JF Ptak Science Books

Straight Lines and Blank Space in Early Western Cartography

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Blank and Empty Series #53

It is sobering to look at the work of the early cartographers and see how much space in their maps they were willing to relinquish  to the blank unknown.  For example, Jacobus Ziegler, in his Quae intus continentur Syria, Palestina, Arabia, Aegyptus, Schondia, Holmiae, Regionem superiorem, singulae tabulae geographicae, published in 1532, was among the first to publish anything at all about Scandanavia and Greenland, wasted no effort in trying to add detail where there wasn't any, a trait that was lost on many other cartographers and mapmakers in the centuries to follow.  His book was mostly about travel in Palestine, but at the end of the book he deals with the new and problematic geographic areas, featuring them in his eighth map, announcing the contents as follows:

The western half of the map, featuring Sweden, Norway, Finland, Lapland and Greenland, is spectacular, and features an enormous, flat-detail, straight-edged Greenland as the bulky land mass in the west ("ulte Gron/rio/lan", a terra incognita).  The extremely angular Greenland coastline stands in sharp contrast to the lovely wavy ocean, the mapmaker unafraid to stake his claim in what he didn't know. 

The eastern half of the map, Scandanavia, is more recognizable (if you focus on Denmark and Germany in the south and then work your way north):

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Though the unencumbered line, far from the fractal nature of Mandelbrot's coastline of Britain, appeared everywhere in the eight maps of Ziegler's work, as we  can see in this intestinal-appearing Dead Sea (below).  The fact of the matter is that this was the state of the art in the first third of the 16th century, and there was in general not a great effort to embellish guesses and gloss over the areas where there was no information.  Of course there was still mythical placements of beings and locales and willing things into existence (like Prester John, sea monsters, El Dorado, no-headed men of South America, Patagonian giants, monsters, and so on), but I still find it remarkable to see how much rigor was given known geographic detail. 

The Nile too received this unrelenting treatment of calm appraisal:

I do admire this effort for not making things up, or covering areas for which there wasn't good data with ephemeral and unnecessary features that would swallow up large swaths of white, empty space, as in this map of the lands eastern Syria:

Though there were still no problems including sea serpents, even so close to the Syrian coast:

On the whole though Ziegler's stylized effort is quite beautiful and truthful,  and I enjoy the depiction of the sea giving way to the chunky, rectangulariness of even such decently known forms such as Cyprus.

The bottom line here is that folks seeing this work for the first time in 1532 would have had a similar reaction to it as you had when you zoomed in on your house in Google Earth for the first time--it was an extraordinary display of information for the time. 

Propaganda in Maps: the Polish "Corridor", 1939

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There's a war on?  Really?  You wouldn't know it from the cover page of the most popular magazine in Germany, the (Leipzig) Illustrirte Zeitung, published 7 September 1939. The odd thing is that for months, years, previously there was a huge and occasionally overwhelming militaria scent to this magazine (a sort of LIFE magazine-like affair in its way), paving the way for the reading population (which I'm sure must've been in the millions) for the stuff to come.  I've looked at every issue of this magazine from 1933 to 1939, and there is simply no mistaking the under- and over-current of the war preparation.  It was just relentless.  And so to finally come to the real fighting part of the beginning of the war it is a little odd to see the cover of the mag decorated with Mother Earth in the herb garden.  The contents of the issue is not what I expected either--not much dedicated to fighting outside of happy and relieved Gdanskers saluting their warm welcome to the advancing Nazi machine, images of the "mongrels" who were living in the places that had once been occupied by Germans, and an "apology" of sorts as to why all of this was necessary.All of which was bluster and diatribe--its hard to imagine, really, how someone living in Leipzig reading this thing over breakfast could've nodded their head in logical consent with the magazine's specious arguments.

Which brings us to the small inset map depicting what was one of the major "problems" for  Germany with Poland--the northern stretch of Polish land that touched the Baltic, the so-called Polish "Corridor".  This polemical affair shows exactly what the Germans thought of the territory, a piece of Germany now in enemy hands, a dagger struck through the heart of Prussia.  

Poland of course didn't think of the land in terms of a "corridor", and as a matter of fact the term was an offensive one.  It was simply a part of Poland, one which was returned to the Poles with the rest of the country (which had been disappeared, absorbed, with the Treaty of Vienna in 1815) in 1920.  It was essential with repatriation that this land be included, giving Poland a natural access to the Baltic, and an ability to follows it major river (the Vistula) all the way to the sea.  Without access to the Baltic, Poland's economy would have been strangled, the country simply wouldn't have had a good stake to survival.  It was a return of land that had been connected to the Polish Crown from 1466-1772.

