When the French Colonial Historical Society/Societe d'Histoire Coloniale Francaise decided to hold its 1991 meeting in Chicago, under the auspices of the Smith Center for the History of Cartography, it seemed a good idea to accompany this meeting with a display of maps. We wanted maps to show the actual implantation of French settlement on the ground in North America, with some detail of the way the settlers laid out their fields, organized their fortifications, built their houses and so forth. So it was no use turning to the well-worn small-scale printed maps that we have often seen; here we needed large-scale, mostly manuscript maps.

Mapping the French Empire in North America: An interpretive guide to the exhibition mounted at the Newberry Library on the occasion of the seventeenth ... Française, with the support of Barry MacLean

Buisseret, David

Newberry Library

To mark its 125th anniversary, the Newberry has assembled one hundred and twenty-five of its most significant objects in one beautifully illustrated volume. Arranged in order to tell both the story of the library as an institution and its collecting history, The Newberry 125 covers a great breadth of topics including: American culture throughout the ages; the history of Chicago and the Midwest; geography and exploration; religion; music and dance; Medieval and Renaissance studies; and the indigenous peoples of North America. Each of the highlighted items has been photographed in stunning full color and is accompanied by a brief description, its call number, and a concise yet informative essay by a Newberry curator, librarian, or researcher on the object’s importance to the collection. By describing the unique physical qualities of these items, as well as their great scholarly import, these essays remind us how irreplaceable many of these maps, books, and documents are—and how much they still have to offer us. The pieces themselves show us the amazing power of physical objects, particularly the products of humanists over many centuries. Included are items as varied as a painting by Elbridge Ayer Burbank, the correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, the earliest print version of Voltaire’s Candide, and a copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia that dates from the fifteenth century. The Newberry 125 is as wide-ranging and impressive as the library itself, and it serves as a wonderful introduction to the collection, as well as a new and fascinating lens through which visitors and fans can view the Newberry.

The Newberry 125: Stories of Our Collection

Reference

Gardens of delight: Maps and travel accounts of Illinois and the Great Lakes from the collection of Hermon Dunlap Smith : an exhibition at the ... 29 October 1984 - 31 January 1985 : catalog

Karrow, Robert W

Catalogs & Directories

Tools of Empire : Ships and Maps in the Process of Westward Expansion

David Buisseret

This biography of the legendary mistress of King Louis XV of France offers insights into the life of one of the most enchanting, powerful and feared women to grace the world's stage.

Two by Two: Twenty-two Pairs of Maps from the Newberry Library Illustrating 500 Years of Western Cartographic History

Science & Math

Akerman, James R.

Karrow Jr., Robert W.

Astronomy & Space Science

With almost 300 maps, 767 books, and two dozen art works and artifacts, the Gerald F. Fitzgerald collection is a major assemblage of material on the discovery and exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. This catalog provides full descriptions of all the important nineteenth and twentieth century published accounts, the personal map collection of explorer James Mann Wordie, and manuscript letters of Peary, Scott, Shackleton, Mawson and others. The book concludes with detailed indexes to authors, titles, and subjects.

The Gerald F. Fitzgerald Collection of Polar Books, Maps, and Art at the Newberry Library

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

What makes a map a treasure? Cartographic Treasures of the Newberry Library is an extended meditation on this simple question that defines a simple answer. The maps in this catalogue were selected from the approximately 300,000 historic maps in Chicago's Newberry Library. They include many of the Library's oldest, rarest, and most exquisite maps—treasures in the conventional sense of the word. But there are also "common" maps that are treasures because they capture so well the spirit of their age, illuminating the geographical outlook of the people who made and used them.

Cartographic Treasures of the Newberry Library

Published to coincide with an exhibition at Chicago’s Newberry Library, Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West charts the historic role maps have played in imagining, understanding, promoting, and exploiting the Western frontier of North America. Featuring more than sixty full-color maps and views from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, this fascinating book documents how maps encouraged Euro-Americans to see the West as a land of promise. Maps helped visualize a nation destined to expand across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Curators Michael P. Conzen and Diane Dillon present an interpretively rich, carefully researched selection of items drawing on the Newberry’s superb collections of historic maps and Western Americana. They have organized the book into four sections: maps for empire, maps for building a new nation, maps for enlightenment, and maps for business. Chicago emerges first as a dot on one of these maps, but it subsequently becomes a bustling metropolis and a major center of cartographic production.

Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West

History

Americas

In 1905 Homer Sargent Michaels, an automobile agent based in Chicago, developed an unusual solution to one of the thorniest problems facing early motorists: how to find one’s way from one city to another along the poorly marked rural roads of the time. Michaels’s solution was to take photographs of every major intersection or turning point along a given route. The resulting books—ancestors of today’s digital in-car navigation systems—were remarkably useful, but few copies survive. Now the Chicago Map Society, in collaboration with the Newberry Library, has compiled a new edition of one of Michaels’s 1905 guides showing the route from Chicago to Lake Geneva, a resort town in southern Wisconsin. This new edition reproduces the entire guide, along with brief explanations and new photographs of the same locations today, as well as an introduction by the Newberry Library’s curator of maps, Robert W. Karrow Jr. Chicago to Lake Geneva: A 100-Year Road Trip is a stellar presentation of a historical artifact—and a fascinating drive down memory lane.

Chicago - Lake Geneva: A 100-Year Road Trip: Retracing the Route of H. Sargent Michaels' 1905 Photographic Guide for Motorists

Photography & Video

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Books by Newberry Library