News for James Ford Bell Library
The Right of the People: Honoring the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence
This exhibit situates the Declaration of Independence in its historical moment and contextualizes the actions of the founders of the new republic.
Salt and Memory
My end-of-summer reading included “Time Shelter” by Georgi Gospodinov, a future dystopia about memory and the past, which deservedly won the International Booker Prize in 2023. While Gospodinov is most interested in the more recent past and its political reverberations today, every once in a while he dips into the deep past.
The Pizzigano Portolan: A cartographic mystery at the James Ford Bell Library
Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano's 1424 Nautical Chart has a mystery in its lines: a group of improbably large islands in the western Atlantic that scholars today call the Antilia group.
The Travels of Adam Olearius: Introducing a StoryMap by Emmey Harris
One of the best parts of working at the James Ford Bell Library is seeing the fruits of student research in the collection. This blog post is devoted to a particularly excellent project completed by Emmey Harris in the Fall of 2023: “The Travels of Adam Olearius: A Gateway to Globalization in the Seventeenth Century.” The project combines historical research and digital StoryMap technology to help with visualizing the past and making it come alive.
Cordiforms and love poetry – it must be February!
The theme of our U of M Special Collections pop-up exhibit on February 13 – “Matters of the Heart: A Pop-Up Prelude to Valentine’s Day” – led me to an unusual map-projection from the 16th century: cordiform or heart-shaped. This type of map was a distinctive way of trying to solve the puzzle of how to project a round globe onto a flat surface, and most scholars believe that these maps also held symbolic significance.
America’s first banned book?
I was very interested to read Colleen Connolly’s essay in the Smithsonian Magazine online about the book that is widely considered the first banned book in North America: “How America’s First Banned Book Survived and Became and Anti-Authoritarian Icon.” The book in question is Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan or New Canaan, published in Amsterdam in 1637, and I was pleased to discover that the Bell Library has a copy – one of about 25 copies that have survived.
Oldest evidence of ‘curry’ outside of India
James Ford Bell Library Assistant Curator Anne Good reflects on what a recent archeological find reveals about early trade and cultural networks.
Pallas, Cats, and Pallas Cats at the James Ford Bell Library
Anne Good, Assistant Curator of the James Ford Bell Library, talks about the history of the Pallas Cat (aka otocolobus manul or, in the 18th century, felis manul).
Geographical Works for Children in the James Ford Bell Library
Some time ago, I had the pleasure of listening to a “History Book Club” conversation between Prof. M.J. Maynes (History, U of MN – Twin Cities) and Dr. Emily Bruce (History, U of MN – Morris), concerning the latter’s new book, Revolutions at Home: The Origin of Modern Childhood and the German Middle Class. It was a great conversation about a really interesting book, and I was inspired by the discussion of geographical education for children to see what I could find on the topic in the Bell Library.
Re-post: Ten Painful Stories of the Dutch Colonial Slave Trade
This review of a traveling historical exhibition, which will be on view at the United Nations Headquarters in New York until March 30, reminded me of the work that the Bell Library has set for itself in the types of exhibits that will appear in the newly remodeled and reimagined Bell Room. These exhibits, focused on the marginalized and under-represented, must necessarily consider painful stories.
Falling in love sitting near maps
I recently read Feed, by M.T. Anderson, a novel in the future dystopia genre, aimed at a young adult audience, published in 2002. Like all the best dystopian fiction, this novel was visionary, and reading it today is at least a little painful. 2002 was a year before the launch of LinkedIn, two years before the start of Facebook, four years before Twitter, eight years before Instagram, nine years before Snapchat, 14 years before Tiktok – indeed, before any of the social media apps that now crowd our lives.
An Arctic Map Re-post
Among the most wide-ranging explorers of the early modern era was the Dutchmen Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563-1611). Accounts of his voyages were published in large, beautiful books, well-illustrated, and often hand-colored as well. He became successful in both merchant and academic circles. Because Linschoten went virtually everywhere and was a well-known personage, the Dutch society dedicated to publishing historical and current travelers’ accounts is known as the Linschoten-Vereeniging.