CAMBRIDGE, MA — Behind every map there’s a map lover. The new exhibition on the Harvard Map Collection’s bicentennial, “Follow the Map: The Harvard Map Collection at 200” tells the stories of the people who have created, loved, and collected the maps that formed Harvard’s world-class collection.
Bringing together materials from Harvard’s many libraries, the exhibition follows the people behind the maps, taking us from slavery to German taxation to Europe after World War 1 to the intersection of art and science. The exhibition is free and open to the public between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays in the Pusey Library Gallery.
The Harvard Map Collection began in 1818 with a gift of over 5,000 maps from the library of a German scholar, who amassed one of the greatest map collections of the Americas without ever crossing the Atlantic. Harvard acquired this library through a generous donation from a local merchant who made his fortune participating in the Caribbean slave trade. The story of this gift is a sobering reminder that it was paid for with dollars from an industry built on brutality, death and destruction.
“Follow the Map” opens up from this original gift to the last 200 years of mapping. With maps, letters, postcards, and photographs, the exhibition animates the mix of alumni, staff, faculty, and benefactors who have contributed to Harvard’s collection. This unique blend of personalities has structured how the Harvard Map Collection continues to evolve.
At “Follow the Map” visitors can explore topics like:
- World War 2 in a secret American map of Iwo Jima and a captured Japanese military map
- A Ukrainian nationalist’s maps of Ukraine collected in exile in the United States
- A map of the Rio Grande owned by a founding family of Brownsville, Texas
- An eighteenth-century map of scientific expeditions around the world to determine the precise shape of the Earth
- Landscapes and landforms by the illustrious Hungarian-American cartographer, Erwin Raisz
- Charles Sumner’s map of the spread of slavery from the same year he was beaten on the Senate floor
Since 1818, the Map Collection has collected new maps, old maps, and—in the last thirty years—geospatial data. “Follow the Map” brings the life-stories of Harvard’s collection out from the behind the maps to tell us where our maps have been and where new maps can take us.