Date: Thursday, September 19, 2019
Title: Mapping the Solar System
Speaker: Andrew Johnson
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry
The start of our program year is out of this world, as Dr. Andrew Johnston will be joining us from Adler Planetarium to discuss the mapping of the solar system. As the Adler’s Vice President for Astronomy and Collections, Johnston oversees astronomy research, collections care, and history research. Dr. Johnston’s presentation will take us across the cosmos for a history of astronomical observations and celestial cartography of other worlds. We will explore how these challenges evolved through the 20th century: How 50 years ago during the Apollo missions the problem of navigating to the Moon was solved, how the paths of robotic missions to other planets were plotted, and the ways that astronomers and engineers visualized planetary orbits and complex space trajectories.
Date: Thursday, October 17, 2019
Title: Mapping the Impossible: Humboldt in the New World
Speaker: Laura Walls
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry
Please join us for a special presentation at the Newberry Library to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth. In conjunction with the Chicago Sister Cities International program, this meeting will feature a keynote presentation by Dr. Laura Walls as well as a sneak peek of a new documentary on von Humboldt, “La mirada del explorador.”
Laura Dassow Walls first encountered Alexander von Humboldt when a professor told her no one could understand Darwin without reading Humboldt. She was mesmerized by the opening sentences of Views of Nature, and ever since she’s never been far from Humboldt’s spell; her many books include Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, and she co-edited the first modern translation of Humboldt’s Views of Nature. Her presentation will track Humboldt to the Americas and trace how the paradoxes of place left him devising new ways for maps to beckon a new world into being.
Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Date: Thursday, November 21, 2019
Title: The Place Native Americans Called Chicagoua
Speaker: The Windy City Historians
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry
It’s all about “Location, Location, Location” and the word Chicago has referred to at least three geographic locations, multiple rivers and creeks, and two portage routes, begging the question, What if our Chicago isn’t really Chicago? For more than three decades retired attorney and historian John Swenson has worked on unraveling historic confusion to reveal an entirely new interpretation of the history and French discovery of Chicago.
Join us as Swenson provides a new spin on early Chicago history. We’ll hear about his deep dive into original French documents, secondary sources, and early maps to identify a second “Chicagoua” portage near Frankfort and an ancient Indian mound in suburban Olympia Fields. This history first captured in interviews on the new Windy City Historians Podcast, co-hosts Christopher Lynch and Patrick McBriarty will join Swenson to support the telling of this groundbreaking new history.
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2019
Title: Holiday Gala and Auction
Speaker: Holiday Party
Location: Baskes and Rettinger Halls, The Newberry
We hope that you will join us for our annual Holiday Gala, which will feature an especially full smorgasbord of holiday treats for your dining and drinking pleasure. We will continue our tradition of pairing this party with our “Members’ Night,” which allows our members to showcase a special item in their personal collections. In the past, we’ve enjoyed hearing about maps, atlases, globes, and “cartifacts”—old, new, borrowed, and blue (yes, we have seen blueprints). You will be given five to ten minutes to talk about your item, which we can display on an easel; you may also use the projector in Ruggles to make a PowerPoint presentation or display a pdf image.
The Holiday Gala will also include a Silent Auction of any items that you may wish to donate to the Society—the full value of which is tax-deductible! To help us assemble our program, please email us by December 12 with details about any item you would like to present to the group and/or donate for the auction.
Date: Thursday, January 16, 2020
Title: Seventeen Fascinating World Oddities
Speaker: Chuck Olsen
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry
Take a trip across the planet to discover the cultural and historical backstories behind some of the most unusual international and interstate borders on the map! Charles “Chuck” Olsen (BA in International Relations and MBA in International Business from UW-Madison) is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel with 21 years of service who has visited over 30 countries. He is a globe collector with a lifelong passion for cartography and cultural geography.
Date: Thursday, February 20, 2020
Title: Time, Travel, and Mapping the Landscapes of War
Speaker: Jim Akerman
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry
Just as the conduct of war has, throughout modern history, necessitated the production of a massive cartographic archive, so have the geographical complexities of battlefields and campaigns defied the comprehension of battlefield tourists, in ways that would seem to call for purpose-made maps. The creation of maps for military tourists has nevertheless had an uneven history, subject to the availability of good sources and especially the influence of technology. The successful map must direct the tourist’s imagination toward the action of battle to the fullest extent possible while grappling with two problems: that the action has passed—it is not present—and that the landscape by which one might recall that past has changed over time. In this paper, Jim Akerman offers a preliminary survey of the representational tactics developed by guidebook authors and mapmakers over the past two centuries (primarily for American battlefield tourists) a particularly robust form of what we might call “time traveling”: travel directed at developing insights about past events by visiting the terrain where they unfolded.