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Martin Gilbert: Famed historian maps Jewish history

One of the world's best known historians shared his fascination for maps yesterday, using them to talk about the Holocaust at a University of Western Ontario lecture.

Sir Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill's official biographer, said he began making maps to illustrate his research in 1959 and has been doing it ever since.

He said mapping helps him to focus, verify and visualize the information he gathers.

It's an important part of his process in writing histories, he said.

Gilbert, a British author of 77 books, is married to a Canadian and last year signed on as a professor of history at Western for five years.

Gilbert presented the first public slide show of his career yesterday, starting off by illustrating the long history of Jews in Europe up to 1933.

His next map presented information gleaned from a 1930s League of Nations census conducted to identify where minorities were in many countries so they could be protected....
Read entire article at London Free Press