The ethnicity issues are long and deep, and something I can't get into right here. But Germany certainly made the claim that there were huge German populations in the corridor who needed to be rescued, and who suffered under the control of the inferior Polish people. But as I said, this is a complex issue--the population in the area was probably around 45% in 1920, and this before the huge repatriation efforts to bring those German people home.  There may have been so many Germans in that area because of a massive Germanization of the area in the 19th century...and on and on.

The Polish government did sign a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1934, after which everything got on the slow boat to hell.  In the months before the Germans attacked, through the summer, there was much frenzied back-and-forth, an awful lot of negotiations that were so much meaningless talk as a mask for the inevitable.  Whatever was agreed upon and signed, Germany was going to attack, anyway, come what may.  And so they did.

[I should point out in closing that, just a few days ago, the Airminded.org site reminded us all of H.G. Wells' 1933 The Shape of Things to Come, and his prediction on the start (or re-start) of the next great war, right there at the Polish "corridor", and right soon.] 

Unusual-Classic Design: Carto-graph of Aachen, Germany, 1932

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This graphi-map isn’t so odd or unusual, and the data it presents isn't deep or wide or complex,  but the image is still very compelling--its simplicity and design the basis for its eye-catching quality.  It takes up about a sixth of the next-to-the-last advertising page in the 1 April 1932 Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig), and it does, really, “pop”.  It is a very simple presentation establishing the centrality of Aachen, and that’s about it—simple.  And it works.  I've seen a number of other "all roads lead to" type of maps like this, but I'm a little stumped on locating them this moment. One of these,  a glorious world map of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, showing lines of transportation between it and the rest of the world, featuring the only-named-city Wilmington smack in the middle of the map Wilming-Center-of-the-World map.  (I think I can gurrantee that this is the only time WIlmington appears so on a world map.) 

 

Another example--more fantastic, much older, and far more important--is the Tabula Peutingaria, a 16th century low-Renaissance copy of a third century ACE Roman map of the known world.   Now this is a map:  it was a spectacular achievement, a road map for the Roman legions to get back and forth in the shortest amount of time, an index for the Italian Autobahn.  The map covers the world from Britain and all the way east to India (which was really India, China and all the rest).  And of course, we all know where all of the roads lead to. 

Cutting Texas Exactly in Half: the Newspaper Frontier, 1880

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The idea of the frontier in American history has been around for quite some time, made famous and mostly-invented (and closed) by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, and expanded, imagined, enticed, magnified, micro-analyzed, and   generally messed with ever since.  There have been all sorts of frontiers introduced into the study of the birth, expansion and filling-up of this country, from the very earliest colonial periods of Indian frontiers, “far-western” river frontiers of the Connecticut, Delaware, Hudson (!) and Susquehanna, to the Appalachian frontier of the early western reaches of the colonies, to the transportation frontier, the slavery frontier, the gold and mining frontier, the gun frontier and so on.  

I’ve got another bit to add:  the newspaper frontier. 

I just happened upon a volume of the US Census of 1880, with a special report by S.N.D. North entitled History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States…and published in 1882.  What provoked me was the map of Texas newspapers for 1880.  It very clearly, and like no other map of its kind, delineates a fantastic line/frontier between the Texas with newspapers and the Texas without newspapers. We see very clearly that the frontier of the newspaper stops fairly abruptly and wonderfully at the 100^th meridian, with only two newspapers in all of the rest of Texas found beyond that point (and those just barely beyond the 100^th.  And it’s the 100^th meridian that mostly marks the vertical middle of the country, running through North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, the Texas/Oklahoma borders, and so into Texas—if you folded this map vertically in half it folds virtually on the 100^th meridian.  An odd bit, it is, half of the country and then half of Texas. 

Of course the population and easier-natural-resources are located east of this point, I know, but it is still quite a jolt to see the line of newspapers get drawn in the sand so vividly.  There isn’t anything else quite like this so far as the newspapers go, except, a little, for Florida, where the line gets drawn north and south, splitting the peninsula roughly in half, the southern part holding only five counties at this point..  But it is a much more robust image for Texas given the number of newspapers that were being published—280 periodicals and newspapers for Texas versus 45 for Florida, with 11,374 in the entire country*—so that the difference between the have-newspapers and haven’t-newspapers in Texas is that much more vivid. 

