"Time in Maps" Virtual Book Launch

The David Rumsey Map Center and Stanford Department of History invite you to join us at the book launch on January 22, 2021 commemorating the publication of Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to our Digital Era, now available from University of Chicago Press. Edited by Stanford's Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer, it features a foreword by Abby Smith Rumsey. All three will be in conversation about the book at the event. The publication of this book stems from the Time in Space: Representing Time in Maps conference held at the David Rumsey Map Center and Stanford Humanities Center in 2017.

On the day of the launch, Zoom will open at 2:45pm PST. The launch will begin at 3:00pm, followed by Q&A about the book: 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. The book also features a defense of traditional paper maps by digital mapmaker William Rankin. With more than one hundred color maps and illustrations, Time in Maps will draw the attention of anyone interested in cartographic history.

Authors featured in Time in Maps: Kären Wigen, Caroline Winterer, Abby Smith Rumsey, James R. Akerman, Veronica Della Dora, Barbara E. Mundy, Richard A. Pegg, William Rankin, Daniel Rosenberg, and Susan Schulten.