Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe

by Steven Seegel

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men , Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki— Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps.

Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations­—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments.

At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.
 

320 pages, Hardcover

Published June 29, 2018

About the author

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and the internationally acclaimed Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has translated for the ongoing US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945. You can find him on Twitter @steven_seegel and as a podcast host on the New Books Network.

Reviews

[Martyn Beeny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe is a fascinating blend of biography, cartography, and political history that reveals how maps have shaped the modern world. Steven Seegel examines the lives and work of five influential geographers whose ideas helped define borders, nations, and identities across East Central Europe during an era marked by war, revolution, and dramatic political change.

Rather than treating maps as neutral tools, Seegel demonstrates how they were deeply connected to personal ambitions, friendships, rivalries, and competing visions of nationhood. Through meticulous archival research and compelling storytelling, the book shows how geography and politics became intertwined in the creation of the modern European landscape.

Rich in historical insight and highly relevant to contemporary discussions about borders and identity, Map Men offers a thought-provoking exploration of the people behind the maps that helped shape the twentieth century.