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Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark's Map of Their
Adventure and Discovery for President Thomas Jefferson and the United States of America.
© Suburban Journals of Chicago Inc. photo

John W. Mc Carter Jr., Field Museum President, Welcomes
Visitors and Introduces the Honorable Kenneth Nebenzahl

Chicago Area Festival of Maps Information and Links

MAPS Opens at the Field Museum

report by Ed Vincent

The exhibit of Maps is happening throughout the Chicago area,
and many places have their exhibits limited in scope, focusing
on what they have found pertinent to their objectives. Brookfield Zoo's show tells of their early development with maps on the early plans and layouts of the grounds. The Chicago Historical society
draws a great deal on the Chicago fire. The show at the Field
Museum is the most diverse and gifted of all the venues in the exhibitions.

We have yet to see the event at the Science and Industry Museum's
show, which is set to open soon. On the opening of the Field's Museum's show I had the distinct honor and pleasure to have some private time with Mr. Ken Nebenzahl. We had a coffee and spoke about his love for maps and how it all started in his youth when he began collecting travel maps from the individual states. His last map from the contiguous United States came from a friend of his. Mr.
Nebenzahl's last map came from Idaho-and now he had them all.
He put them on the floor and had an instant atlas that went from
sea to shining sea, even before Rand McNally had put together
their famous road atlases.

Mr. Ken Nebenzahl was in High School when World War II started,
and like many young patriotic Americans he left his last year of High School until after the war, and after his becoming a Marine. I complemented him on his efforts in the Corp and he was proud to note their motto: "Semper Fi". He returned home and back to school after the war and went to Columbia University in New York for a time. Most of his learning was by hard knocks and lots of diligent
effort. Mr. Nebenzahl is a very personable man and with a charming character. He was telling me how many of the French chateaux had mirrors above their beds, but that he prefers Maps. He and his wife can lay upon their bed and look upward to their next destination, a world map covers their bedroom's ceiling.

Mr. Nebenzahl's love of maps has a long history, and his history
with maps is a note of pride and honor at many institutions around the region. This display, and others we have seen are a treat for the
curious with an interest in maps, history, travel, and culture--all are
addressed in this fun exhibit. Come and have a look, and be entertained and enlightened.

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Fashion and map aficionados alike will enjoy this map of London on a glove created for the 1851 Great Exhibition.
Photo Credit:
Reproduced by permission of The National Archives of the United Kingdom

THE EXHIBITION AT A GLANCE

Exhibition Title: MAPS: FINDING OUR PLACE IN THE
WORLD

Exhibition Dates: November 2, 2007, to January 28, 2008

Overview: From clay tablets to sea charts, from satellite
navigation systems to tantalizing sketches of worlds
real and imagined – maps tell us much more than how
to get from where we are to where we want to be.
They help us visualize the places we inhabit, see and
study the unknown, understand our place in the world
as it is and shape it for the future.

This rare exhibition of the world’s greatest maps
features more than 130 exquisite original maps, globes, and
artifacts, along with examples of cutting-edge technology and engaging interactive displays. Maps: Finding Our Place in
the World is a once-in-a-lifetime journey through landscapes
of time and space, science and imagination. You’ll see maps
created by traders and navigators, by scientists like Ptolemy and Leonardo da Vinci, and by dreamers from J.R.R. Tolkien to
Internet pioneers. You’ll learn how early maps were made, see
how the technology changed over centuries, and try out the latest advances in digital mapping.

At once historical, cultural, and futuristic, this exhibition is for
anyone who has opened a map, an atlas, or a GPS program
and wondered: Who made this fascinating object? How did
they do it? What stories does it tell?

Mapped Portions of the United Kingdom

Location: The Field Museum

1400 S. Lake Shore Drive

Chicago, Illinois 60605-2496

Phone Numbers: 312/922-9410 General Field Museum Information

312/665-7100 Public Relations (not for publication)

Organizers: Maps: Finding Our Place in the World is organized by The Field Museum and The Newberry Library.

