"Mapping History"
March 7, 2025
9a - 2:30p
Jack Bouchard, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
We all love maps, and many of us love working with maps in our research and teaching. Some people just love staring at them for hours online or in our living rooms. The Internet loves maps as well, and we live in a golden age of detailed, creative, and free maps. They are informative, fun to look at, and can tell us all manner of wild things about our world, past and present. Alas! Maps are also liars and persuaders, tools of oppression and liberation, agents of empire and state-formation and capitalist extraction. Maps are windows into lost worlds and onto worlds that never existed. They are tools to navigate the world around us, or gross over-simplifications of that world which are unsuitable to help us find our way. They are ways to mark what divides and unites us, to show how we are connected through roads and bisected by waterways, or to show who owns what and how much it is worth. Maps have existed for as long as humans have, yet most were never meant to be preserved.
Maps have a history, and maps are essential to history. This workshop revolves around the exploration of two problems: the history of maps, and history with maps. We will start by studying how humans have made, used, and interpreted maps over time. We will learn the ways that cartography has changed in the past several thousand years, how this has shaped human behavior and changed how we see the world. This includes, importantly, the history of navigation and space without maps. One of the things we?ll soon learn is that maps are only one of, and often the least important, the many tools humans use to make sense of space, place and navigation. In the second part, we will study how historians have used, and continue to use, maps as tools to understand the past. In part this means how they have researched, interpreted and deployed historical maps as evidence. But we will also explore how historians have made and used maps which contain information about history ? the maps in your textbooks, infographics, data-maps, etc.