Texas needed more papers:  there were 1.5 million people living in the massive state in 1880, almost twice as many as there were in 1870, and almost half of what there would be there in 1900. 

Florida was another story, entirely—even in 1880, which is only 130 years ago, there were only 270,000 people living in the entire state, not even close to half of the county population of Pinelas today.

I’m just enjoying the surprise of the straight-edge frontier in Texas. 

 

*Just for the sake of comparison, the number of periodicals per state for 1880 was as follows: Illinois, 1017; New York, 1411; Pennsylvania, 973; Ohio,  774; New Jersey 215.  Also, oddly, the average circulation of the Florida and Texas papers was roughly the same: 1,282 for Texas and 1306 for Florida (with an average for the country at 4137). 

Sacred Mountains Series: Tai Shan, China.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 659

The Chou dynasty Shu-ching (“the History Classic”, “the Book of History”, “the Book of Documents”) is one of the world’s oldest historical documents, relating vernacular, religious and legendary drama of China.  According to this sixth century BCE history, the the legendary Chinese third milenium BCE ruler, Shun (2255-2206 BCE), would pilgrimage* every five years to the points marking the extent of is realm, stopping and extolling virtue and leaving gifts at the peaks of five mountains at these five points.  The one mountain of these five that was named was Tai Shan, which remains the principal of what is called “the five sacred mountains**”, and which is still after thousands of years a point of veneration and pilgrimage. 

The map of the pilgrim’s paths in this mountain was published in The Illustrated London News for 20 October 1945.  It is a nicely designed skeleton map of the mountain, scaled down to reveal temples and principal interests, and done in such as  way as to look a bit naïve. 

There’s too much not-known history here for me to make much of a comment on this map.  One item that did catch my interest though is found near the peak, the “tablet without Inscription”.  It is evidently a massive monolith put in place around 110 AC.  It has but one work incised in it:  the ideogram for “Lord”.

*pilgrimage - ch' ao-shan chin-hsiang - means 'paying one's respect to a mountain'

**The  five sacred mountains include:

• Tai Shan, Taoist mountain of the east, Shandong province, 1545 meters.

• Heng Shan Bei, Taoist mountain of the north, Shanxi province, 2017 meters.

• Hua Shan, Taoist mountain of the west, Shanxi province, 1997 meters.

• Heng Shan Nan, Taoist mountain of the south, Hunan province, 1290 meters.

• Song Shan, Taoist mountain of the center, Henan province, 1494 meters.

This interesting image was made by none other than Gilbert Grosvenor (1945), the chair of the National Geographic.  These stairs--1000 of them--lead to the South Heavenly Gate near the summit.  At the time, these were still one of the world's longest stairways.

Pale Horses and the Lake of Fire: a Map to the End of the World

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There are, in my experience, very few antiquarian images depicting the end of the world in which we see the entire globe exploding or in pieces or in flames. This sort of image gets more play in the 20^th century, especially after 8 August 1945, but prior to that it is really very scarce.  I own a few images that appear in the 17^th and 19^th centuries, and another from 1929 (Das Weltbild which show a “giant ice ball” colliding into and completely destroying the earth). .  Then there is this new find, S.L. Lacy’s The End of the World, (necessarily) self-published in West Point, Virginia, in 1941.  It is a short and stocky, and bound in orange wrappers—its spine title (The End of the World) begs the casual reader to pull it from the shelf. It’s a simple book—studying the Bible prophecies and revelations on the end of all things—and it annoys and is insulting but doesn’t disappoint.

I started to breeze through the book (back-to-front as always) and opened the book to Chapter XIII, finding this delicious chapter heading:  “The Chronological Order of Final Things”, this being a full page pre-PowerPoint summation of the time-shrinking fireball that is rolling inexorably towards us all.  To say that one is able to put a period at the end of the world's flow of time, that someone is able to identify the point in the future where the future is no more, is "presumptive"--this in the most understated fashion as to offend even the highest of high-Victorians' sense of restrained propriety.  Wrapped in a comfortable Christian chrysalis of pre- and post-apocalyptic religious certitude, Mr. Lacy delivers his interpretation of biblical prophecy for the coming of the end, hustling it to the front of the religious line of things to come.