Sponsor: Presented by NAVTEQ.

Admission: Tickets to Maps include Museum admission and are priced at $19 for adults, $14 for seniors and students with ID, $9 for children 4-11. Discounts are available for Chicago residents. Visit www.fieldmuseum.org or call 312-922-9410 for details.

To purchase tickets call 866-FIELD-03 (866-343-5303), visit www.fieldmuseum.org, or come to the Field Museum box office.

Special rates are available for tour operators and groups of 15 or more. Call the Museum’s Group Sales office toll-free at 888-FIELD-85

(888-343-5385).

Public Programs: The Field Museum is offering a variety of public programs to complement the exhibition. For up-to-date information visit www.fieldmuseum.org or call 312-665-7400.

Companion Book: Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, edited by James Akerman and Robert R. Karrow, Jr., with an introduction by Karrow. This colorful and fascinating book is for map-lovers and for those who don’t yet know they are map-lovers. While its chapters reflect the themes of the exhibition, it is not a catalog but a fascinating expansion of the exhibition’s ideas and objects, meant in part to stretch the reader’s idea of “mapness.” Of its 200 color illustrations, only 20 are of objects in the exhibition. The book offers countless revealing and sometimes amusing insights into the meaning and unsuspected power of maps. Published by The University of Chicago Press, fall 2007. Available at The Field Museum, $55.

A Map of the Known World Right After Cristival Colon (Christopher Columbus) Discovered the New World -- Note the Spanish Names on
the coast of China for Areas in his Travel
© Suburban Journals of Chicago Inc. photo

Find Your Way – and Your World – through Maps

Maps: Finding Our Place in the World takes visitors on a journey through time and culture, geography and imagination, art and technology – to discover how maps help us understand our world, our history, and ourselves. The exhibition explores innovative mapping technologies from the past, present, and future, and presents maps from cultures around the globe.

Introduction

The spectacular and rarely opened Atlas of the Great Elector is an apt beginning to the journey. Standing almost seven feet tall, weighing 275 pounds, and bound in fine leather and gold with brass fittings, it is obviously more than a geographic tool. It is a symbol of its owner’s learning and worldliness, of the power and wealth of the Prussian state, of national pride – and an early hint that the maps visitors will see in this exhibition will tell us more than how to get from “here” to “there.”

Gerard Mercator, a mathematician and cartographer, spent years developing this projection, first printed in 1569, which remains the
essential projection for sea, air and space navigation.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the University Library, Basel, Switzerland

Gallery One: Finding Our Way

The groundbreaking graphic simplicity of the London Underground map has made it an icon among wayfinding maps. Like this example, many of the most familiar maps are designed to help us travel a route from one point to the next. But that doesn’t mean they all look like the road map in your glove compartment. In the first gallery, visitors will discover that diverse approaches to wayfinding reflect the scope of human experience. For example, visitors can follow a thirteenth-century map that guided pilgrims on an imagined spiritual journey to the Holy Land. They’ll see a “Photo-Auto Guide,” a low-tech ancestor of today’s in-car navigation systems, with its turn-by-turn pictures taken by a camera mounted on the hood of
a car. And in a video illustrating the modern version, they’ll learn the role that satellites and geographers play in supporting in-car navigation systems.

While maps for ground travel may use landmarks, other environments require different approaches. Visitors will encounter the fifteenth-century Carte Pisane,
the earliest existing portolan chart that showed navigators precisely how to sail between points on the Mediterranean coastline; and they’ll see a navigation chart from the Marshall Islands, constructed of sticks and shells, that depicts patterns of waves and currents that helped sailors find their way from one island to another in the Pacific Ocean. Air travel takes off with an artifact from one of modern history’s most celebrated events: the map Charles Lindbergh assembled, annotated, and carried with him, charting the shortest course by air from New York to Paris.

