Landkarten – Bilden sie unsere Welt ab? Oder gestalten sie sie? Karten sind nützlich, aber limitiert. Ihre Entstehung ist Ausdruck von Macht, Geld und Zugang zu Bildung. Deswegen ist es sinnvoll zu wissen, welche Geschichte hinter Karten steckt – und welches Potential. Autorin: Julia Fritzsche 23 Min. | 4.10.2023 VON: Julia Fritzsche Ausstrahlung am 5.10.2023… Read More RadioWissen: Die Politik der Landkarten – Über Macht und Größenverhältnisse, BR podcast, Bayern 2, 4.10.2023.

The story of how the map of New Zealand emergedis a fascinating one. The first full map of the islands was published in Londonin 1773, which might seem the natural starting point, but over the preceding150 years, fragments of charts and intelligence about New Zealand ricochetedaround various parts of the world.  In ADraught of the… Read More Paul Moon (2023): A Draught of the South Land: Mapping New Zealand from Tasman to Cook. Lutterworth Press: Cambridge.

How did a generation of academic geographers engage with constitutional decolonisation during the end of the British empire in Africa? In Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1990, Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate explore how the teaching, research, administration and activism of geographers in Africa shaped the decolonisation… Read More Ruth Craggs, Hannah Neate (2023): Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998. John Wiley & Sons: Chichester.

The publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state… Read More John Rennie Short (2022): The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century: Power, State and Territory. Anthem Press: London.

Catherine Horel has undertaken a comparative analysis of the societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as represented in twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By purposely selecting these cities, the author aims to counter the disproportionate attention that the… Read More Catherine Horel (2023): Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire. Imagined Communities and Conflictual Encounters. CEU Press: Budapest, Vienna, New York.

Writing with authority and brio, Giulio Boc­caletti—honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Univer­sity of Oxford—shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civ­ilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers. Even as he describes how these societies were made… Read More Giulio Boccaletti (2021): Water: A Biography. Pantheon: London.

What is—and what was—“the world”? Though often treated as interchangeable with the ongoing and inexorable progress of globalization, concepts of “world,” “globe,” or “earth” instead suggest something limited and absolute. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume concerns itself with this central paradox: that the complex, heterogeneous, and purportedly transhistorical dynamics of globalization have given rise to… Read More Helge Jordheim and Erling Sandmo (eds.) (2019): Conceptualizing the World: An Exploration Across Disciplines (Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations, 4). Berghahn: New York and Oxford.

In achtzehn exemplarischen Inselerkundungen – von der faktualen Isla Juan Fernandez über das historische Formosa und das berühmte Pitcairn bis zur fiktionalen Pip‘s Island – erzählen Roland Borgards, Lena Kugler und Mira Shah eine Geschichte des pazifischen Inselmeers. Zwei Themenbereiche tauchen auf diesen Pazifischen Passagen immer wieder auf: Zum einen liefern die Autor:innen Fragmente der… Read More Roland Borgards, Lena Kugler und Mira Shah (2023): Pazifische Passagen. Ein Insularium des Großen Ozeans. Wallstein: Göttingen.