For most of human history, the seas and oceans have been the main means of long-distance trade and communication between peoples – for the spread of ideas and religion as well as commerce. This book traces the history of human movement and interaction around and across the world’s greatest bodies of water, charting our relationship… Read More David Abulafia (2019): The Boundless Sea. A Human History of the Oceans. Alan Lane: London.

The Nördlinger Ries and Steinheim Basin, two conspicuous geological structures in southern Germany, were traditionally viewed as somewhat enigmatic but nevertheless definitely volcanic edifices until they were finally recognized as impact craters in the 1960s. The changing views about the origin of the craters mark an important paradigm shift in the Earth sciences, from an… Read More Martina Kölbl-Ebert (2020): From Local Patriotism to a Planetary Perspective. Impact Crater Research in Germany, 1930s-1970s. Routledge, London and New York.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South,… Read More Thomas Lahusen and Schamma Schahadat (eds.) (2020): Postsocialist Landscapes. Real and Imaginary Spaces from Stalinstadt to Pyongyang, transcript: Bielefeld.

Als sich der niederländische Kartograph und Landschaftsmaler Charles William Meredith van de Velde 1851 nach Palästina einschiffte, plante er nichts Geringeres, als eigenhändig das Heilige Land zu vermessen. Lange schon hatte die christliche Welt eine Karte auf Grundlage moderner Vermessungstechnik gefordert. Doch das Osmanische Reich, zu dem Palästina seit Ende der Kreuzzüge gehörte, hatte wenig… Read More Jutta Faehndrich (2020): Als Künstler und Kartograph im Heiligen Land (1851/52): Die drei Palästina des C.W.M. van de Velde, D. Reimer: Berlin.