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After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, Hardcover, Illustrated Edition by Rankin, William (Used)

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$1.52

Hardcover: Illustrated Edition
Used: Very Good
9780226339368
022633936X

Publication Date: 2016-07-01
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Hardcover : 398 pages
Edition: Illustrated Edition
Author: Rankin, William
ISBN-10: 022633936X
ISBN-13: 9780226339368

Product Description For most of the twentieth century, maps were indispensable. They were how governments understood, managed, and defended their territory, and during the two world wars they were produced by the hundreds of millions. Cartographers and journalists predicted the dawning of a “map-minded age,” where increasingly state-of-the-art maps would become everyday tools. By the century’s end, however, there had been decisive shift in mapping practices, as the dominant methods of land surveying and print publication were increasingly displaced by electronic navigation systems.             In After the Map, William Rankin argues that although this shift did not render traditional maps obsolete, it did radically change our experience of geographic knowledge, from the God’s-eye view of the map to the embedded subjectivity of GPS. Likewise, older concerns with geographic truth and objectivity have been upstaged by a new emphasis on simplicity, reliability, and convenience. After the Map shows how this change in geographic perspective is ultimately a transformation of the nature of territory, both social and political. Review " After the Map uniquely addresses important questions about the changing nature of territoriality in the twentieth century. The book is thus highly recommended to historians of science—and historians more generally—who have an interest in politics, space, and territoriality, as well as to those inquisitive minds who want to cast a spatial glance into the twenty-first century." ― ISIS " After the Map should sit on the shelf alongside such books as Neil Smith’s American Empire and Susan Schulten’s The Geographical Imagination in America, as part of the pantheon of ground-breaking scholarship that captures that inescapably spatial twentieth century." ― Imago Mundi "This ambitious and detailed book, elegantly written and illustrated, offers a history of the mapping sciences—or, more precisely, "geographic tools" and "geo-epistemology"—in the 20th century. Moving across cartography, geodesy, and navigation, cartographer Rankin traces a gradual but significant shift in the "nature of territory" from a world of cartographic representation firmly tied to the space of the nation-state to very different understandings premised on the coordinates of the global positioning system (GPS). Alongside detailed historical excavation, the text’s strength is its serious, even unprecedented, attempt to draw together scholarship in cartography and historical geography with the history of science—and with a dose of diplomatic or international history, too. Rankin clearly possesses a formidable understanding of his subject, and approaches maps and related technologies with a delightful precision." ― Choice "Traversing varied material, institutional, and conceptual terrains, plotting shifts in how space has been represented and enacted throughout the 20th century, and rendering connections between spatial technologies and politics, After The Map ventures far beyond conventional boundaries of the history of cartography." ― Reviews in History " After the Map:  Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century, has a wealth of good, interesting information." ― Cartographic Perspectives "The questions sustaining Rankin’s inquiry — questions that ultimately remain open at the end of the book — are about how the dramatic shift from traditional to GPS mapping might affect not only our sense of the spatial but also our sense of the political." ― The New Atlantis "William Rankin’s After the Map tracks the ‘geo-epistemology' of surveying and navigation across the twentieth century, from the patchwork international collaboration of creating a reliable world map in the years leading up to World War I to the use of radiolocation technologies eclipsed by the meteoric rise of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in the 1990s. Rankin’s fine analytical sensibility regarding sc


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