It seems that in 1941 the end was beginning, and Lacy saw all of the images implied by prophecy that were necessary to announce the glorious final days of broad retribution. This includes the list if the ten things indicating "the sign of The Times", one of which (Number 5) was "The Automobile" and another (Number 7) was "Increased Knowledge and Travel" (announced by Nathum 2: 3,4 and old dependable Daniel. 12:4, respectively.  There's nothing that doesn't fit into Daniel's visions or revelations, though Mr. Cash has certainly made a lovely song of them.)  When everything fits perfectly into a predictive model with no possibility of falsification (or of proof or disproof), then the model has no validity outside of a belief system in itself. Very tidy.

It is an annoying, cloying minor treatise, promising little more than The Lake of Fire awaiting almost all of us, even the sleeping dead, who would be scraped from their graves to be spit into this burning tragedy. 

Lacy does a lot of inspired interpretation and philosophizing, much of which he doesn’t seem to bother separating from biblical quotations—I don’t think it is intentional, just bad writing.  A random find in Lacy’s thinking dislodges the following  nugget:

“Satan is in the atmosphere above the earth, with access to heaven and earth with a circumscribed power over the atmospheric elements and the earth including the inhabitants”. 

 Oh dear.

But enough of this nonsense. What brought me to this work is the folding schematic map at the front of the book.  It is a slightly complex jumble of semi-circles and circular reasoning, and I have no interest in straightening out this jumbled linguine. What has my interest is the dissolving Earth part of the diagram, a part of the dead earth that comes between Calvary  and Heaven-on-Earth.  What makes this image different from the others though is that the Earth reappears—different from its former self having been vanquished and cleansed by all consuming fire, but the Earth nevertheless.  Or something like it.  Or nothing like it. 

 

Blank and Missing Things: a Map of Missing People of Central Europe and Russia, 1881

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The History of Blank, Missing and Empty Things (Thread, #45)

“Heaven and earth were one form…. (then they were separated from one another…)”

 In ancient times the representation of the gods and beliefs was handed from one writer or storyteller to the next, on and on, changes here and deletions there, for many generations.  This practice was possible (necessary?) because there really wasn’t a solitary scripture to follow (as in the Koran or the Bible) and no priestly class to guard and cherish a particular strong story line in all of its barbed details.

 

There are of course bits that have survived intact for millennia.  One of these is this fragment from one of Euripides’ lost plays (only 20% or so are complete), The Wise Melanippe, and begins a statement of cosmogony that states the creation of all things.  The separation of heaven and earth has always stuck with me, because this separation begins with Euripides with the creation of the world seems to continue on its way with mini-separations of all things over the course of time—like the cosmological world-bearing turtles—all the way down.  I’m not sure how or who exactly did this heaven-rending, or to what force it owed its being:  evidently the Presocratics tended to depersonalize the actions of the gods and grant their actions to natural forces, so the issue with the heaven-separation business may well have been a motive force rather than a god.  Anyway it’s the tearing apart, the removal, the separation phenomena that got my attention to begin with, and one which has stayed with me, though I’m sure that Euripides didn’t have that sort of violent rending in mind while describing the birth of the earth.

And so it is with this map* showing the concentrations of the Jewish people in Europe  in the late 19^th century. Between the time of the publication of this map—1881—and the beginning of the Nazi regime in  Germany in 1933, there were many persecutions and Pogroms and deportations of the Jewish people.  Nothing prepared anyone for the concentration camps and the systematic extermination of that people between 1935 and 1945.  What this map shows is the distribution of the Jewish people (by percentage of the total population) before they were eviscerated:  the difference between this map in 1881 and the map of 1945 would be completely different.  The Jews were gone:  killed.  Some deported.  Others escaped.  But they were basically torn from Europe  in the cruelest manner so that in almost every case the only indicators of their existence were shadows. 

There are large-scale maps of this sort of evidence for other groups of people in their pre-Euripidean tearing from
their home:  maps showing the locations of Indian tribes in North America (pre-Columbian, 17^th century, 19^th century, they’re all telling pretty much the same devastating story) is one good example of a slender category.  There aren’t maps for the mass extermination by starvation created by Joe Stalin, or the millions murdered by Pol Pot or Mao.  There are of course more small-scale, localized maps depicting the results of forced relocations or devastating war or drought or hunger or floods.  But few, I think, take such a compelling x-ray of a people’s past on a continental scales such as this. 

 *"Die Verbreitung der Juden in Mitteleurope"  found in  Richard Andree's , Volkskunde der Juden...,  Verlag von Velhagen & Klefirg in Bielfeld und Leipzig:  1881. 

