Map History Books of 2020

(and several missed from 2019)

Continuing the annual tradition (see 2019 for links to earlier lists), here’s my list of 2020 books in map history and in related fields that came to my attention. I also append a few books dated 2019 that for whatever reason did not make previous lists.

This has been a pretty good year overall, I think. There are some interesting collections—including two different edited volumes about mapping time—and of course Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume Four of The History of Cartography (finally!).

As ever, I am sorry if I left out something really obvious or important, if I mistook a catalog record of a forthcoming book for something actually published, or if I was too Anglocentric. While I’ve handled most of these, and many have ended up on my own shelves, the appearance of a book in the list does not necessarily imply that I have seen or that I approve of the work in question.

Agustín-Hernandez, Luis, Aurelio Vallespin Muniesa, and Angélica Fernández-Morales, eds. 2020. Mapping, Cartography, and Innovation in Education. Vol. 3 of Graphical Heritage. Cham, Switz.: Springer.

Alvarez, C. J. 2019. Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Arad, Pnina. 2020. Christian Maps of the Holy Land: Images and Meanings. Turnhout: Brepols.

Azzola, Egels, Gauthier Fontanon, Heipke Grimm, Hiermanseder Heno, and Polidori Lagarde, eds. 2020. Aimé Laussedat (1819–1907): Le précurseur de la photgrammetrie. Paris: Publi Topex.

Bargués-Pedreny, Pol, David Chandler, and Elena Simon, eds. 2019. Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age. London: Routledge.

Biedermann, Zoltan. 2019. (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bifolco, Stefano. 2020. Mare nostrum: Cartografia nautica a stampa del Mar Mediterraneo. Catalogo delle carte generali 1528–1802. Rome: Edizioni Antiquarius gennaio.

Black, Jeremy. 2020. A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Boria, Edoardo. 2020. Storia della cartografia in Italia dall’Unità a oggi: Tra scienza, società e progetti di potere. Turin: UTET.

Bravo, Michael. 2019. North Pole: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion.

Brooke-Hitching, Edward. 2020. The Sky Atlas: The Greatest Maps, Myths, and Discoveries of the Universe. San Francisco: Chronicle.

Buchholz, Amrei. 2020. Zwischen Karten: Alexander von Humboldts ‘Atlas géographique et physique des régions équinoctiales du Nouveau Continent’. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Burnet, Ian. 2019. The Tasman Map: A Biography of a Map. Abel Tasman, the Dutch East India Company and the first Dutch Discoveries of Australia. Dural Delivery Centre, N.S.W.: Rosenberg.

Bushell, Sally. 2020. Reading and Mapping Fiction: Spatialising the Literary Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bushell, Sally, Julia S. Carlson, and Julia Walford Davies, eds. 2020. Romantic Cartographies: Mapping, Literature, Culture,  1789–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Capello, Ernesto, and Julia B. Rosenbaum, eds. 2021. Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. New York: Routledge.

Cattaneo, Angelo, and Sabrina Corbellini, eds. 2019. Sguardi globali: Mappe olandesi, spagnole e portoghesi nelle collezioni del granduca Cosimo III de’ Medici. Florence: Mandragora. English ed: The Global Eye: Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Maps in the Collections of the Gran Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici, trans. Sonia Hill and Ian Mansbridge.

Christoph, Andreas, ed. 2019. Kartieren um 1800. Laboratorium Aufklärung, 19. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, Brill Deutschland.

Citérin, Gwénaël, and Annick Bohn, eds. 2019. Hors du monde: La carte et l’imaginaire. Strasbourg: Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg.

Danilenko, Nadja. 2020. Picturing the Islamic World: The Story of al-Iṣṭtahrī’s Book of Routes and Realms. Leiden: Brill.

Dean, Riaz. 2019. Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies & Maps in Nineteenth-Century Asia. Oxford: Casemate.

Della Dora, Veronica. 2020. The Mantle of the Earth: Genealogies of a Geographical Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dodeman, André, and Nancy Pedri, eds. 2020. Negotiating Waters: Seas, Oceans, and Passageways in the Colonial and Postcolonial Anglophone World. Wilmington, Del.: Vernon Press.

