Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of twenty-one books on British
and European history, including European Warfare, 1660-1815, published by Yale University Press.
Review
"A marvel of erudition."
--Ian Thompson, Sunday Times
"[This] book is more than an excellent guide to the subject: it also provides a vast quarry of information
on how visions of the world and the past have been warped by political and cultural prejudices. . . . A veritable
encyclopedia of the subject, in which every contributor to the tradition gets a mention and every technical advance
is recorded."
--Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Literary Review
"This is one of those all too rare works which take an obvious but generally neglected source and show how
it can be used to illuminate a central historical question: how societies 'imagined' themselves and their past."
--John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph
"Black's book, with its arch, distant narrative, offers a heavy dose of objectivism. . . . Now that there
are so many fashionable niches of academic study, Black suggests that historians should not only read, but also
look and learn: 'cartography represents power.'"
--Tobias Jones, Observer
"A magisterial work. Profusely illustrated, thoroughly footnoted, and lavishly and delightfully produced,
Black's work is a provocative piece of scholarship."
--Choice
"This is a practical, direct, informed but not dogmatic survey-study, the content of which is sufficiently
fascinating to compensate for the author's leaden prose."
--Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
"This book should be required reading for all history teachers who tend to use atlases in rather uncritical
ways."
--Edward Watson, Teaching History
"Black's book shows just what a historian should reveal: far from being neutral records of the extension of
measurement and rationality, maps have always been profoundly purposeful things. . . . Remarkably, this is the
first survey in English of how people in Europe and America depicted the space in which they lived from Abraham
Ortelius's historical atlas of 1570 to the latest moment."
--Jonathan Clark, Spectator
"[This book] deals splendidly with the most vexing question of historical cartography, and explains the deeply
positivistic tendencies of much historical mapping, [and] deserves a place with the best works on environment,
geohistory, and mentalités. The range of this book is at times breathtaking. . . . A beautifully produced
book."
--Don MacRaild, Archives
"An encyclopedic tour de force."
--Lesley B. Cormack, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Submitted by Yale University Press Web Site, September, 2001
Summary
Historical atlases offer an understanding of the past that is invaluable to historians, not only because they
convey a previous age's sense of space and distance but also because they reveal what historians and educators
of those periods thought important to include or omit. This book--the first comprehensive and wide-ranging account
of the historical atlas--explores the role, development, and nature of this important reference and discusses its
impact on the presentation of the past.
Jeremy Black begins with a consideration of the "pre-history" of the historical atlas: individual maps
depicting the Holy Land at the time of Christ and maps of the classical world. He then examines the first known
historical atlas, the Parergon of Abraham Ortel, which was published in Antwerp in 1579 and was followed by other
works that mapped the world of the Bible and the classics. In the eighteenth century, there was a growing interest
in mapping the post-Classical world, and works appeared that included maps of medieval Europe. In the nineteenth
century, historical maps came increasingly to embody a clear political emphasis, mapping blocs of territory separated
by clear linear frontiers and reflecting an approach to the past focused on undivided sovereignty and the development
of the nation-state.
In the twentieth century, historical atlases have both contributed to and responded to other ideologies, portraying
peoples, languages, and cultural differences in an immediate and often striking visual form. Since 1945 the range
of atlases has broadened to include maps devoted to the global environment, health, population trends, and other
sociological, cultural, and economic changes. And the "liberation" of the Third World and the ending
of the Cold War have stimulated a full scale re-mapping of the globe and the way it is perceived.
