Download or read book Cartophilia written by Catherine Tatiana Dunlop and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period between the French Revolution and the Second World War saw an unprecedented proliferation of mapmaking and map reading across modern European society. This book explores the age of cartophilia through the story of mapmaking in the disputed French-German borderland of Alsace-Lorraine. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both French and Germans claimed Alsace-Lorraine as part of their national territories, fighting several bloody wars with each other that resulted in four changes to the borderland s nationality. In the process, the contested territory became a mapmaker s laboratory, a place subjected to multiple visual interpretations and competing topographies. And the mapmakers were not just professional border surveyors but rather people from all walks of life, including linguists, ethnographers, historians, priests, and schoolteachers. Empowered by their access to affordable new printing technologies and motivated by patriotic ideals, these popular mapmakers redefined the meaning and purpose of European borders during the age of nationalism."