Nazi Propaganda and the Battle for Europe, 1941: the War at Sea

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Propaganda Series #  14  (See listing below)
The Admiralty Regrets to Announce… was for years the standard beginning to an official British announcement concerning the loss of ships and sailors.  The phrase is used as the title to this work (by an unattributed writer known only as “an expert”) to immediately introduce the reader to the failings of the British navy.  It is of course a piece of Nazi propaganda, issued some time in 1941. (My copy is he U.S. copyright deposit copy and is stamped with a transfer date of September 1942; the pamphlets reads to me as though the U.S. had not yet entered the war.)  The great strengths of the German air force and navy are extolled and the failings of the British mercantile elaborated at great—and sometimes greatly imagined—lengths.  The booklet was published in French (except for the title) and answers its own repetitive question: “quelle est donc la situation relle de la marine commerciale anglais?”

 The pamphlet’s 32 pages (illustrated with 24 photographs of various blow-ups and bombings, plus one graph and three maps) are dedicated to winning the French hearts and minds, trying to convince the conquered population that there really wasn’t any help coming, and that the British could not even supply themselves with the necessaries to run a country, let alone a war.

In the map at right we see the  ports and shipping centers that were bombed by the Luftwaffe (with London located by a big red dot).  Another map shows the stockade-like presence of the Nazi navy securing its impregnable wall against the arrival of foreign trade and supplies to Britain.  

This post is one of a series on propaganda maps which occasionally appear in this blog.   Like Thomas Nast political cartoons and war photography, a map can instantly and overwhelmingly display not only data but sentiment as well. The maps published in this pamphlet by the Nazis are were certainly immediately understandable to just about anyone, French-reading or not, literate or not--the images needed no words, especially when surrounded in the text by vicious images of German military might.  Overrun or not, Petain-ized as it was, France was still offering aid to its allies and resistance to the Germans--the more minds that could be won over with propaganda of this sort meant one less to have to worry about as an active enemy.

A Listing of Some our the Propaganda-related posts in this Blog

Nazi Propaganda: Scaring the Will-to-War, 1935

Maps as Propaganda: the Nazi's Use of Maps in the Hearts and Minds Campaign in Occupied and Holland and France, 1943

 

The Propaganda of Restricting Infomration: Dorothea Lange's Photos at the Japanese "Relocation" Camp, Manzanar, 1942

Psychological Warfare--Aerial Propaganda Leaflets and Surrender Tickets, WWII.

Maps as Propaganda: the Turning of the Tide, January 1943

 

Humanitarian Propaganda--Hope for those at Home, September 1944.

Nazi Propaganda: Scare Tactics in a Hearts and Minds Campaign, 1940

A Propaganda Effort Equating the New Deal and Nazism, 1935: the Power of Willful Forgetting

The Atomic Bomb: 6 August 1945. Propaganda Leaflet Dropped on Japanese Cities

The Polish "Threat" to Germany, 1939:   Nazi Propaganda on the Perceived Polish "Invasion"

 

Propaganda Maps #2: the Nazis. the Big Lie, and Cartography

 

Graphical Display of Data: the R.A.F. and Luftwaffe Present Their Cases, 1938-1940

 

 

Locating Chaos (Addendum): The Land of Chaos in the "Atlas of Experience"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 571 and a half

The ink on my last post hadn't really dried when my wife, Patti Digh, said that she had seen another a map of Chaos.   And of course she was right--it was sitting happily in the beauty-bending The Atlas of Experience by Louise van Swaaig and Jean Klare.  This is a most unusual work, using familiar mapping skills and general topography to create geographic landscapes for lands of ideas, concepts and emotions. They provide maps for Secrets, Knowledge, Bad Habits, Home, Boredom (my favorite!), Health, Stream of Ideas, The Isles of Forgetfulness, Passion, Mountains of Work, Growth, The Void, Adversity, Chaos, Adventure, Haute Cuisine, Pleasure, Change, Mortality, and Elsewhere (my second favorite).  This just a damned lovely book. 

Things out of Place Department: the Moon

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 This is a short entry in the “Things out of Place” department.  The image is lovely enough, and the depiction of the Moon is excellent, especially given the time of publication, which was 1683.  The Moon though, of course, is enormously out of proportion with the setting—I’m not sure why it needed a setting at all, but it has one, and it is odd.  The work is that of the prolific Manesson Mallet, who published this engraving as one of 677 in his massive Description de l’Univers, which appeared in five volumes.  I’m also not sure of how Mallet came to such greatness and capacity, as he started out his life (1630-1706) as a simple foot soldier under Louis XV, rising and rising in promotion and ability over the years until he became the chief inspector of forts.  He also wrote military books, including the three volume Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre (1684), which he was somehow able to accomplish in the year after publishing his magnum opus.