Doré, Andréa. 2020. Cartografia da promessa: Potosi e o Brasil em um continente chamado Peruana. São Paulo: Intermeios.

Duder, Tessa, and David Elliot. 2019. First Map: How James Cook Charted Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland: HarperCollins.

Edney, Matthew H., and Mary S. Pedley, eds. 2019. Cartography in the European Enlightenment. Vol. 4 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• this is far and away the best map history book to appear in 2020 (although copyrighted to 2019): thanks to Mary for the privilege of working with you for so long, to all the Project staff and students who worked so hard on this—and Jude Leimer in particular—and to all the contributors who provided the content!

Erbig, Jeffrey Alan, Jr. 2020. Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Faehndrich, Jutta. 2020. Als Künstler und Kartograph im Heiligen Land (1851/52): Die drei Palästina des C. W. M. van de Velde. Berlin: Reimer, Dietrich.

Falk, Seb. 2020. The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. New York: W. W. Norton.

• not mappy per se, but definitely map-adjacent

Faulkner, Danny R. 2019. Falling Flat: A Refutation of Flat Earth Claims. Green Forest, Ark.

• written by a Creationist …

Ferdinand, Simon. 2019. Mapping beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

García Redondo, José María. 2019. Cartografía e imperio: El padrón real y la representación del Nuevo Mundo. Madrid: Doce Calles.

Goree, Robert. 2020. Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan. Harvard East Asian monographs, 437. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.  

Hadry, Sarah. 2020. Kartographie, Chorographie und Territorialverwaltung um 1600: Die Pfalz-Neuburgische Landesaufnahme (1579/84–1604). Studien zur bayerischen Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 32. Munich: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte.

Heuer, Christopher P. 2019. Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image. Brooklyn: Zone Books.

Hinrichs, Oscar. 2020. Stonewall’s Prussian Mapmaker: The Journals of Captain Oscar Hinrichs. Ed. Richard Brady Williams. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Hyde, Ralph. 2020. London Parish Maps to 1900. Edited by Simon Morris and members of the society. London Topographical Society, Publication 183. London: London Topographical Society.

Iosefo, Fetaui, Stacy Holman Jones, and Anne Harris, eds. 2021. Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography. London: Routledge.

Gilson, Jools, and Nicola Moffat, eds. 2019. Textiles, Community and Controversy: The Knitting Map. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

• really about modern textile arts and the politics of public display, but has intriguing chapter titles, and I must check it out next time I get to the UW art library: “Introduction: Mapping this book: here be monsters” (Nicola Moffat); “The entangled map and Irish art” (Fionna Barber); “The edge of the ‘Map’” (Moffat); “Textures of performance” (Róisín O’Gorman); etc.

Jurkowlaniec, Grażyna, and Magdelena Herman, eds. 2021. The Reception of the Printed Image in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Multiplied and Modified. London: Routledge.

Kedwards, Dale. 2020. The mappae mundi of Medieval Iceland. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Kogman-Appel, Katrin. 2020. Catalan Maps and Jewish Books: The Intellectual Profile of Elisha Ben Abraham Cresques (1325–1387). Turnhout: Brepols.

Kramper, Peter. 2019. Battle of the Standards: Messen, Zählen und Wiegen in Westeuropa 1660–1914. Veroffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London, 82. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.

Kupfer, Marcia, Adam S. Cohen, and J. H. Chajes, eds. 2020. The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Turnhout: Brepols.

Labbé, Morgane. 2019. La nationalité, une histoire de chiffres: politique et statistiques en Europe centrale (1848–1919). Paris: SciencesPo.

Lange, Diana. 2020. An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th Century Tibetan Lama: A Journey of Discovery. Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, 45. Leiden: Brill.

