation Inducement, and Overhead Surveillance”), and David will serve as summary discussant.

Presenters at the history of cartography special sessions at the 2001 AAG

James R. Akerman (Newberry Library), “From
     Rails to Trails: American Tourist Mapping in
     Transition, 1900-1940”
John Cloud (Cornell University), “Eight Steps in
     the Post-War History of Geographic
     Information Science”
Peter Collier (University of Portsmouth, U.K.),
     “Innovation and Stagnation: The Adoption of
     Air Survey Techniques in the British Empire,
     1918-1939”
Patrick H. McHaffie (DePaul University),
     “Sketching Rationalization: Cartographers
     and Automation at the U.S. Geological
     Survey”
Robert B. McMaster (University of Minnesota)
     and Susanna McMaster (independent
     scholar), “Twentieth-Century American
     Academic Cartography”
Daniel R. Montello (University of California
     Santa Barbara), “Experimental Cartographic
     Design Research in the 20th Century: Using
     Psychological Theories and Methods to Make
     Better Maps”

News from the Madison Office

In late September, we welcomed geography graduate student Ben Sheesley (cartographic design and water resource management) to the Project as a reference editor. He joins reference editors Kimberly Coulter, Brian Covey, and Brenda Parker and illustration editor Dana Freiburger in their work preparing Volume Three manuscripts for publication.

Jane Rosecky provided valuable office assistance to the Project for a year but left our staff in August to pursue an internship at Guelph University. In her place, we hired Anne Jahnke, a double major in geography and political science, who is efficiently managing our filing, library work, copying, data entry, correspondence, and preliminary digital scanning for Volume Three line drawings.

New Poem Commissioned For This Year’s Broadsheet

Lucia Perillo

Each year, the History of Cartography Project produces limited-edition, hand-printed broadsheets featuring a literary passage about cartography. We are proud to send them to supporters as a token of our thanks. For this year’s broadsheet, number nine in our series, we commissioned a poem—inspired by Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina of 1539—by the award-winning poet Lucia Perillo.

Perillo is currently an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. In the course of her career she has earned a long and impressive list of awards: the Poetry Society of America’s Farber First Book Award (1989), the Morse Prize (1989), the PEN/Revson Award (1991), Purdue University’s Emery Poetry Prize (1996), Claremont College’s Tufts Discovery Award (1997), and the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Prize (1998). Most recently, Perillo received one of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowships, acknowledging her achievements and encouraging her in new endeavors.

Perillo’s earlier collections of poetry, Dangerous Life (1989) and Body Mutinies (1996), met with critical praise. Her latest book, The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999), has also won numerous accolades.

Funding News

This March, we expect to hear news of a pending proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for funding beginning July 2001. We greatly appreciate the ongoing support of the NEH and hope that the transition to a new administration in Washington will prove beneficial to that agency. We would also like to acknowledge the ongoing generosity of the UW—Madison Graduate School, which is supporting our additional reference editors this year, and the National Science Foundation, which continues to support preliminary work on Volume Six.

We would like to extend an especially heartfelt thanks to all of the individuals, map societies, and private foundations that supported the Project so generously during the year 2000. We raised almost $68,000 in private gifts this past year, and that support encourages us greatly as we look to the future. Many thanks.

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