Here are 100 books that Mapping an Empire fans have personally recommended if you like
Mapping an Empire.
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As a critical care doctor, I love pausing when taking care of patients in a modern ICU to reflect on how far we’ve come in the care we can provide. I want to be entertained while learning about the past, and so I seek out books on medical history that find the wonder and the beauty (and the bizarre and chilling) and make it come alive. I get excited when medical history can be shared in a way that isn’t dry, or academic. These books all do that for me and capture some part of that crazy journey through time.
The Ghost Map is the fantastic story of an important Cholera epidemic in London in 1854.
The book swept me along with its narrative, plunging straight into the fetid world of Victorian London. Johnson weaves together the stories of the people affected, and the desperate hunt by Dr. John Snow to understand the cause of the disease. He also provides fascinating descriptions of the dangers to life in a time before sewers, and the evolution of such systems that ultimately transformed city life.
I definitely look at toilets, pipes, and sewer grates differently after reading this book.
A National Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year
It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure-garbage removal, clean water, sewers-necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time.
I began college as a science major, but then switched to literature from a minor to my major. In graduate school, as I worked on my dissertation (which became my first book), I found that metaphors of the body and health were everywhere in the literary field in the mid-nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the sciences, including the rapid development of modern medicine, are both fundamental to this period and deeply shape its literary culture. In Mapping the Victorian Social Body, I became fascinated with the history of data visualization. Disease mapping completely transformed the ways we understand space and how our bodies exist within it.
This is a more recent history of cholera in the context of quarantine, and clarifies some of the stakes of decisions about quarantine in the context of the history of plague. It places it nicely in the context of a larger European response to epidemic disease and the history of plague in the Mediterranean. I liked that it expands the focus to an international context, and a longer period of history—epidemics, like any novel experience, are processed within existing schema, and the plague was a particularly resonant and long-lasting framework for understanding contagion.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, quarantine laws in all Western European nations mandated the detention of every inbound trader, traveller, soldier, sailor, merchant, missionary, letter, and trade good arriving from the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Most of these quarantines occurred in large, ominous fortresses in Mediterranean port cities. Alex Chase-Levenson examines Britain's engagement with this Mediterranean border regime from multiple angles. He explores how quarantine practice laid the foundations for the state provision of public health and constituted an early example of European integration. Situated at the intersection of political, cultural, diplomatic, and medical history, The Yellow…
I began college as a science major, but then switched to literature from a minor to my major. In graduate school, as I worked on my dissertation (which became my first book), I found that metaphors of the body and health were everywhere in the literary field in the mid-nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the sciences, including the rapid development of modern medicine, are both fundamental to this period and deeply shape its literary culture. In Mapping the Victorian Social Body, I became fascinated with the history of data visualization. Disease mapping completely transformed the ways we understand space and how our bodies exist within it.
This book begins with cholera and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and vampire novels, and then moves forward in time to examine the longstanding continued use of epidemic disease as a metaphor to describe political revolt and terror. Kolb argues that the colonial state has long positioned itself as a hygienic "doctor" treating political "disease," and shows clearly why understanding political activity within the frame of disease is so damaging. Moving through the mid-twentieth century with Camus and Algeria, to Rushdie, 2001, and the shameful history of the US torture memo, Kolb's argument is both historically sweeping and persuasive.
Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. The result is the first book-length study to approach the global war on terror from a postcolonial literary perspective.
Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neo-imperial…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
By
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
I began college as a science major, but then switched to literature from a minor to my major. In graduate school, as I worked on my dissertation (which became my first book), I found that metaphors of the body and health were everywhere in the literary field in the mid-nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the sciences, including the rapid development of modern medicine, are both fundamental to this period and deeply shape its literary culture. In Mapping the Victorian Social Body, I became fascinated with the history of data visualization. Disease mapping completely transformed the ways we understand space and how our bodies exist within it.
This collection of previously published essays by Charles Rosenberg elaborates many of his ideas about how people make meaning out of epidemics, including his famous theory that epidemics are understood in a dramatic tripartite structure (see “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective”). Rosenberg shows not only how the history of medicine illuminates larger themes, but why it matters, both to those of us interested in history and those interested in medical science itself.
Medicine has always had its historians; but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Charles Rosenberg has been one of the key figures in recent decades in opening up the history of medicine beyond parochial concerns and instead viewing medicine in the rich currents of intellectual and social change of the past two centuries. This book brings together for the first time in one place many of Professor Rosenberg's most important essays. The first two sections of essays, focusing on ideas and institutions, are meant at the same time to underline interactions between these realms. The…
I’m a writer and an editor with eclectic interests. I’ve published two books of popular history—Da Vinci's Ghost (2012), about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), about the map that gave America its name. I’ve also written extensively for national publications on such topics as the sociology of new religious movements, privacy protection in the Internet age, the Voynich manuscript, the revisionist study of the Qur’an, the revival of ancient Greek music, and alphabet reform in Azerbaijan. I’m presently a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review and acontributing editor at The Atlantic. From 1988-1990, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.
You won’t be curling up in bed with this two-volume, 2,272-page encyclopedic history of cartography in the European Renaissance—but if you’ve got a passion for maps, or if you want the most comprehensive source of information on the cartography of the period, it’s a delightful and even essential work to consult. The essays are diverse and deeply informative, and the reproductions, including 80 gorgeous color plates, are a treat to spend time with.
When the University of Chicago Press launched the land-mark "History of Cartography" series nearly thirty years ago, founding editors J. B. Harley and David Woodward hoped to create a new basis for map history. They did not, however, anticipate the larger renaissance in map studies that the series would inspire. But as the renown of the series and the comprehensiveness and acuity of the present two-part volume demonstrate, the history of cartography has proven to be unexpectedly fertile ground. "Cartography in the European Renaissance" treats the period from 1450 to 1650, long considered the most important in the history of…
I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.
