The Exploratory Essays Initiative: Background and Overview Mark Monmonier and David Woodward Cartography and Geographic Information Science, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2002, pp. 133-135 T his special issue of Cartography and Geographic Information Science (CaGIS) arises out of planning for Volume Six (Cartography in the Twentieth Century) of the History of Cartography, a multi-volume series that has performed a dual role as a reference work and interpretive narrative for the history of mapmak- ing in all periods and cultures. When the History of Cartography Project was conceived in 1977, the original plan was for four volumes to cover the subject to 1900, the traditional cutoff date for carto- bibliographers and map historians. This plan was sharply criticized by one of our editorial advisers, Walter W. Ristow, then chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, who pointed out that the story would stop before the most prolific cartographic century. The history of twentieth-century cartography was added to the plans, and in December 1984, Brian Harley and David Woodward invited Mark Monmonier to be a co-editor for Volume 6. A detailed outline for the volume was drafted in 1985, but plans were put on hold as work on other volumes mushroomed. We eventually modified the outline for discussion at a three-day conference on issues and events in twen- tieth-century cartography held at the Library of Congress on October 9-11, 1997. The conference was attended by thirty-four scholars, practitioners, and institutional sponsors, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The challenges of writing a twentieth-century history of cartography are daunting. The sheer amount of material is enormous, scattered, often informal and inaccessible, and even secret. In the closing decades of the century, cartographic technology changed so rapidly that it is diffi- cult to gain perspective on what happened. The institutional histories that are so central to the century—particularly of military, social, and envi- ronmental government agencies—are fraught with selective reporting and political posturing. Since far more artifacts, agencies, and techniques need to be discussed for the twentieth century than for, say, the Renaissance, we decided a year ago that a large multi-level interpretive encyclopedia was logistically a far more straightforward method to complete Volume Six. A departure from earlier volumes in the series, which consisted of long interpretative essays, the encyclopedic format— adopted for Volumes Four, Five, and Six—is fully consistent with the History’s preeminent role as a scholarly reference of first resort. The ten essays in this special issue of CaGIS represent the culmination of the three-year Exploratory Essays Initiative sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Proposed to NSF in January 1999, the project was our response to the rejection of a longer-term, inherently more expensive plan that would have advanced Volume Six two-thirds of the way to completion—impres- sive perhaps but insufficiently complete to warrant support. Understandably, the National Science Foundation wanted a tangible product at the end of the funding period. So we overhauled the pro- posal to address a serious impediment to Volume Six: the shortage of researchers working in the his- tory of twentieth-century cartography, often con- sidered too recent to be “history” and too old to be of interest to anyone focusing on cutting-edge techniques in mapmaking and GIS. The Initiative was devised as a comprehensive plan to encour- age research in this area by recruiting established or promising scholars with interests related to cartography and mapping, and to offer guidance on historiography and sources. In addition to supporting communications and travel, the grant included substantial honoraria to partly offset authors’ research expenses and opportunity costs. We began by recruiting a board of distinguished advisors and requesting short proposals from prospective participants. Our solicitation, distrib- uted worldwide through listservs, newsletters, and periodicals in the history of science and the history of technology as well as in cartography and geog- raphy, resulted in over two dozen responses from qualified scholars, more than twice the number we