Gallery Two: Mapping the World

Lindbergh based his map in part on that of another great traveler, a name many visitors will recognize: Gerard Mercator, whose system of mapping lives on in nearly every American classroom. In gallery two, visitors will come face to face with his 1569 world map, the famous Mercator projection that is still used to navigate the seas…and now, outer space.

Mercator’s projection is one example of the scientific approach to map-making
that began with Ptolemy, one of whose maps is here as well. These are displayed along with Captain Cook’s chronometer and an astrolabe, inventions that, along
with the compass, allowed navigators to keep track of their latitude and longitude
in navigating the seas. A computer animation lets visitors see for themselves what happened when cartographers brought these instruments together to create what we now know as modern world maps.

In this gallery visitors will also see how diverse cultures have sought to visualize not only the physical earth but spiritual realms. Maps representing the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, and Christian traditions show how different people incorporated geographic knowledge into their religious worldviews. A medieval European map of the world, for example, shows Jerusalem at the center, while on a Hindu globe the continents emerge like lotus leaves from the central pole of Mount Meru.

Leonardo da Vinci's Northern Italy— With his map of central Italy, Leonardo da Vinci introduced the cartographic convention of using
color to indicate changes in elevation.
Photo Credit:
Royal Collection © 2006 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Gallery Three: Mapping Places

In Jacobo de Barbari’s beautiful woodblock print – a bird’s-eye view of Venice from the Italian Renaissance – we see the city, with its magnificent ships and buildings, in monumental aspect. This gallery, the largest and most diverse in the exhibition, shows what maps can tell us through the mapmaker’s choice of materials and representational styles. From the ancient Babylonian city of Nippur to modern Europe, from the Peruvian Andes to central Africa, maps of communities, cities, nations, and specific regions cast light on what was important to those who made them.

The gallery includes maps drawn on clay tablets, molded into pottery, drawn on papyrus and deerskin, carved into wood, and painted in reindeer blood. A video illustrates the basic process of surveying, translating the physical lay of the land; visitors will see that while technology has moved from optics to lasers, fundamental principles such as triangulation are timeless.

Here visitors will encounter the oldest identifiable city plan, a map of the town of Nippur in what is now Iraq; inscribed on a clay tablet, the map dates to about 1500 BCE. They’ll see objects we would scarcely recognize as maps, such as a papyrus text dating from the fourth century BCE and a lukasa memory board, a carved map of spiritual geography as well as earthly space that could be interpreted only by members of an elite secret society in the eastern Congo.

Among the many stunning and historically important objects in this gallery are fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a monumental Roman map cut in marble; Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches for the street plan of the city of Imola; maps from
The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes, a twelfth-to
thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript that came to light just a few years ago; and a British national treasure making its first appearance outside the United Kingdom: the Gough map, a thirteenth-century map of Britain believed to be the first large and generally accurate map of a European country.

This map 1524 map depicts the thriving Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, based
on the eyewitness account of Hernan Cortés.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Newberry Library

Gallery Four: Mapping History

In 1782, British and American negotiators met to sign a peace treaty and define the territory of the new American nation. They used a map drawn some years earlier by John Mitchell, on which they outlined the U.S. boundaries in red, creating what came to be known as the “red line map.” After the treaty was signed, the map was presented to King George III, who made his own notes on it.

    The red line map is one of several maps in the exhibition that not only document history but played a role in shaping it. Such maps reveal both what was and what people aspired to. For example, a 1784 map attributed to Thomas Jefferson outlines the proposed western states; and an 1849 map of the California trail charts the westward expansion that settlers were beginning to see as their “Manifest Destiny.”

    A few steps away visitors will discover a different view of those aspirations: a map drawn in 1837 by Non-chi-ning-ga, an Ioway Indian, shows the historical movements of his people and stakes out their rights to their territory. An even older map similarly challenges the idea of the New World as vacant territory waiting to be claimed: a map of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, which Hernan Cortés triumphantly sent back to Spain in 1524 clearly shows the existence of a great city with a thriving culture at the center of a great empire.