I found it hard to put down Stein’s engaging account of the borders of the 50 US states, plus the District of Columbia. Stein takes readers across the map, border by border, from Alabama to Wyoming, explaining the macro forces, like wars, treaties, and tensions over slavery, and the idiosyncrasies, like surveying and mapping errors and court decisions, that created the USA’s state borders.
I appreciated how Stein packed a lot of history and geography into essentially a series of short vignettes for each state and its borders. The book covers a lot of ground, but readers don’t need much prior knowledge to follow along.
Why does Oklahoma have that panhandle Did someone make a mistake
We are so familiar with the map of the United States that our state borders seem as much a part of nature as mountains and rivers. Even the oddities-the entire state of Maryland(!)-have become so engrained that our map might as well be a giant jigsaw puzzle designed by Divine Providence. But that's where the real mystery begins. Every edge of the familiar wooden jigsaw pieces of our childhood represents a revealing moment of history and of, well, humans drawing lines in the sand.
An Italian Feast celebrates the cuisines of the Italian provinces from Como to Palermo. A culinary guide and book of ready reference meant to be the most comprehensive book on Italian cuisine, and it includes over 800 recipes from the 109 provinces of Italy's 20 regions.
I have obsessed with maps my whole life, but I guess the main drive for studying them is my enjoyment of outdoor spaces, as a hiker, a mountaineer, and as a sailor: always with a paper map at hand. If you use GPS (a wonderful innovation) you will not only lose some of your precious orientation abilities but above all you will look less at the environment around you. I feel that paper maps do a great favor to my brain and to my enjoyment of places. The books below are a great tribute to maps; they helped me understand them better, and this affected the way I use them.
This is a super-authoritative book on the historical evolution of map-making by a renowned scholar of classics. It shows a surprising variety of maps from Antiquity to the present. Yet in this variety, Jacob is able to find important commonalities that help us understand what makes a map a map.
The take-home message for me has been that maps are engines of thought. By making a territory visible, they unleash a trove of otherwise unthinkable thoughts about it.
A novel work in the history of cartography, "The Sovereign Map" argues that maps are as much about thinking as seeing, as much about the art of persuasion as the science of geography. As a classicist, Christian Jacob brings a fresh eye to his subject - which includes maps from Greek Antiquity to the twentieth century - and provides a theoretical approach to investigating the power of maps to inform, persuade, and inspire the imagination. Beginning with a historical overview of maps and their creation - from those traced in the dirt by primitive hands to the monumental Dutch atlases…
I believe stories to be our species’ instinctual tool for discovering our best selves. Sometimes those stories are about real people in the past, sometimes they’re completely imagined people in the future — sometimes we even swap out the humans for animals or aliens, or sassy anthropomorphized objects. Whatever the case, for a story to work its wonders, its details must be believable, or we reject its premise. These books help make a story believable, and, if you get the alchemy just right, those details can even help tell the story themselves.
You get a lot of insight into a culture from the maps they create. Not only how they view themselves, but how they view others around them. There have been times in history when cultures weren’t even concerned with their maps being geographically accurate— they were a tool for teaching religion, or indulging a yearning for the fantastic. This book gives an excellent overview as to the many ways humans have used, and designed, maps throughout the centuries.
Mapping the World is a one-of-a-kind collection of cartographic treasures that spans thousands of years and many cultures, from an ancient Babylonian map of the world etched on clay to the latest high-tech maps of the earth, seas, and the skies above. With more than one hundred maps and other illustrations and an introduction and running commentary by Ralph E. Ehrenberg, this book tells a fascinating story of geographic discovery, scientific invention, and the art and technique of mapmaking.
Mapping the World is organized chronologically with a brief introduction that places the maps in their historical context. Special "portfolios" within…
I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.
I was drawn to this book because it explains a broad range of cartographic conventions straightforwardly. Unlike the other books on my list, this book is probably the most academic. Yet I was impressed by Ashworth’s ability to engagingly and informatively discuss seemingly dry topics, like latitude and longitude, legends, scale, and map symbology.
I enjoyed the wide range of illustrations featuring a mixture of historical and contemporary maps, which helped me understand the longer-term pedigree of modern map conventions and their advantages and limitations.
Many people have a love of maps. But what lies behind the process of map-making? How have cartographers through the centuries developed their craft and established a language of maps which helps them to better represent our world and users to understand it?
This book tells the story of how widely accepted mapping conventions originated and evolved - from map orientation, projections, typography and scale, to the use of colour, map symbols, ways of representing relief and the treatment of boundaries and place names. It charts the fascinating story of how conventions have changed in response to new technologies and…
I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.
I was struck by this book’s unusual topic and perspective, namely focusing on maps in fantasy, children’s and science fiction literature, movies, and television. I really appreciated that the book is a collection of essays in which writers and cartographers reflect on the maps of imaginary places that featured in their works and the maps, real or imagined, that inspired their creations.
That really gives the essays a personal feeling, and you get to know a little about the creation of maps like the Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter franchise or the various maps of Middle Earth featured in The Hobbit series. I like that the essays are conversational, and with over 200 illustrations, I was anxious to turn to the next page.
It’s one of the first things we discover as children, reading and drawing: Maps have a unique power to transport us to distant lands on wondrous travels. Put a map at the start of a book, and we know an adventure is going to follow. Displaying this truth with beautiful full-color illustrations, The Writer’s Map is an atlas of the journeys that our most creative storytellers have made throughout their lives. This magnificent collection encompasses not only the maps that appear in their books but also the many maps that have inspired them, the sketches that they used while writing,…
