2025-26 Harper Lecture: How Maps Reveal (And Conceal) Our History
April 13
5:00pm - 7:00pm
Community Commons 1700
Audience: Alumni, Faculty, Current Student
For over five hundred years, America has been defined through maps. Whether handmaidens of diplomacy, tools of statecraft, instruments of social reform, or tools of persuasion, these sources are efforts to make sense of the world. They invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form, and in the process reflect decisions about how the world ought to be seen. Above all, maps remind us that the past is not just a chronological story, but also a spatial one. For all these reasons, maps offer unique windows onto the past. Join Susan Schulten, Distinguished Professor of History and State Historian of Colorado, in this year's Harper Humanities Distinguished Lectureship as she showcases maps that have shaped our shared history, ranging from iconic battle plans to unknown treasures made by ordinary Americans.
