Since the publication of the first volume of The History of Cartography in 1987, the series has been the flagship of a new kind of map history. The series’ volumes have prompted scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to engage with maps as multifaceted cultural documents and as powerful social instruments. The series is the starting point for anyone interested in how people have produced and consumed maps around the globe and throughout human history.
The new approach has been so successful that the series has had to grow to accommodate the new voices and new interpretations. Founding editors J. B. Harley and David Woodward initially envisioned four volumes that would total one million words. The series now comprises six volumes: Volume Two was published in three separate books (1992–1998), and the one million words and one thousand illustrations in each of Volumes Three through Six requires them all to be bound in two parts. All but Volume Five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, have been published.
Although the large format and high-quality image reproduction of the printed books (see right-hand column) are still well-suited to the requirements of map historians, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts everywhere.
On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the five published volumes of The History of Cartography in PDF format. Navigate to the PDFs from the left-hand column. Each chapter of each book is a single PDF. The search box on the left allows searching across the content of the PDFs that make up all eight books.
“An important scholarly enterprise, the History of Cartography … is the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken …. People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times
“It is permitted to few scholars both to extend the boundaries of their field of study and to redefine it as a discipline. Yet that is precisely what The History as a whole is doing.”—Paul Wheatley, Imago Mundi
“A major scholarly publishing achievement.… We will learn much not only about maps, but about how and why and with what consequences civilizations have apprehended, expanded, and utilized the potential of maps.”—Josef W. Konvitz, Isis