I really couldn't figure out where to put his image, categorically speaking that is--it sort of fits into the small Extra Earth series, simply because the extra earths are big and way out of proportion.  But this is not "extra", and not the earth, but it is out of proportion and belongs in the sky; and, taken out of context, the image is very unusual, in a naive surreal kind of way...

Blank and Missing Things #31: Missing Earth

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In 1830 when Amos Eaton, filling up his chair and burning the  midnight oils in his home in Albany New York, was figuring out the insides of the earth  He had but little direct evidence to go on, and the publications on the topic of the center of the earth were left to speculation not much better then than science fiction (a term which had not been invented yet; neither for that matter had the word "scientist").   A  very careful  observer, Eaton applied what he knew about the strata of the earth to a theory of how the landforms of the upper/outer mantle were formed. (Eaton (1776-1842) was as influential a teacher as he was a theorist and observer:  some of his students include the following Big Names (for which many buildings on university grounds are named for ):  James Dwight Dana   (geologist, zoologist), James Eights  (Antarctic explorer), Asa Gray ( greatest 19^th c American botanist), James Hall  (first New York State Geologist), Joseph Henry (developed electromagnetism, all-around smart guy who communicated with everyone, secretary of the Smithsonian and so on.)

He applied the discoveries of stratum of William Smith (1759-1839, the "father of English Geology") drawing on a number of maps of his, such as “Strata Identified by Organized Fossils. : Containing Prints on Coloured Paper of the Most Characteristic Specimens in each Stratum” of 1815  and “Geological section from London to Snowdon; showing the varieties of the strata, and the correct altitude of the hills” of 1815 (pictured below), plus much else.  

These two images (left) of cross-sections of the earth appeared in Eaton's Geological Textbook, (1830). The top shows the earth in perfect harmony and in cross-section, depicting the strata in six layers beneath a calm and palcid ocean.  There was trouble though located inside the six bulbous bulbs on the interior of the innermost strata:  as we see in the second image, the six bulbs, filled with
"combustible material", combusted, forming volcanoes and such, thereby parting the waters and forming the continents. It was some pretty  good thinking for the time.  But what attracted me to these images was the labeling of the interior of the newly-exploded earth, "interior probably undisturbed", and blank beyond that point.  a dark, blackish mass, unknown and from where Eaton sat, unknowable.  But Eaton did do an extraordinary job in trying to imagine this stuff, piecing things together from the geological record in those pre-Darwin, pre-Lyell days.  The woodcut at right appeared in the same publication as that above--this incredible rendering depicts the entirety of  North America  in profile, which was a vast leap of faith, an image so severe in its accomplishment that it is difficult today to realize how shocking it must've seemed to the readers of 1830.  I believe this was the first time a true geological cross-section like this was attempted--again to see an X-ray (pre-dating that discovery by 65 years by the way) of the earth and to have it be not so terribly bad (compared to today) was just a phenomenal achievement

________

Just for the record, Smith's map of the London area--which presages the Eaton map somewhat--appears below:

Highpoint of Northern Renaissance History and Cartography: Olaus Magnus, 1565

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Olaus Magnus (Swedish historian and geographer, born. at Skeninge, Sweden, 1490; and died at Rome., 1558) wrote the legendary and Renaissance-high-point  Historia delle genti et della natura delle cose setentrionale… ("Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus", and translated as  "Olaus Magnus Gothus', the Upsala Archbishops', history of the nordic people's different manners and camps, also about the wonderful differences in customs, holy practices, superstitions, bodily exercises, government and food keeping; further on war, buildings and wonderful aids; further on metals and different kinds of animals, that live in these neighbourhoods ") published in Rome, 1555 (as well as Antwerp, 1558; Basle, 1567; Frankfort, 1618, and also in translation in German (Strasburg and Basle, 1567); Italian (Venice , 1565); English (London, 1658); and Dutch, (Amsterdam, 1665)).  It was mostly a response to earlier histories treating the geography, fauna, flora and general history of Scandinavia, which Magnus found to be wanting, wrong and fanciful. (The image to the left,  a mixture of fact and fiction, does depict snowshoes for about the very first time in a printed book.)  His own book, the Historia, corrected and strangled many earlier wrongs and fanciful affronts committed by other authors.  It is still seen as a useful book on Scandinavian mythology and folklore, along with some interest in the origin of the material that Magnus contributed from his own imagination when sources went wanting.  

