Gazetteers used to be the last and least-consulted pages in atlases and dictionaries. Now, without realizing it, people use them whenever they check the location of a restaurant on their phone, surf the web for vacation ideas, or check a fact on Wikipedia, “arguably . . . the largest and most widely used gazetteer” (23). Digital gazetteers are also increasingly common infrastructure for place-based research in the humanities and social sciences, as well as an object of study in their own right.
As the editors point out in their excellent introductory essay, gazetteers of one kind or another were much more common than maps until about 1800. Printed itineraries told people in words how to travel from place to place. Local, regional, and national histories, overwhelmingly textual, described places in often marvelous detail, the writing as much a geography lesson as historical account. Historical-geographical gazetteers were re-issued and revised for...