Gallery Five: Visualizing Nature and Society

It has been called “the Map that changed the world,” and for good reason.
William Smith’s early-nineteenth-century map of geological strata across England and Wales helped to overturn long-held ideas about the age of the Earth…and laid a foundation for Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Scientists use maps in remarkable and often ingenious ways to manage information and study the world from new angles. Their maps reveal patterns and phenomena
that are otherwise unseen – in effect, giving shape to the invisible. This gallery holds many fascinating examples in addition to the Smith map. Visitors will encounter maps that revolutionized branches of science from epidemiology to plate tectonics; maps that illuminated issues in linguistics and sociology; and a beautiful drawing by Leonardo da Vinci that was the first map to use color to show changes in a landscape’s elevation – a technique centuries ahead of its time.

    Visitors will also see several interactive displays illustrating how Field Museum scientists use maps and mapping technologies in their research. One, for example,
will bring to life mammalologist Bruce Patterson’s use of radio telemetry and satellites to study the behavior of lions in Kenya. With the press of a button, visitors can see live-feed data on the movements of Kiboche, a male lion currently wearing one of Patterson’s radio-signal collars. In another interactive, visitors will explore the remote-sensing technology that archeologist Ryan Williams uses to see deep into the ground and across wide areas to uncover remnants of ancient civilizations.

Gallery Six: Mapping Imaginary Worlds

Where is the treasure on Treasure Island? Where will the yellow brick road take Dorothy before she gets to Oz? The books of our childhood are mapped on paper
as well as in our hearts. While most cartographers use their imagination to help us visualize real things, like a round Earth or a continent divided into nations, others use the realistic methods of map-making to show us imaginary places.

    This gallery is devoted to maps of places that have been traveled by countless readers, though they exist nowhere on earth. From Lilliput to Middle Earth, from Utopia to Yoknapatawpha County, visitors will delight in maps from favorite literary works. Many will consider the star of this gallery to be J.R.R. Tolkien, a man almost as obsessed with mapping Middle Earth as with telling its characters’ stories. Two of Tolkien’s original drawings are here, including Thror’s Map, which was published in The Hobbit, and one that he drew only for himself.

Gallery Seven: Living with Maps

Imagine that your cell phone could suggest a customized jogging route with precisely the level of hills you like. Or that while you’re walking through a new neighborhood, your handheld device could give you information about apartments for rent or special sales nearby. And how much easier would your life be if your in-car navigation system could notify you of difficult traffic conditions ahead and suggest an alternate route? Maps like these are just over the horizon …and
visitors will have a chance to preview them in the exhibition’s final gallery.

Once the property only of the elite, maps long ago became an essential element of
our everyday lives – whether we’re riding a subway, taking a road trip, or watching the evening news. The gallery begins with some early, low-tech example: maps used in interior decoration, wearable maps, maps for tourists and travelers, and maps made for children – including the world’s first jigsaw puzzle, a map of Europe divided into its countries.

    These maps, like the others in this exhibition, served the needs of their times.
But times – and technologies – are changing faster than ever before, as visitors will discover when they step into a highly immersive experience on the frontiers of mapping. Through a variety of interactive displays they can learn how digital maps
are made…share a public exploration of any spot in the world through Google Earth…and dig into the demographics of any neighborhood in the U.S. They’ll discover how leading-edge map technology is being used to define special conservation areas, set up boundaries around military operations and public events, and respond to natural disasters.   And they’ll have an opportunity to try out the high-tech, multi-purpose maps that will be a part of our everyday lives tomorrow.

Chicago Area Festival of Maps

Information on GIS (Graphical Information Systems)

Lewis and Clark Expedition with Multi Media

Journals Online of Lewis and Clark Expedition

Every Map Has a Story to Tell

A compelling story could be told about almost any map in this exhibition. Here are a few.