Magnus' map of the great northland was a fantastic achievement, its stature undeterred by the liberal use of sea monsters and other fanciful creatures.  The detail in the coastlines (as well as the depiction of currents between Iceland and the Faroe Islands) as well as interior features make these among the most detailed maps of the north yet printed in the 16th century.

The Air Bridge to Nowhere: the Friendly Skies, Chicago to Moscow, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 449

This hopeful and terrifically unbalanced homage to wistful loveliness of the Soviet Union, The Businessman's Stake in American-Soviet Friendship, by Harland Allen, was published in Chicago in 1944, and seems to me a small prayer for what the post-war world might bring about.  Allen forced the then-popular economic thought that the people dangling from the visor of Uncle Joe Stalin's cap were money angels rather than Russian corpses, and that the air lane shown in the trans-polar map at right would soon be filled with American exports headed to Moscow. (Little did he know that in  a decade this line would be the distance traveled by ICBMs, or close enough to it.)  At least that seems to be the hope here, Stalin forcibly melted into the Big Board, the Soviet Union trading on the DOW as CCCP (Inc.).

The small pamphlet received some spirited review support from the Northwestern University School of Law, the Des Moines Register and Tribune,the Society for the Advancement of Management, the Meadville Theological School, and Laird Dell Attorney at Law. And that's about it. But these were ripe times for this sort of pro-Soviet thought:  after all, dozens of millions of Russians had been killed in the fight in the East against their former Nazi allies, and without all of that blood sacrifice I have no doubt that the war would've lasted for some years to come.*  The U.S. had a powerful ally in the Soviet Union regardless of what had happened there in the 1930's and regardless of their attack on Finland and regardless of their Pact with Hitler--from 1942 onward they would hinder and halt the Nazi army and nearly ground the whole thing down to a nub, crushing the German capacity to fight in the west. The atomic bomb was to be untried until July 1945, and the outcome of the war was not yet known.  Love for the Soviet Union was high in the sky at this point, FDR making many airy and superior statements about our new ally, while the rest of the propaganda machine was lubed and oiled for the coming fight.  LIFE magazine went so far as to pronounce Lenin as "perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and that the NKVD was analogous to the FBI.  Even old anti-Soviet hawks like MacArthur publicly pronounced their admiration for the new regime.  (George Patton famously did not.)

Back to our pamphlet: aside from some romantic vision of the Soviet Union, Allen maintained that the U.S. needed to deal with the CCCP because of its enormous army (which he did not want to annoy and fight) and its impending "mastery o the air"--it would be better to trade and make money than it would be to make war.  Allen pointed out that some of the problems of Americans dealing with the political system in the Soviet Union were inadequate reports on what he described as the country's economic "principle of national planning". .(I hardly know what George Orwell might've said about the supremely understated summation of the Soviet system as "national planning" and the fruitless and embarrassingly weak attempt at  controlling language to describe the monstrously repressive regime.)  He continues:  "Journalists have been positively fearful of open-minded reporting in Russia lest they get tagged--or tarred--with the familiar epithet "communist", and then goes on to describe the similarities of the "two great peace-loving peoples". 

And so it goes, on and on in this pamphlet--it just isn't worth going into any further than this.  The euphoric sheen of pro-Soviet sentiment and appreciation wore thinner as the war progressed, truer feelings becoming more exposed as the German army retreated westward, reproducing the famous Minard chart of Napoleon's disappeared army in a war 130 years earlier.  The endgame for European real estate, fumbled badly by the dying FDR at Yalta, brought out the cardboard smiles between the US and the Soviet Union, relations strained to the point that the military employment of the atomic bomb was in some not-minor sense made to bridle Soviet intentions.

But that was still two years hence for Mr. Allen, who I guess couldn't see into the future that far, even if his work was heralded by the Des Moines Register.  He just didn't do a very good job of withstanding the test of time, even though that test ended in 1946.

Skinny IV: the American Empire 1940

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 420

This map of the American Empire, "a might nation on whose flag the sun never sets", appeared in an odd little publication called US, a Presentation of Americanism, published in 1940 by the United States Flag Association.  The author, Col. James A. Moss, was adjectively gifted, or affected, never having met one he didn't like or couldn't use.  The pamphlet drips red, white and bluey drippings--on this map spread alone we see unimaginative and repetitious uses of the words  "amazing", "marvelous", "unprecedented" and so on. 

