Reinventing the Map Lecture By Susan Schulten, Professor, University of Denver, Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library, September 13, 2014 at 2 pm

We live in a culture saturated with maps. We have become accustomed to making them instantly and representing virtually any type of data. Technology makes this possible, but our contemporary use of maps is rooted in a fundamental shift that took place well over a century ago. Join noted map scholar Susan Schulten, Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Denver, as she explores the American evolution in mapmaking in her lecture “Reinventing the Map,” Saturday, September 13, 2 pm. The lecture is free thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Ruby W. and LaVon P. Linn Foundation. It is part of a series related to the Museum and Library’s collection of historic maps.

In her talk, Schulten will reveal how beginning in the nineteenth century Americans began to use maps not only to identify locations and represent the landscape, but to organize, display, and analyze information. Through maps of the agricultural data, the distribution of slavery, census results, and the path of epidemics, Americans gradually learned to view themselves and their nation in altogether new ways.

Susan Schulten has taught at the University of Denver since 1996. She is the author of Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America and The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950, both with the University of Chicago Press.

Professor Schulten earned her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2010 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on maps. Since 2010 she has contributed to the “Disunion” series in The New York Times, which commemorates the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War.

The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library is dedicated to presenting exhibitions and programs on a wide variety of topics in American and fraternal history. The Museum is supported by the Scottish Rite Freemasons in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the United States. The Museum is located at 33 Marrett Road in Lexington at the corner of Route 2A and Massachusetts Avenue. The Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Admission is free. For further information contact the Museum at (781) 861-6559. www.monh.org