Overview

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps. Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations­—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments. At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.  

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9780226438498

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Reviews

Seegel has written a fascinating study of the cosmopolitan wanderings of a group of provincialists. We watch as the biographies of these 'map men'--smart, frustrated, illiberal, self-important, and adventurous--converge to create a 'Non-Republic of Letters' that sought to give national causes an international profile via the politics of cartography. Well researched and with a spritely narrative voice, this book is an original, non-national journey across a deeply nationalist cartographic landscape. --Holly Case, Brown University Creatively researched and beautifully written, Seegel uses biography to refashion the historical map of Central Europe. --Kate Brown, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County Seegel has written a remarkable work--one that is erudite, far-reaching, insightful, and focused on matters of enduring importance for the study of modern Europe. Maps are cold. By comparison, lives are much warmer. The great gift of this book is that it stirs up the placid world of maps so that we feel the lived, often momentous and deeply personal geographies that lay behind them. The life stories that intertwine here perfectly illustrate Seegel's overarching theme of how late nineteenth-century Central Europe's German-dominated Wissenschaft culture was undone in the heat of twentieth-century war and revolution. --Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati

Seegel has written a fascinating study of the cosmopolitan wanderings of a group of provincialists. We watch as the biographies of these 'map men'--smart, frustrated, illiberal, self-important, and adventurous--converge to create a 'Non-Republic of Letters' that sought to give national causes an international profile via the politics of cartography. Well researched and with a spritely narrative voice, this book is an original, non-national journey across a deeply nationalist cartographic landscape. --Holly Case, Brown University Creatively researched and beautifully written, Seegel uses biography to refashion the historical map of Central Europe. --Kate Brown, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County In his brilliant new book, historian Seegel has shifted his focus from maps to the men who make them. . . . Seegel succeeds in making the reader 'more skeptical of national-heroic and literalist readings of lives and maps'. In this and other regards, Map Men should be of great interest to the Polish or East Central European specialist--or for that reason, anyone interested in geographers or cartographers more generally. --H-Net Seegel has written a remarkable work--one that is erudite, far-reaching, insightful, and focused on matters of enduring importance for the study of modern Europe. Maps are cold. By comparison, lives are much warmer. The great gift of this book is that it stirs up the placid world of maps so that we feel the lived, often momentous and deeply personal geographies that lay behind them. The life stories that intertwine here perfectly illustrate Seegel's overarching theme of how late nineteenth-century Central Europe's German-dominated Wissenschaft culture was undone in the heat of twentieth-century war and revolution. --Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati

Author Information

Steven Seegel is professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author of Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire, published by University of Chicago Press, and Ukraine under Western Eyes.

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