Yet for all of this multi-colored ink and trying adjectives, the Empire, or empire, as described by Moss really wasn't so much, once you added up all the square miles.  Actually, if you take away Alaska from this mix, all of this external property doesn't add up to more than Texas; if you subtracted the very problematic size of the Philippines, these properties wouldn't cover North Carolina*.  Now so far as "empires" go, this isn't much--they're lovely places to land planes, though, or refuel ships (in earlier days)--but when the foreign conquests don't add up to 5% of the general land mass, an "Empire" it isn't.  Perhaps if one of those flags was on Australia (sorry!), well, then, that would make a stiffer claim for the E-word (or I-word, actually, as in Imperium).  Roman, Persian, Ottoman, British, Assyrian, Spanish, Byzantine, Median/Mongol, Athenian, Akkadian, Russian, Celestial--these are empires (whole alphabets of them), in power, land, influence.  America could've really have been an empire in 1945 had it the stomach and hadn't been exhausted of the whole idea of war--thank goodness it didn't happen. Running amok and all. I'm happy to think of this Skinny Empire of the United States in 1940--Fat Empires generally are killers.

Some of the other Skinny Posts:

Skinny III:  Skinny Water. An Extremely Thin Shower Apparatus, 1888.

Skinny II: Morals, Class Warfare & Letting Someone Else Pick up your Dropped Fork

Skinny (I) Tech--Swimming, Sitting and Smoking Thin (Really Thin)

*There are simple ways of determining this exactly--adding up columns of figures in the Statesman's Yearbook will satisfy this need, but I think that my guess gets us to the point to within a comfortable margin. 

Cartograms of the Obama Victory: What "Normal" Maps Don't Show

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 355

I woke up this morning feeling good for the first time in my life about the results of a presidential election here in the United States.  In my living memory, the characterizations of the occupiers of the big chair in the Oval Office have been less than fulfilling:  the ruined greatness of LBJ, the actual and interrupted possibility of evil of Richard Nixon, the tight-lipped raisin-eyed confusion of the deceptive Jerry Ford, the bittersweet and limited Jimmy Carter, the addled incompetence and intellectual insolence of master storyteller RWR, the bookmarked-thin-never-finished-book of Old School George Bush, the Falstaffian and could've-been-great-but-spoiled Bill Clinton (killed in the end by viciousness and republican lust), the unutterable and poisonous George Bush redux.  The people sent up to run against them have been less than illustrious in many cases:  Hubert Humphrey, Walt Mondale, John Kerry, Al Gore (though with Mr. Gore, known as "Al God" to the other kids at  National Cathedral , would've been  a better choice for the chair than George Bush; but then again, a warm stain would have been better too, so faint a praise is that...there is little doubt though that we'd have several trillion dollars more in the economy and wouldn't have affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of American military families or "disrupted" the lives of millions of Iraqis.) But late last night, when Iowa went to Obama, I felt the possibility of pride and probability of accomplishment creeping into even my cynical soul-shadow.  I also have little doubt that a man of this calibre surrounded by a forceful whirlwind of readiness will also be able to attract excellent minds to the administration--something I think that was sorely lacking (for the greatest part) in the last administrations. I know absolutely that everyone else in the world was ready for Obama; I'm glad that the United States followed suit. 

And how big a win was this?  How many people supported the Obama ticket? 

A simple map showing results of voting by state doesn't tell that much of the story:

Looks very red to me. 

However, when you use an electoral college cartogram (a map with a thematic variable, where the area of the map is representing something other than simple geography and a place on the globe) to display the same results the visual representation of the same data changes dramatically, we you can see (and this image can be clicked for a more detailed view):

(The following image is from the interesting and clearly written website of Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan.  He also has published a "real world" atlas of cartograms that more vigorously display quantitative information--outside of an atlas of imaginary places, this is exactly the sort of book that should be present in every classroom in the United States. ) The population cartogram from Newman's website offers another interesting aspect of the election results, depicting a solid but relatively thin control of much of the South (inexplicably and stupidly referred to over and over again by the pundits on CNN as "the Confederacy" (!?)), along with a stubborn reed of red that extends from the northern to southern border and which pretty much follows the cattle trail of the Hat Creek Outfit from the Great American Novel Lonesome Dove (by Larry McMurtry, which is also to a lesser degree the path of the Goodnight-Loving Trail.                                                                                                      

The net result, I think, is that the Obama victory was decisive, and has a huge tailwind, a mountain of support.  It seems that there is very little doubt that the people of this country were ready for something very different than what has been here for eight long years.