Borders in Red shows how Lenin and his Bolshevik leadership embraced the nationality question as a way of managing diversity and institutionalized it as a means of governance. Stephan Rindlisbacher uses the making of national borders as a lens through which to examine the Bolsheviks‘ fundamental shift from proletarian internationalism to ethnonational federalism sui generis.… Read More Stephan Rindlisbacher (2025). Borders in Red. Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union. Cornell: New York.

The blank spots on a map and the legends that speak of terrae incognitae are among the most seductive sirens of the cartographic imagination. They hint at the existence of unknown lands, yet tell us nothing about what they are or what they might be like. Do such lands even exist? How many types of… Read More Carla Lois (2025): Terrae Incognitae. Mapping the Unknown. Brill: Leiden and Boston.

How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences? This book examines these key questions with a unique global perspective. Kerry Goettlich argues that linear boundaries are products of particular colonial encounters, rather than being essentially an intra-European practice artificially imposed on colonized regions. He reconceptualizes modern territoriality as a phenomenon separate from sovereignty… Read More Kerry Goettlich (2025): From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality. CUP: Cambridge.

Der vorliegende Band bietet einen Überblick über die Entwicklung des Verbands für Geographie an deutschsprachigen Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen (VGDH). Sein „Herzstück” bildet ein über 90 Seiten umfassender Zeitstrahl, der zentrale Ereignisse der Verbandsgeschichte chronologisch dokumentiert. Ergänzt wird dieser durch Beiträge, die ausgewählte Entwicklungen vertiefend einordnen und erläutern. Eckart Ehlers zeichnet die Entwicklung der Verbandsstrukturen der… Read More Boris Braun, Franziska Krachten, Carsten Butsch (Hrsg.) (2025): Debatten und Entwicklungslinien – von den Anfängen des VGDH bis heute (= Colloquium Geographicum, Band 41). E. Ferger Verlag: Bonn.

Geogeschichte ist eine Expedition voller Überraschungen, bei der Grataloup einer einzigen Frage auf der Spur ist: Welchen Einfluss hat die Geografie auf den Verlauf der Weltgeschichte? Geologie, Anthropologie, Klimatologie, Demografie, Genetik, Epidemiologie und Ökonomie – sie alle werden in diesem Buch mobilisiert, um die Weltgeschichte von den frühesten Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart auf eine andere… Read More Grataloup, Christian (2025): Geogeschichte. Die Macht der Geografie in der Weltgeschichte. C.H. Beck: München.

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.

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.