This session explores the history of attempts to visualize climate as a spatial phenomenon and the use of maps as historical records of climate change. The focus is on the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century in central Europe, colonial Africa, and the United States, important contexts for the development of both mapmaking techniques and ecological frameworks of inquiry. Climate maps played key roles in the emerging disciplines of atmospheric physics, geology, geomorphology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and human biogeography. Simultaneously, they figured in debates for or against schemes of conquest, colonization, and development. Although they have drawn little attention from historians, maps of climate and related phenomena merit analysis from multiple angles. As Mott Greene’s paper illustrates, they are rich sources for the history of climate science, revealing the instability of the very concept of climate. Climate maps are also unique windows onto the historical relationship between science and empire-building, as Deborah Coen’s and Philipp Lehmann’s papers suggest. A third approach, exemplified by David Spanagel’s paper, is to explore the uses to which such maps have been put. A single map can be read in quite different ways at different points in time, of which the present search for traces of anthropogenic climate change is just one in a long series of reframings. In sum, this session aims to draw attention to maps as sources for the history of climatology and allied sciences and to expand the range of historical questions that we bring to them.

Organized by Deborah Coen (Yale University)