1998 – 1999 Meetings

Date: September 17, 1998
Title: Something New
Speakers: The Map Staff of the Newberry Library
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

The Map Staff of the Newberry library cordially invites you to a celebration and presentation of a major new cartographic acquisition. Jim Akerman, Bob Karrow, and Pat Morris will present this new and exciting Newberry resource and discuss its significance. (We won’t reveal the identity of the new collection at this time. but if you ever took an automobile trip between 1918 and 1991, we think you’ll find this of interest.)

Date: October 15, 1998
Title: Historic Maps and the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries
Speakers: Michael Conzen, Professor of Geography, University of Chicago, and Douglas York, Program Assistant, Scholl Center for Local, Family, and Community History, The Newberry Library
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

Dr. Michael Conzen and Douglas York will give us a guided tour of the Newberry’s latest exhibit, 1848: Chicago’s Turning Point. Dr. Conzen was the exhibit’s curator and Mr. Knox its assistant curator. The exhibit includes many rare and never before exhibited early maps of Chicago and provides a fresh look at some lesser known but absolutely pivotal events in our city’s history, including the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the construction of the city’s first railroad.

Date: November 12, 1998
Title: Maps of the Mexican Boundary Commission, 1849-1857
Speaker: Paula Rebert, Northern lllinois University
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

Please join us a week earlier than usual for what promises to be an exciting program. Our featured speaker is Dr. Paula Rebert, one of our most loyal members. She will introduce us to one of the lesser known episodes in American cartographic history, but one of long-lasting political and economic significance—the work of the international commission charged with determining the U.S.–Mexican boundary after the war of 1846-48. The evening will commence with a few remarks from Malcolm Lewis about the making of Cartographic Encounters (University of Chicago Press), the most recent volume to emerge from the Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography.

Date: December 10, 1998
Title: Your Favorite Maps
Speakers: Members of the Chicago Map Society
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

It has been several years since we last held one of our holiday “my favorite map” sessions. Please take some time this week to pick out a map from your collection you would like to share and briefly discuss with other members of the society. Public speaking experience is not required.

Date: January 21, 1999
Title: Representing the Pacific: Maps and Narratives 1519–1606
Speaker: Mercedes Maroto Camino, Senior Lecturer, The School of European Languages and Literatures, The University of Auckland
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

Mercedes Maroto Camino has been at the Newberry since November as a History of Cartography Research Fellow. She has graciously agreed to share with us some results of her current research on the relationships between maps and accounts of the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth century.

Date: February 18, 1999
Title: Goode’s Atlas: An American Classic
Speaker: Valerie Krejcie
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

CMS member Valerie Krejcie is an independent scholar, freelance cartographer, and educational specialist who operates her own consulting business that assists educators and publishers in the development of cartographic concepts. She will bring her extensive experience in geography education and cartography to bear in her lecture, which examines the pedagogic value and history of Goode’s World Atlas, a fixture on school library shelves for the better part of this century. Please join us for a new look at a familiar book.

Date: March 18, 1999
Title: Tlon, uqbar, orbis, tertius: An Exploration of Mapping and Art
Speakers: Stephen Farrell, Art Institute of Chicago and Don Pollack, Illinois Institute of Art
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

Please join us this month for an unusual program presented by two local artists and art teachers. Stephen Farrell and Don Pollack probe the relationship between art and cartography, focusing on how they use cartography and mapping concepts in their art instruction. Their presentation will feature the results of student projects as well as their own work.

Date: April 15, 1999
Title: Reflections on the Mapping of Tennessee
Speaker: Ann Harwell Wells
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

Ann Harwell Wells is an antiquarian map dealer and independent publisher from Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of several local histories and several articles on the history of the cartography of Tennessee that have appeared in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. Please join us for her entertaining and insightful survey of the most significant historic maps of Tennessee as well as of many unusual ones that have caught her eye.

Date: May 22, 1999
Title: Map Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France and England
Speaker: Mary Pedley, Assistant Curator of Maps, The William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
Location: Towner Fellows’ Lounge, The Newberry Library

Please note the special date and time for this month’s meeting, which is co-sponsored by the Newberry Library’s Center for Public Programs. We are delighted that Mary Pedley will be gracing our podium again, this time tracing the origins of the French and English national map collections. Dr. Pedley’s lectures are always beautifully illustrated and presented in lively and good-humored style. This program will be especially festive because the lecture accompanies the newly opened Newberry exhibit, The Joy of Collecting, which features several of the library’s cartographic treasures.