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The Wandering Cartographer

Thoughts about mapping, history, language, travel, mathematics…

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4964 Simcoe Loop

Smithers, BC V0J 2N2

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morgan@hesperus-wild.org

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Archive of books, etc.
Finding historical place names
Skymodels gallery
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What I'm Reading

God's Shadow, by Alan Mikhail. Found this book at a library book sale after hearing the author interviewed on the Ottoman History Podcast. This is a history of the times of Sultan Selim (1470-1520) that is not so much about what was happening in the Ottoman lands, as about how Islam shaped the actions and perceptions of Columbus and his circle. The Spanish New World explorers began and ended their lives fighting Muslims, and they carried this reality to the New World in ways that we still live with.
Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy Maclean. This is a tale of Maclean's adventures in the 1930s and during world war 2 as a British agent and diplomat. He was posted to Moscow in the 30s and did some unauthorized travel in Soviet Central Asia. (I cannot think of another non-Russian author who saw this area between the Revolution and the 90s.) During the war he was involved in various operations in North Africa, but then sent to be the British liaison to Tito during the guerrilla war in Yugoslavia. Peter Fleming gets a brief acknowledgement for reading and commenting on the text.
The Best American Travel Writing 2005, ed. Jamaica Kincaid. An anthology of travel writing from 2005.
Tournament of Shadows, by Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac. A beautifully written history of the Great Game. I read this years ago -- it's a classic -- but I thought I would re-read it to refresh myself on some of the characters I'd forgotten about, like Joseph Rock and Nicholas Roerich.
Conquest of Peru, by William H. Prescott. Published in 1849, this was a very thorough account of the Spanish conquest of the Incan empire, and what followed. Prescott (the namesake of Prescott Arizona and Prescott Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a contemporary of Thoreau, and a legend in his time -- for writing history! Outdated now, certainly, but engagingly written. Ties in nicely with God's Shadow (above)

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Ancient World mapping Area features Baku Blender Cartography Central Asia CIA Climate DARE Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire Divankhana Francis Younghusband Frederick Osborn geodata geographic puzzles geometry Georgia Gertrude Bell Gottfried Merzbacher Greece hiking historical mapping Inkscape Iraq Ireland islamic geometric design Map Map design Maps for books Maps for Books Without Maps Mongolia northern BC OpenStreetMap QGIS raster chunk processing S. F. Markham Shaded relief Skymodel Syria Tbilisi Thessaloniki Tile Map Servers TMS tracing historic features vector map tiles

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