Ephraim Chambers News Today

Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end

From the blog of David Sedley at The Times of Israel

These great bodies of scholarship evoke our changing times like nothing else

It may have been eclipsed as reference material, but it’s still a valuable indication of the general knowledge of past generations

Antique Maps of South and North America. Gallery of authentic historic and rare maps of North America, South America & the Western Hemisphere from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

  1747 (undated)         1 : 10134000 This is the earliest English map of Tibet, engraved for Braddock Meads A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, published under his pseudonym John Green by Thomas Astley in 1747. It is one of the few maps of the region to rely (ultimately) on local sources - although the mapmakers claim that the map was drawn from that made by Lama Mathematicians does not include the chain of Jesuit missionaries and French cartographers linking the Lama M...