This map 1524 map depicts the thriving Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, based
on the eyewitness account of Hernan Cortés.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Newberry Library

Cultures Cross in Tenochtitlan

When Hernan Cortés entered the ancient city of Tenochtitlan he was stunned by what lay before him. The Aztec capital was not only enormous – bigger than Paris in its day – but politically organized and technologically advanced. A carefully planned city constructed in the middle of a mountain lake, it boasted broad avenues and causeways, busy canals, ornate temples and public buildings, wide bridges, aqueducts bringing water from distant mountains, bustling markets, botanical gardens…and armies of street cleaners and garbage collectors, something unheard of in Europe.

    How could Cortés describe to Charles V, King of Spain, the city he had conquered? And how could he boast of his conquest and at the same time justify holding captive the ruler of a civilized nation? His second letter to the king is exuberant and detailed – but the map he sent with it tells even more.

    Though the woodcut made from the map uses European techniques, including buildings shown in perspective, some scholars believe it is based on an indigenous Aztec map and embodies the culture’s idea of Tenochtitlan, grounded in the way the Aztecs viewed the cosmos. At the map’s center is the temple precinct, surrounded by a circular city set in the middle of a circular lake – ideal rather than actual spatial relationships. The temple precinct’s great expanse and dozens of buildings are reduced to its most significant and symbolic elements: two oversized pyramids with the sun rising between them, racks for human skulls, and a headless sacrificial victim or idol at the pyramids’ base. To the Aztecs, says one scholar, the ritual of human sacrifice is what made the temple precinct divine. To Cortés and King Charles, it would have meant something very different: that despite their great accomplishments, the Aztecs were barbaric, ignorant of Christianity, and corrupted by the sin of human sacrifice.

Defining a New Nation

How does a new nation define its borders? With rivers and coastlines…with
walls and fences…in words and measurements…and in maps. For the American and British diplomats who negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War and created the United States, the defining map was one
first drafted by John Mitchell more than thirty years earlier.

Mitchell, a physician-botanist with no prior mapping experience, could hardly have guessed that his map would one day be used to separate the former colonies from British control. His intent had been quite different: to reinforce British control in North America.

    Born into a well-off family in colonial Virginia in 1711, Mitchell had studied medicine in Scotland and spent his spare time on botany. In his 30s, though, his interests turned to the French threat to the British colonies. In the late 1740s,
many British colonists thought that the French were ignoring a treaty signed 35 years earlier and were encroaching on British territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. To publicize the threat, Mitchell drew a map of all the
colonies – for a British public, and from a British point of view. Wherever there was disputed territory, Mitchell assigned it to the British.

    Though his first draft was crude, it came to the attention of the British government, which badly needed a large, detailed map of all of North America. The government had the colonial governors send their own maps and boundary information to Mitchell, who published a more detailed and annotated map of the colonies in 1755. Mitchell died in 1768, eight years before the start of the American Revolution.

    After the Revolutionary War, when British and American negotiators met in Paris to draft a peace treaty, their most important task was to set the boundaries
of the United States. Though the treaty defined those boundaries only in words, the negotiators relied on Mitchell’s map to trace them out. Several versions were outlined: one by John Jay from the American delegation, who traced his understanding of the boundaries, and another by the British negotiator Richard Oswald, who traced the outlines of all earlier treaties. Finally, Oswald added a thin red line, in ink, marking the British interpretation of the new nation – the version that was at last accepted by all the parties.

    When the treaty was concluded, Oswald gave this “red line” map as a gift – no doubt a somewhat rueful one – to King George III.

The original map drawn by Dr. John Snow (1813-1858), an English medical
doctor who mapped all the known cases of cholera in the London epidemic of 1854, showing both the areas of death-infection and the pumps located near them (one of the first cases of GIS --Graphical Information Systems).

