Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
door, and he spent hours tapping away at the transmitter in Morse code. “I'd always have
an atlas on my lap,” he remembers. “Because all of the sudden I'd be talking to Tamaqua,
Pennsylvania, and where the hell is Tamaqua, Pennsylvania? Where is it?” As he tells the
story, his finger traces a highway on an imaginary road atlas. But when he arrived at Geor-
getowntoworkonhismaster'sdegreein1965,therewasnogeographydepartment—those
had been unfashionable for more than a decade. He studied Latin American history instead
and was already working for the Library of Congress by the time he received his doctorate
in 1972. He's been here ever since.
Most of Hébert's staff of forty-five librarians aren't professional geographers—they
cametolovemapsbyseeingthepowerofcartographyintheirownfields,whetherthatwas
art history or public affairs. Hébert was no different. “Maps drew out points of history that
the text wouldn't tell me,” he says.
Indeed, history seems to be all around us as we begin to trek through the geographically
arranged stacks: first world maps, then (from north to south): Canada; the United States
in the order of its appearance, from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Latin America; then across
the Atlantic to Europe and Asia; and then Africa and Oceania at the far end of this cav-
ernous space. It's the world in miniature, and Hébert displays a missionary zeal in showing
off his beloved collection not as some dry scholarly archive but as a vast treasure trove of
Americana, from the earliest days of Spanish exploration to the present. There are maps
of the Brazilian rain forest drawn by Theodore Roosevelt himself, during his nearly fatal
expedition down the “
River of Doubt
”
in 1913. There's Welthauptstadt (“World Capital”)
Germania, Albert Speer's plan for a monumentally redesigned Berlin, recovered by Amer-
icantroopswhenNaziGermanyfell.TherearetheoriginalmapsthatdividedEuropeatthe
end of World War I, brought back from Versailles by the American Geographical Society
team that accompanied Woodrow Wilson there. “We have the original military maps from
theBattleofChapultepecandchartsfromtheBarbaryCoastWar,”boastsHébert,“soIcan
honestly say we have the halls of Montezuma
and
the shores of Tripoli.” If there's a His-
tory Channel special on it, it's in here.
Justabouteveryluminaryinhistory,itseems,makesaMylar-coveredcameoappearance
intheMapDivision'sshelves.Asheshowsmearound,Hébertisdroppingsomanyfamous
names that he starts prefacing them with the faux-humble-sounding disclaimer “a man
called”—“a man called Stonewall Jackson,” “a man called Ferdinand Magellan.” At one
shelf, he points offhandedly to a high drawer. “I have Lewis and Clark in there,” he says,
alarmingly. Seemingly at random, he opens another drawer and shows me a colonial map
ofAlexandria,Virginia,beforethetownwasevenbuilt.It'sanunremarkablesurveylisting
the names of local landowners, and I'm not quite sure why I'm looking at it. People sure
did have nicer handwriting back then, I guess. Then I see on an indexing sticker the map-
maker's name: a young Virginia surveyor who later went on to other things. George Wash-
ington. I feel a little twinge of vertigo—not just that I'm holding
in my hands
a map per-
