Geographical imagination and the authority of images collects three papers and an interview on the themes presented and discussed during the 2005 Hettner lectures. Cosgrove examines the roles that vision and imagination have played in shaping material and represented landscapes at scales ranging from the local and regional to the global and cosmic. The book presents substantive studies of cosmographic and global mapping, the picturesque tradition and suburban Los Angeles, and the use of aeTranspennine' England as a geographical art gallery. Embedded in these are theoretical and ethical reflections on the ways that we come to know the world, ourselves and each other through geographical engagements, especially when these are mediated through graphic images. The interview locates these themes within the context of Denis Cosgrove's development as a geographer and his response to debates within the discipline about the roles of imagination, culture and representation within geographies's humanities tradition. Contents Peter Meusburger / Hans Gebhardt: Introduction: Hettner-Lecture 2005 in Heidelberg Denis Cosgrove: Apollo's eye: a cultural geography of the globe Denis Cosgrove: Landscape, culture and modernity Denis Cosgrove: Regional art: Transpennine geography remembered and exhibited Tim Freytag / Heike Joens: Vision and the, culturalae in geography: a biographical interview with Denis Cosgrove The Klaus Tschira Foundations gGmbH u Photographic representations: Hettner-Lecture 2005 u List of participants.

Schulten examines four enduring institutions of learning that produced some of the most influential sources of geographic knowledge in modern history: maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools."--BOOK JACKET.

This book focuses on the work of the great sixteenth-century traveller and map-maker Andre Thevat and explores the interrelations between representation and power in the age of discovery.

The advent of photography opened up new worlds to 19th century viewers, who were able to visualize themselves and the world beyond in unprecedented detail. But the emphasis on the photography's objectivity masked the subjectivity inherent in deciding what to record, from what angle and when. This text examines this inherent subjectivity. Drawing on photographs that come from personal albums, corporate archives, commercial photographers, government reports and which were produced as art, as record, as data, the work shows how the photography shaped and was shaped by geographical concerns.

The imagination has long been associated with travel and tourism; from the seventeenth century when the showman and his peepshow box would take the village crowd to places, cities and lands through the power of stories, to today when we rely on a different range of boxes to whisk us away on our imaginative travels: the television, the cinema and the computer. Even simply the notion of travel, it would seem, gives us license to daydream. The imagination thus becomes a key concept that blurs the boundaries between our everyday lives and the idea of travel. Yet, despite what appears to be a close and comfortable link, there is an absence of scholarly material looking at travel and the imagination. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, archaeologists, heritage researchers, literary scholars and creative writers, this edited collection explores the socio-cultural phenomenon of imagination and travel. The volume reflects upon imagination in the context of many forms of physical and non-physical travel, inviting scholars to explore this fascinating, yet complex, area of inquiry in all of its wonderful colour, slipperiness, mystery and intrigue. The book intends to provide a catalyst for thinking, discussion, research and writing, with the vision of generating a cannon of scholarship on travel and the imagination that is currently absent from the literature.

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 explores what literate British people understood by the word 'Europe' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Was Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where were the edges of Europe? Was Europe primarily a commercial network or were there common political practices too? Was Britain itself a European country? While intellectual history is concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers, Paul Stock traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts, offering a detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, which were widely read by literate Britons of all classes, and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain: ideas about religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the 'centre' and 'edges' of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change. By showing how these and other questions were discussed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 provides a thorough and much-needed historical analysis of Britain's enduringly complex intellectual relationship with Europe.

Reflecting the revival of interest in a social theory that takes place and space seriously, this book focuses on geographical place in the practice of social science and history. There is significant interest among scholars from a range of disciplines in bringing together the geographical and sociological ‘imaginations’. The geographical imagination is a concrete and descriptive one, concerned with determining the nature of places, and classifying them and the links between them. The sociological imagination aspires to explanation of human activities in terms of abstract social processes. The chapters in this book focus on both the intellectual histories of the concept of place and on its empirical uses. They show that place is as important for understanding contemporary America as it is for 18th-century Sri Lanka. They also show how the concept can provide insight into ‘old’ problems such as the nature of social life in Renaissance Florence and Venice. The editors are leading exponents of the view of place as a concept that can ‘mediate’ the geographical and sociological imaginations.