The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and… Read More Sören Urbansky (2020): Beyond the Steppe Frontier. A History of the Sino-Russian Border. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

As global temperatures rise under the forcing hand of humanity&;s greenhouse gas emissions, new questions are being asked of how societies make sense of their weather, of the cultural values, which are afforded to climate, and of how environmental futures are imagined, feared, predicted, and remade. Weather, Climate, and Geographical Imagination contributes to this conversation… Read More Martin Mahony and Samuel Randalls (2020): Weather, Climate, and the Geographical Imagination : Placing Atmospheric Knowledges, University of Pittsburgh Press: Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This study explores how the rise of institutional geography in Victorian England impacted imperial fiction’s emergence as a genre characterized by a preoccupation with space and place. This volume argues that the alliance between institutional geography and the British empire which commenced with the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, shaped the spatial… Read More Jean Fernandez (2020): Geography and the Literary Imagination in Victorian Fictions of Empire: The Poetics of Imperial Space (= Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 57), Routledge: New York

Beginning around 1500, in the decades following Columbus’s voyages, the Atlantic Ocean moved from the periphery to the center on European world maps. This brief but highly significant moment in early modern European history marks not only a paradigm shift in how the world was mapped but also the opening of what historians call the… Read More Metcalf, Alida C. (2020): Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500, John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.

Historical geography is an active, theoretically-informed and vibrant field of study within modern geography, with strong interdisciplinary connections with the humanities and the social sciences. The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography provides an international and in-depth overview of the field with chapters that examine the history, present condition and future significance of historical geography in… Read More Mona Domosh, Michael Heffernan, Charles W. J. Withers (eds.) (2020): The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography. Sage: Los Angeles u.a.

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, maps are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. It is these very characteristics, however, that give maps their importance in understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world and that give historical maps… Read More Kathleen A. Brosnan, James R. Akerman (eds.) (2020): Mapping Nature across the Americas, University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

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.