History 450 - JYW Seminar in History

This seminar trains students in historical research techniques and the writing of history, and fulfills the University's Junior Writing requirement. See the History Department course description guide for various sectional sub-titles and descriptions.

Open to juniors and seniors only. In the 21st century we tend to take maps for granted. Even as paper maps become increasingly rare in everyday life, many of us interact regularly with digital maps on a regular basis (for example, with Google Maps), and it has become increasingly easy for ?ordinary? people to create maps using digital tools. But what is a map? How have maps, and the purposes they serve, varied over time and in different places and human societies? Why should historians be concerned with studying maps? And in what ways are maps ?political?? We begin by discussing these broad questions and then explore case studies of how maps and map-making have been connected to politics and the exercise of power between premodern times and the twenty-first century. We'll work with primary sources that include digitized historical map collections and 19th-century atlases in the DuBois Library's Special Collections.