Horowitz Map Collection Digital Gallery

"Geography is so necessary to illustrate history that they ought to be inseparably connected."

-- Jacques-Nicholas Bellin, The Gentlemen's Magazine (1746) ¹ 

What does it mean to “illustrate history”? How do maps – and other kinds of cartographic representations – translate the complex and changing features of the natural world, physical space, and human landscapes into legible, two-dimensional form? 

Maps are wonderful artifacts. They note, in careful detail, the particulars of place – whether known or imagined – while simultaneously, they embody the wider eras of their creation: quests for “discovery” and claim; Indigenous knowledge and action; projects of extraction, settlement, and colonialization; state building and territorial definition. 

They challenge us to read for both image and text – choices of scale, and perspective; the symbolic language of names and illustrations; the material assertions of property and territory. They are authored by forces of politics, capital, and belief, as well as (if not sometimes more than) science or curiosity. They reveal how much, or how little, we understand about the world around us; and how we value it.  

Maps are also unusual for their capacity to represent historical time: at a glance, we read the past, present, and intended future of a place. Maps record older interventions and current practices, and declare —and legitimate—different agendas.  

Maps are a rich, complex, but deeply complicated record of human engagement with the natural world. So yes, Monsieur Bellin, geography does indeed illustrate history. But then, history also illuminates geography.

This storymap serves as a digital gallery for showcasing a collection of rare, historical maps donated to Bucknell University by class of 1962 alum Steven Horowitz for use in history and geography classes. For more on the Horowitz donation to Bucknell University, see the article  “The Ancient World, Revealed,”  from Bucknell Magazine, Summer 2020.

"There’s so much value in being able to touch and feel artifacts like this, and use them firsthand as resources." 

-- Ryan Bremer, Class of 2022 ² 

Preliminary work on the digital gallery was done by Ryan Bremer (History/Film & Media Studies) and was taken up by the students in Fall of 2022 as part of the course Mapping History: Nature, Place, and Power. This course – History, Geography, and Environmental Studies & Sciences – considers maps as artifacts of environmental history and environmental change. For more on Ryan Bremer's role in researching and building the digital gallery,  see the following article from Bucknell University's student stories collection .

Learn more about the geographies depicted in the Horowitz collection by exploring the interactive map below. Click on one of the catalog cards along the left to see a detail view of the area represented in that map (and vice versa - click on a placemark in the map to see the catalog card details for that item).

Click on the catalogue cards below to explore the collection. Each card will profile a different map, as an artifact of history and environmental change:

• Its physical qualities (condition, format, origin/provenance
• Its visual portrait (composition, perspective, color, scale)
• The featured geography (borders, spatial definition, topography, biophysical elements)
• The human space (languages, populations, borders, territorial claims)
• Elements of the natural world: what is included, what is absent, what is valued, how nature is depicted