User:Mainemap/Map History

Introduction
This entry discusses a field of study, whose object is also known as the history of cartography. Map history is studied in both academic and lay settings and is of wide intellectual interest, attracting students not only from geography and history but also art history, literary studies, the histories of science and technology, sociology, and political science.

Definition
Map History is the study of maps in the context of the cultures and societies that made them. It is broadly concerned with how and why people have made and used maps of all different sorts to comprehend, organize, and communicate their knowledge of the world in order to live in and to change that world. It is an interdisciplinary field with practitioners from across the humanities and much of the social sciences who are broadly committed to the principles of critical cartography, but it features a broad array of methodologies and theoretical approaches.

Why 'Map History' and not 'History of Cartography'
As a field of study, the study of old maps remains inchoate. It has none of the coherent identity of established academic disciplines; its practitioners almost certainly identify themselves according to the disciplines in which they were trained (“I’m a geographer” or “I’m an art historian,” never “I’m a map historian”). Indeed, there is no one label that all practitioners can point to and say, “I’m an X.” There is, to begin with, a persistent confusion between the colloquial and inappropriate “historical cartography” and the much more appropriate “history of cartography”; moreover, “history of cartography” itself technically refers to only a particular formation of mapping practices encountered in the Western world from the 1840s on. It therefore seems that “map history” is the best label for the field.

Why not 'Historical Cartography'
In colloquial English, “historical cartography” strongly suggests mapping practices undertaken in the past. For example, the OCLC/FirstSearch database GeoBase, which catalogues books and articles in geography, uses “historical cartography” as the standard subject term for any work on old maps. Many people continue to refer to the study old maps intuitively as “historical cartography.” The problem, however, is that within professional cartographic circles, “historical cartography” has also come to mean the practice of representing and reconstructing past landscapes, events, and other phenomena in maps. Historical cartography — mapping out data about past populations, industries, trade, cultural movements, explorers’ routes, etc. gleaned from censuses and other sources — is an activity undertaken by historians, historical geographers, and even literary scholars.