The Erwin Raisz plan to advance academic cartography in the United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT Erwin Raisz represents the vanguard of early Twentieth Century American cartography. Raisz’s ultimate aim was to build academic cartography as its own sub-discipline in geography. Forged in the crucible of Columbia and Harvard, Raisz published his seminal 1938 textbook General Cartography and used it to galvanize his goal to establish courses in cartography at all academic institutions and to build a cartographic society to advance research. This paper examines his strategy and argues for Raisz’s academic life and background in the fertile grounds of Columbia University where geospatial thinking abounded in the 1920s. From there, how his textbook gave rise to the establishment of new cartography courses. Then, Raisz proposed his idea to organize cartographers into a new cartographic society in the early 1940s when he emerged as a leading voice in cartography and its human-networking champion. As chair of the Association of American Geographers’ Committee on Cartography, he used it as its own cartographic society to encourage the growth of academic cartography. He surveyed institutions post-World War II to understand where cartography courses were and their provenance to understand the progression of development. He acted as the networking glue to propel the academic cartography agenda forward beyond the 1950s.