PORTLAND, Maine — For many of us, GPS has been a game changer - a tap, a voice, a turn-by-turn path, will get you there. But there is something special about a physical map that the GPS in your car or phone just can't provide.
When laid out, a physical map can provide a greater sense of scale and place, hints at the allure of far-off lands, and a reminder that we're a small part of a big world with a complex history.
A Library that lets students handle history
That's something that's revealed to students at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.
Students can view maps and globes, both modern and some going back hundreds of years, from all over the world. Many of the maps put Europe as the focal point, some were drawn before America was even mapped, giving the students a different perspective and orientation.
Shauna Martel, a teaching assistant at the Osher Map Library twirls a massive globe around and points to Australia.
"If you go to Australia," she tells a group of fourth graders, "they flip the map upside down so Australia is up on top versus like North America."
Renee Keul, Assistant Director for Education and Outreach at the map library, says the kids coming in definitely know what maps are.
"What's interesting is they very much see a map as something that is empirically true because we're so used to satellite maps and Google Maps where the information is most likely true," she says.
The library makes clear that many of the maps weren't accurate to begin with.
"To understand that they're limited to the perspective of the map maker is kind of our first challenge when we're working with old maps."
Maps are customized for each class. Up to 13,000 students — from K to 12, as well as university — go through the Osher Map Library every year.
Libby Bischof, the Executive Director of the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education says the two founding donor families - L.C. Smith and Eleanor Houston Smith, and Harold and Peggy Osher — wanted a second grader to be able to come in and see the oldest map.
"They wanted maps … infused into every aspect of the curriculum," Bischof says, adding that just over the past year, the library worked with over 32 different disciplines.
"Anything from history to environmental science to nursing to social work and everything in between astronomy, biology, honors programs, sociology," she says.
Bischof says a lot of institutions have archives and collections that rightly sit in vaults, protected.
"But the point here is to get them out and to use them and to make a new generation really excited about historic objects and historic materials."
She says the Osher Map library is one of the largest in the country in terms of a map collection that's open and accessible to the public.
"We have about half a million maps, cartographic items, globes, atlas books … dating back to 1475."
Mapping power, politics and perspective
The library's vast collection of rare and unusual maps is a boon for Matthew Edney, the faculty scholar at the Osher Map Library who teaches a university course on global history.
"I set it through the lens of how have different cultures mapped their worlds, thinking of world as a cultural phenomenon, not just a physical thing," he says.
Maps also reflect power, ambition and goals of various peoples and governments – think Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America.
One map at the Osher Library — titled Uprooted People of the USA — was produced in 1945 by Louise Jefferson, a black graphic designer and cartographer. It's a bright, colorful illustration of the widespread displacement in the U.S. at that time, says Bischof.
"You have refugees from Europe … You have all sorts of men and women going to fight and serve in the Army and Navy being moved to train," she says.
Bischof says the social history map also shows Japanese internment camps on the west coast.
"You see the barbed wire and barracks," she says. "Not a lot of people would map this during the time."
The Osher library has a very broad view of what defines a map. One — titled Willard's Tempe of Time — charts the concept of time back to the creation.
There are celestial maps, and books like the Nuremberg Chronicle, which is a history of the world. It is a complete and intact leather-bound tome from 1493. Its thick pages are made from rags. The library allows people to touch it, without gloves, feel the paper made hundreds of years ago.
Louis Miller is a librarian at Osher says the Nuremburg Chronicle contains more than 1800 woodcut illustrations of cities. He doesn't consider the entire book a map, but says the finely detailed views of the cities and building are definitely maps. Miller says a forerunner, if you like, for what we use now.
"Anything that Google is doing now with Street View, things like that, is borrowing off of a convention that maps have been using for hundreds and hundreds of years."
Treasures from attics and breezways
One of the newest maps at the library is a large piece of cloth from India which was worn by a member of the Jain religion as they lay dying. It's a mix of pale blues, greens and saffron, showing land and rivers and mountains.
"The cloth was a cosmological map of the entirety of creation and human divine relationships," says Edney.
Edney calls it "stunning" and says it will add to his materials for teaching about South Asian history.
The Osher Map Library actively searches for and buys maps to add to their teaching collection. And there are some unexpected finds.
Edney says he had long coveted a Yaggy Geographical Study set of 1887. They were designed as teaching aids for 19th century classrooms.
Edney says a Yaggy would come up occasionally for auction, but the library was always outbid. Then one day it showed up.
"A woman was cleaning out her uncle's house in central north Maine, and it was in the rafters of the breezeway," he says. The woman approached the Maine Historical Society and they pointed her towards the Osher Map Library.
"And voila, we have it," says Edney. He says it is a "gorgeous" celestial map showing the heavens and the orbits of the planets.
Bischof says you never know when a map is going to appear — from map dealers, the corner of the attic, a forgotten box — but when it does it becomes more than a piece of paper — it's an insight into history and cultures — and a glimpse at how people have seen and imagined their world.
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