An essay on historical thinking through an examination of the unstudied minor genre of the newspaper weather map.
This type of map first appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century and a was a child of the Industrial Revolution at its height—its parents were the railroad and the telegraph—and has now been made obsolete by the internet and the smartphone. Its history coincides with that of the Anthropocene. Miller shows us how newspaper weather maps present questions of historical thinking in ways that address anyone who ponders what it means to live in time.
Peter N. Miller (born 1964 in New York) is an American historian. He received his BA and MA from Harvard University and received a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge. Prior to becoming dean, he was professor of cultural history at Bard and held posts at the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of Chicago. Miller is an expert on the history of scholarship, cultural history, antiquarianism, and conservation. He is President of the American Academy in Rome.
