History of Cartography

Geography ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Edney

Until the 1980s, the study of the history of cartography was defined by two idealizations: (1) that maps are strictly factual statements and (2) that cartography is an innately progressive science that serves as a surrogate for Western civilization as a whole. Then, the recognition that maps are actually cultural texts made for specific functions transformed map history into an exciting, interdisciplinary field of study. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences now seek to understand how past peoples thought about and acted in their particular worlds. The result is a substantial literature, which in many respects resembles a multifaceted iceberg: each disciplinary perspective reveals only the tip. In taking a series of selective and topical cuts through the recent literature, this bibliography cannot take every new perspective into account. Necessarily excluded are the older literature, which despite its conceptual flaws, contains a wealth of important information; narratives of the development of maps of specific regions (“The Mapping of X”); and cartobibliographies (mostly regional in scope).

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 134-137
Author(s):  
Rose Aslan

In The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia, HarryMunt offers a much-needed look at the history of Madinah through scholars’writing about its significance and the construction of its sanctity. By examiningthe city’s history through a spatial lens, Munt presents a new perspective on134 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:3the history of a city that has been written about for more than a millennium.While Madinah has served as a catalyst of religious formation, identity, andpractice, until now it has not been studied as a sanctified city (ḥaram) in andof itself.As the city that welcomed Makkah’s Muslim refugees, Madinah has arich and complicated history. In addition, it is a sacred city. While modernMuslims primarily view it as sacred because of the presence of the Prophet’sgrave, the author returns to early Islamic sources to understand how earlyMuslim scholars between the seventh to the ninth centuries viewed the cityand how it became sanctified. He argues against the modern normative Islamicviewpoint that the city was immediately viewed as sacred and posits that ittook several centuries for the normative viewpoint to consolidate into a popularnarrative ...


Author(s):  
Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter discusses Marxist historiography in the present times. In the interpretation of the world nowadays, there has been a rise in the so-called anti-Rankean reaction in history, of which Marxism is an important but not always fully acknowledged element. This movement challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory, and that all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it and explain why things happened the way they did. This movement also brought together history with the social sciences, therefore turning it into part of a generalizing discipline capable of explaining transformations of human society in the course of its past. This new perspective on the past is a return to ‘total history’, in which the focus is not merely on the ‘history of everything’ but history as an indivisible web wherein all human activities are interconnected.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Freemantle

An early proponent of the social sciences, Frédéric Le Play, was the occupant of senior positions within the French state in the mid- to late 19th century. He was writing at a time when science was ascending. There was for him no doubt that scientific observation, correctly applied, would allow him unmediated access to the truth. It is significant that Le Play was the organizer of a number of universal expositions because these expositions were used as vehicles to demonstrate the ascendant position of western civilization. The fabrication of linear time is a history of progress requiring a vision of history analogous to the view offered the spectator at a diorama. Le Play employed the design principles and spirit of the diorama in his formulations for the social sciences, and L’Exposition Universelle of 1867 used the technology wherever it could. Both the gaze of the spectators and the objects viewed are part and products of the same particular and unique historical formation. Ideas of perception cannot be separated out from the conditions that make them possible. Vision and its effects are inseparable from the observing subject who is both a product of a particular historical moment and the site of certain practices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Crosthwaite ◽  
Peter Knight ◽  
Nicky Marsh

Abstract This article charts the emerging interdisciplinary field of the Economic Humanities, and highlights a recent research project on the history of US financial advice writing as an example of what this field might look like in practice. We begin by arguing that the Economic Humanities distinguishes itself from the New Economic Criticism that flourished in the 1990s by virtue of a broadened methodological scope, made possible by greater interaction with various economically oriented branches of the social sciences. We then discuss our History of Financial Advice project as one example of what the Economic Humanities might do, highlighting three especially significant moments in the development of this genre of US writing: the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, either side of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the era following the emergence of a canonical body of financial theory in the early 1970s. Finally, in a brief conclusion we point to key areas in which the Economic Humanities has potential to do important critical work in the coming years.


2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Michael Ashcraft

The study of New Religious Movements (NRMs) has evolved over the last thirty to forty years by both design and chance. Beginning in the 1970s, scholars interested in NRMs studied specific groups, read one another's work, and ultimately met one another to fashion a "coalition of the mind," or scholarly yet interdisciplinary field of study, focused upon NRMs. The story of this development largely depends on the accounts provided by NRM scholars in interviews conducted by the author.


2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Helmreich

This review essay surveys recent literature in the history of science, literary theory, anthropology, and art criticism dedicated to exploring how the artificial life enterprise has been inflected by—and might also reshape—existing social, historical, cognitive, and cultural frames of thought and action. The piece works through various possible interpretations of Kevin Kelly's phrase “life is a verb,” in order to track recent shifts in cultural studies of artificial life from an aesthetic of critique to an aesthetic of conversation, discerning in the process different styles of translating between the concerns of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and sciences of the artificial.


Res Rhetorica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Tramel Gaines

Scholarly disagreement about preaching has suffered confusion due to definitions of the subject that do not sufficiently consider the diversity of that interdisciplinary field of study. This article provides a summary of historical perspectives that is more comprehensive than any such summary in recent literature. That overview leads to suggestions for investigating what preaching is and does.


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