Mapping an Epidemic

It was the last week of August, 1854, when residents of a small, poor, and densely crowded neighborhood in London began to fall ill with stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, and intense thirst. Seventy people died within one 24-hour period; in ten days some 500 lay dead.

    It didn’t take long for medical authorities to recognize the disease as one that had killed thousands in Britain in outbreaks in the 1820s and ’40s: it was the dreaded cholera. But stopping the epidemic was another matter, since no one at the time knew what caused cholera or how it was spread. The leading theory, held even by the eminent physician William Farr, one of the founders of epidemiology, maintained that it was miasma, disease carried by poisonous, foul-smelling “vapors.”

John Snow, a pioneering anesthesiologist, thought otherwise. He had treated patients during cholera outbreaks a few years earlier, and was convinced that this was a bowel disease contracted by eating or drinking something contaminated.
He strongly suspected the public water pump, since that was how most poor Londoners obtained their water.

Snow combed the neighborhood, visiting some of the homes where people had died and asking where they got their water. The evidence pointed to one source: the Broad Street Pump. When Snow marked the incidence of deaths (which eventually totaled more than 600) on a street map of the area, it was clear that the highest concentration centered around the pump. What’s more, among those who worked at the nearby Lion Brewer (and drank malt liquor rather than water) or in the workhouse (which had its own pump), there were no cases of cholera.

Even before he drew his now famous map, Snow took his theory to the local Board of Governors and asked them to close down the pump. Though they doubted his theory, they agreed to do so, and the epidemic quickly subsided.
Although the cholera bacterium was identified that same year, it was decades before it became widely known. Snow’s map, though, shows that epidemiologic studies can produce successful prevention strategies even without knowing the mechanism of a disease.

How the Earth Works

The first half of the twentieth century wasn’t an easy time for a woman who wanted to be a geologist. But Marie Tharp had luck on her side. When America’s young men went off to fight in World War II, the University of Michigan opened its geology department to women for the first time, and Tharp soon earned a master’s degree. Hired by an Oklahoma oil company, she wasn’t permitted to work with the men searching for oil in the field, and instead was assigned to organize the data and maps they used. In her spare time, she picked up a degree in mathematics.

    Tharp was then hired by the geology department at Columbia University – not
as a scientist, but as a technical assistant, helping graduate students with their data. She soon found herself working with a short-tempered student named Bruce Heezen. He asked her to take the sonar measurements he and others had made
of the depth of the Atlantic and plot them on huge sheets of paper, point by point. As she filled in the data, these two-dimensional maps became three-dimensional landscapes, revealing the details of the ocean floor. She saw the well-known Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a mountain range running down the middle of the ocean floor, following the curves of the continents on either side. But Tharp saw something new in the map: a deep valley dividing the crest of the mountain range.

    To her, the rift was a clear sign that the ocean floor was pulling apart as new rock came up from inside the earth – evidence of a theory, advanced by a few geologists, known then as continental drift. In the 1950s, though, a scientist could be fired for being a “drifter,” and Heezen dismissed her findings as “girl talk.”
They argued loudly for many months, but as the evidence piled up, Heezen came around. Their first map of the Atlantic was published in 1957.

Tharp subsequently was fired, and although Heezen had become a tenured professor, they were forced to take their work off campus. Over the next twenty years Tharp and Heezen mapped all the world’s oceans from her home. In 1977 they published the “World Ocean Floor,” showing the earth as though all its water had been drained off – and revealing a continuous, 40,000-mile-long ridge girdling the planet. The map remains a tool for geologists studying plate tectonics. As one long-time colleague said, “[Marie] didn’t just make maps; she understood how the earth works.”

Chicago Area Festival of Maps

Information on GIS (Graphical Information Systems)

Lewis and Clark Expedition with Multi Media

Journals Online of Lewis and Clark Expedition