Historical Geographies: The Basics provides readers with a thorough grounding in a sub-discipline that revisits the past through a geographical lens. It encourages the reader to pursue researching the past in a usable manner, reflecting on the role of the past in the present and how it might inform geographical thinking. Across seven chapters, the… Read More Paul Griffin and Cheryl McGeachan (2025): Historical Geographies: The Basics. Routledge: London and New York

Within the Habsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century, nature became a central focus of political, economic, and scientific attention. A source of valuable natural resources and a platform for consolidating wider, territorial rule, its management and control was subsumed into a broader system of imperial governance. In this exacting analysis of the correlation between… Read More Jawad Daheur and Iva Lučić (eds.) (2025): Habsburg Natures Imperial Governance and Environment in Central Europe, 1850-1918. Berghahn: New York and Oxford.

Using a transdisciplinary approach, this book examines how scientific understanding of the Earth has been created, transformed, and shared across time – combining perspectives from the history of science, sociology of knowledge, and cultural studies to explore the evolution of Earth sciences. Focusing on the practices, actors, and socio-cultural contexts that have shaped knowledge production,… Read More Norman Henniges, Johannes Mattes, Marianne Klemun (eds.) (2026): Earth–Knowledge. History of Science as Histories of Knowledge? Routledge: London and New York.

n the nineteenth century, changes to the environment, driven by ideology, natural forces, and burgeoning fossil fuel power, shifted the course of the Habsburg Empire. Along the Danube—Europe’s second longest river—hydraulic engineering projects ranging from bridges to embankments and shipping hubs affected the river’s dynamics, as did new activities related to trade, industrialization, sanitation, recreation,… Read More Robert Shields Mevissen (2025): The Danube Empire: An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement. University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh.

What is commonly thought of as the centuries-old field of “the history of cartography” was invented after World War II through incomplete historiographies by Cornelis Koeman, Armando Cortesão, R. A. Skelton, and J. B. Harley. This monograph begins to replace those misleading historiographies with an empirically grounded analysis of the ways in which early maps… Read More Matthew H. Edney (2025): Comparative Map History and “the History of Cartography” Methodologies, Institutions, and Idealizations. Leiden: Brill.

Maps have played a central role in our understanding of what and where defines the North. At the same time, the northernmost reaches of our world have, for much of history, been difficult to navigate and verify, from the mythical islands on medieval maps to the itineraries of Arctic explorers in the nineteenth century. This… Read More Charlotta Forss (2025): Mapping the North: Myth, Exploration, Encounter. Bodleian Library: Oxford.

This book explores the various ways imperial rule constituted and shaped the cities of Eastern Europe until World War I in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. In these three empires, the cities served as hubs of imperial rule: their institutions and infrastructures enabled the diffusion of power within the empires while they also served… Read More Ulrich Hofmeister, Florian Riedler (ed.) (2024): Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman Empires. London and New York: Routledge.

Der Geograph Johannes Justus Rein (1835-1918) wurde im Auftrag des preußischen Handelsministeriums im Jahr 1873 nach Japan entsandt, um der deutschen Wirtschaft das Wissen um die traditionellen Industrien (Papier-, Porzellan- & Lackherstellung) des über Jahrhunderte hinweg verschlossenen Landes zugänglich zu machen. Während seiner zweijährigen Reisetätigkeit führte er darüber hinaus zahlreiche geographische Untersuchungen durch, trat mit… Read More Tobit Nauheim (2025): Ein Geograph in Japan. Praktiken der Forschungsreise Johannes Justus Reins. (Colloquium Geographicum 40). Ferger: Bergisch Gladbach.