Leuenberger, Christine, and Schnell Izhak. 2020. The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lugli, Emanuele. 2019. The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maier, Jessica. 2020. The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marcocci, Giuseppe. 2020. The Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mayhew, Robert J., and Charles W. J. Withers, eds. 2020. Geographies of Knowledge: Science, Scale, and Spatiality in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

McCrystal, John. 2019. Singing the Trail: The Story of Mapping Aotearoa New Zealand. Auckland: Allen & Unwin.

Metcalf, Alida C. 2020. Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Morgan, Kenneth. 2020. Navigating by the Southern Cross: The European Discovery of Australia. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Mukherjee, Nilanjana. 2020. Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India. London: Routledge.

Nelson, Jennifer. 2020. Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors.’ State College: Pennsylvania State University Press.

• wonderful, map-adjacent art history

Oliver, Richard, Roger J. P. Kain, and Todd Gray, eds. 2019. William Birchynshaw’s Map of Exeter, 1743. Devon and Cornwall Record Society, Extra Series 3. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press for the Devon and Cornwall Record Society.

Olsson, Gunnar. 2020. Arkography : A Grand Tour through the Taken-for-Granted. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Oswalt, Vadim. 2019. Karten als Quelle und Darstellung Historische Karten und Geschichtskarten im Unterricht. Frankfurt: Wochenschau Verlag.

Ovenden, Mark. 2020. Underground Cities: Mapping the Tunnels, Transits and Networks underneath our Feet. London: White Lion Publishing.

Padrón, Ricardo. 2020. The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Palmer, Douglas. 2020. Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.         

Parker, Katherine, and Barry Ruderman. 2020. Historical Sea Charts: Visions and Voyages through the Ages. Vercelli: White Star. Also published in French (Cartes des mers: Du Moyen Âge au XIXe siècle) and Italian (Lungo le rotte del mare: Cartografía marina attraverso i secoli).

Parsons, Andrew, with John Dent. 2019. Launceston Revealed, Being an Exhaustive and Instructive Cartographic Investigation of the Advancement of Launceston, Tasmania, Established in the County of Cornwall, in the Northern Territory of Van Diemen’s Land in March 1806. Launceston, Tasmania: Publications Committee of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

Pilhuj, Katja. 2019. Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Pulido Rull, Ana. 2020. Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Rapoport, Yossef. 2020. Islamic Maps. Oxford: Bodleian Library.

Saladin, Irina. 2020. Karten und Mission: Die jesuitische Konstruktion des Amazonasraums im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Schein, Jim. 2020. Gold Mountain, Big City: Ken Cathcart’s 1947 Illustrated Map of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Petaluma, Calif.: Cameron.

Segal, Zef, and Bram Vannieuwenhuyze, eds. 2020. Motion in Maps, Maps in Motion: Mapping Stories and Movement through Time. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Seidelmann, P. Kenneth, and Catherine Y. Hohenkerk, eds. 2020. The History of Celestial Navigation: Rise of the Royal Observatory and Nautical Almanacs. Cham, Switz.: Springer.

Shannon, William D. 2020. Seventeenth-Century Lancashire Restored: The Life and Work of Dr. Richard Kuerden, Antiquary and Topographer, 1623–1702. Remains Historical and Literary Connected with Lancaster and Chester, 3rd ser., 54. Manchester: Chetham Society.

Sletto, Bjørn, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale, eds. 2020. Radical Cartographies: Participatory Mapmaking from Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Song, Nianshen. 2018. Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Specht, Doug, ed. 2020. Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping. London: University of London Press.

Swanston, Malcolm, and Alexander Swanston. 2019. How to Draw a Map. London: HarperCollins.

Tambassi, Timothy, ed. 2019. The Philosophy of GIS. Cham, Switz.: Springer.

Tütüncü Mehmet. 2020. Mekka and Medina Maps and Illustrations: From 15th to 20th Century. N.p.: SOTA.

Walker, Caroline. 2020. MacDonald Gill: Charting a Life. London: Unicorn.

Wigen, Kären, and Caroline Winterer, eds. 2020. Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winther, Rasmus Grønfeldt. 2020. When Maps Become the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wragge-Morley, Alexander. 2020. Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.