Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era

The new field of spatial history has been driven by digital mapping tools, which can readily show change over time in space. But long before this software was developed, mapmakers around the world represented time in sophisticated and nuanced ways in static maps that offer lessons for us today. In this collection, historians Karen Wigen and Caroline Winterer bring together leading scholars to consider how mapmakers depicted time. The essays show that time has often been a major component of what we usually consider to be a spatial medium. Focusing on 500 years of mapmaking in 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.