Mapping Nature across the Americas

FAIN: FV-267158-19

Newberry Library (Chicago, IL 60610-3305)
James R. Akerman (Project Director: February 2019 to March 2025)
Kathleen A. Brosnan (Co Project Director: July 2019 to March 2025)

A four-week seminar for 16 K-12 teachers to study mapping as a lens for understanding the history of the Americas.

The Newberry Library’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography seeks funding for a four-week summer seminar for sixteen schoolteachers in 2020 that traces the interplay between mapping and environmental knowledge across Pan-American history. Mapping Nature across the Americas, led by James Akerman and Kathleen Brosnan, will emphasize how map study can provide insights into the complicated, contradictory, and contested ways in which humans conceived their place in nature through history. The seminar will be distinctive in its use of maps as the core texts for this exploration, emphasizing the development of teachers’ skills in the use of maps in their classroom teaching as they consider how mapping has represented and transformed human conceptions of nature over time. This seminar builds on our experience leading a summer institute on the same topic for college and university faculty in 2014.