Maps organize us in space, but they also organize us in time. Looking around the world for the last five hundred years, Time in Maps shows that today's digital maps are only the latest effort to insert a sense of time into the spatial medium of maps. Historians Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer have assembled leading scholars to consider how maps from all over the world have depicted time in ingenious and provocative ways.
Focusing on maps created in Spanish America, Europe, the United States, and Asia, these essays take us from the Aztecs documenting the founding of Tenochtitlan, to early modern Japanese reconstructing nostalgic landscapes before Western encroachments, to nineteenth-century Americans grappling with the new concept of deep time. Time in Maps also features a defense of traditional paper maps by digital mapmaker William Rankin. With more than one hundred colour maps and illustrations, Time in Maps will draw the attention of anyone interested in cartographic history.
Foreword by Abby Smith Rumsey
Introduction: Maps Tell Time / Caroline Winterer and Kären Wigen
Chapter 1: Mapping Time in the Twentieth (and Twenty-First) Century / William Rankin
Part I: Pacific Asia
Chapter 2: Orienting the Past in Early Modern Japan / Kären Wigen
Chapter 3: Jesuit Maps in China and Korea: Connecting the Past to the Present / Richard A. Pegg
Part II: The Atlantic World
Chapter 4: History in Maps from the Aztec Empire / Barbara E. Mundy
Chapter 5: Lifting the Veil of Time: Maps, Metaphor, and Antiquarianism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries / Veronica Della Dora
Chapter 6: A Map of Language / Daniel Rosenberg
Part III: The United States
Chapter 7: The First American Maps of Deep Time / Caroline Winterer
Chapter 8: How Place Became Process: The Origins of Time Mapping in the United States / Susan Schulten
Chapter 9: Time, Travel, and Mapping the Landscapes of War / James R. Akerman
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
Kären Wigen is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. Caroline Winterer is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University.
"As wide-ranging, imaginative, and revealing as the maps they discuss, these essays follow the trace laid down by the editors and William Rankin's magisterial opening essay. They track how maps – interpreted broadly – convey time as well as space. GIS, they contend, has not rendered old paper maps obsolete as much as revealed their wonders – their dynamism, their depth, their metaphors, their techniques, and their connections to not only a physical world but to other intellectual endeavors. They convey the magic not only of maps but of scholarship."
– Richard White, Stanford University
"What a relief to move beyond the worn dichotomy between maps and timelines, geography and history! Time in Maps shows definitively that maps brim with temporal references, both overt and subtle. They represent moments that range from one protest march to centuries of slavery, or a year's erosion along Cape Cod to the deep time of geological eons. Cartographers' visual strategies include encodings of time as much as symbolic representations of objects in space. Contrary to popular opinion, printed maps are anything but 'static' once one learns to recognize how they in fact hold time in the embrace of space. Time in Maps is a wonderful book, and one that is long overdue."
– Anne Kelly Knowles, University of Maine