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Mapping's past it

19 February 2000

Geography lost its compass around 1800. Its descriptive remit of naming
rivers and mapping countries—still the staple of much schoolwork-became
old hat and derided following the scientific ferment of the Enlightenment.
Arguably, geographers still haven’t caught up. In Geography Unbound,
Anne Marie Claire Godlewska charts the collapse 200 years ago of a noble but now
profoundly unfashionable discipline. Published by University of Chicago Press,
£45, ISBN 0226300471.

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