He supervised eighteen masters theses and ten doctoral dissertations, all on topics relating to contemporary cartography except that of one doctoral student, Judith Tyner, who would also acquire the historical bug. He also produced a number of atlases, notably Man’s Domain: A Thematic Atlas of the World (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968 3rd ed., 1975). As a cartographer, he created the first map supplement for the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in 1960-a landform study of Cyprus-and he went on to become the journal’s map-supplement editor (1965–1974).
Much of his scholarship was in map production, landscape analysis and the interpretation of orthophotomaps and (later) satellite imagery, generating a substantial body of publications. He taught cartography and terrain representation, air-photo interpretation and the geography of Europe. Thrower started on a tenure-track position in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1957, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. Like other European geographers, he was struck by the gridded landscapes of the Midwest: his dissertation was a cultural geographical analysis of the relative effects of disorganized and ‘rectangular’ forms of land subdivision deployed in different areas of Ohio at the end of the eighteenth century (published 1966). Thrower was the first of Robinson’s doctoral students to use a historical approach to study maps and geography. Robinson at the University of Wisconsin (MA 19, with a minor in the history of science). The growing family then moved to Madison, where Thrower studied with Arthur H. He took classes from Erwin Raisz and also worked with Armin Lobeck, whose geomorphological block diagrams were integral to his undergraduate thesis on North African landforms. In 1947, Thrower was hired as a cartographer by the Virginia Geographical Institute at the University of Virginia, where he also studied geography (BA 1953). At this time, he met his wife, Elizabeth ‘Betty’ McPherson, an officer in the US Army Nurse Corps they soon moved to join Betty’s family in the United States. On returning to Britain in 1946 he joined the Directorate of Overseas Surveys, where he made maps of Gambia and Jamaica from photogrammetric surveys. He worked primarily in map compilation and drafting, especially using the novel process of photogrammetry.
Instead, he sat an examination for the Survey of India on passing this, he was transferred to the Survey and to the Royal Engineers. 1 A bout of dysentery on his arrival in India in 1942 prevented him from joining his assigned regiment in Burma. When, in the 1980s, Thrower’s contemporaries largely turned away from historical subjects, the resolutely analogue cartographer remained a genial and genteel relic of a bygone age, the fate perhaps of all scholars who are active for so long.īorn in the Thames valley, in the south of England, Thrower seemed set to become a commercial artist when he was conscripted into the Royal Artillery at the start of the Second World War.
In the 1970s, as manual drafting techniques were displaced by photomechanical processes, Thrower took advantage of institutional opportunities to focus more exclusively on historical studies. Like other practitioners and academics of the time, Thrower studied the ‘internal’ history of cartographical practices, mapmakers and the science of cartography. His grounding was in art and drawing, and as a pupil of Erwin Raisz and Arthur Robinson, he flourished in the age of complex pen-and-ink mapping and relief depiction. Norman Thrower, who died shortly before his 101st birthday, was among the first and the last of the postwar academic cartographers who taught and studied the field’s history alongside contemporary practices of mapping.