Mapping and Empire Reinhartz, Dennis; Saxon, Gerald D
2005, 20050101
eBook
From the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Spain, then Mexico, and finally the United States took ownership of the land from the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico to the Pacific Coast of ...Alta and Baja California—today's American Southwest. Each country faced the challenge of holding on to territory that was poorly known and sparsely settled, and each responded by sending out military mapping expeditions to set boundaries and chart topographical features. All three countries recognized that turning terra incognita into clearly delineated political units was a key step in empire building, as vital to their national interest as the activities of the missionaries, civilian officials, settlers, and adventurers who followed in the footsteps of the soldier-engineers. With essays by eight leading historians, this book offers the most current and comprehensive overview of the processes by which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. soldier-engineers mapped the southwestern frontier, as well as the local and even geopolitical consequences of their mapping. Three essays focus on Spanish efforts to map the Gulf and Pacific Coasts, to chart the inland Southwest, and to define and defend its boundaries against English, French, Russian, and American incursions. Subsequent essays investigate the role that mapping played both in Mexico's attempts to maintain control of its northern territory and in the United States' push to expand its political boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The concluding essay draws connections between mapping in the Southwest and the geopolitical history of the Americas and Europe.
In the early 1990s, it was revealed that during the Cold War the Soviet Union's General Staff had secretly mapped large parts of the world in great detail. This article discusses Soviet military maps ...covering Norway, and analyses how the maps were produced and how successfully they depict their subject. The author concludes that the USSR utilised open sources, satellite imagery, and human intelligence when compiling the maps, with varying degrees of success ranging from the successful penetration of Norwegian military secrecy to misidentification of commonly known institutions, which resulted in maps of highly non-uniform quality that were unique in Norwegian mapping history. A further conclusion is that the maps clearly do not represent the full Soviet intelligence repository on Norwegian topography, and the author discusses some possible theories for their unexpectedly low quality and reasons why they were perceived as vastly superior when first discovered.
During the Cold War, the Soviet military carried out an ambitious mapping programme, which resulted in a global series of topographic maps. Although recent advances in scholarship have increased our ...knowledge of the production of these maps, we still know little about the organization behind them. Based on information from a set of 466 1:50 000-scale Soviet military topographic maps of Denmark, this article examines the Soviet mapping practices related to the large-scale mapping of Denmark. Results show that the Soviet military compiled large-scale topographic maps of Denmark between the 1950s and the 1980s. The maps were initially based on Danish maps, but later the Soviets began to prefer remote-sensed data from satellite imagery. This allowed the Soviets to capture information about concealed military infrastructure. The article also shows the potential for using information from the map sheets in a transnational analysis of the Soviet mapping during the Cold War.
Historic gardens are often seen in the context of botanical heritage, which emphasizes their aesthetic and botanical value. Yet, their architectural importance as an integral part of the ...architectural heritage of the bastion castle ensemble is ignored. Finding the relationship between the castle and the garden is presently complicated by considerable changes in the townscape since the 17th century and the lack of details on these gardens’ depictions on maps. The paper demonstrates how historical maps, especially military ones combined with modern on-site analyses can reveal the main architectural types of the gardens in the bastion castle ensemble and show their most important architectural features that should be preserved. The results demonstrate three scenarios in the relationship between the garden and the palace component of bastion castle, their main features, and the challenges facing them. This elucidation of the main features can help to conserve and to valorize plans for the gardens in these ensembles.
We report the serendipitous discovery of a map drawn by an army surgeon during the First World War. The map, entitled “Loos 36° NW3,’”was drawn by 24-year-old Captain Alexander Edward MacDonald in ...fall 1917 and was found in his old surgery textbook. MacDonald’s map depicts the positions of Canadian frontlines and medical units after the Battle of Hill 70. During the battle, Dr. MacDonald tended to the wounded in an aid post that he constructed in a ruined coal mine near the Front. MacDonald would go on to serve with distinction in the Battle of Passchendaele and Canada’s Hundred Days, and he received the Military Cross for gallantry. He maintained a passionate interest in cartography throughout his life and eventually became an authority among map collectors. Artifacts such as MacDonald’s map remind us of the realities of war and the sacrifices of our surgeon predecessors.
In Central Asia, the introduction of mechanised farming and the transformation of the landscape caused by agricultural intensification over the last 50 years have resulted in the massive destruction ...of archaeological remains. In this paper, we focus on an underestimated and unexploited type of remote sensing for the study of landscape change and anthropic impact on cultural heritage: 1:10,000 Soviet military maps of the 1950s. We present their use in the case study of the Archaeological Map of the Samarkand region. We argue that their precision and the early date at which they were produced make it possible to employ them as a reference tool for systematic survey and archaeological heritage management in Central Asia and throughout the former Soviet Union. We discuss the results of an archaeological survey based on these maps and show how they can be used to evaluate the destruction of archaeological mounds during the last 50 years, by contrasting them with modern satellite imagery.
This note concerns an atlas of military maps dating from the middle of the seventeenth century. Almost certainly compiled in France, it came into the possession of the British Museum (now Library) in ...the early nineteenth century but seems never to have been described at length. Although manuscript military atlases are not rare, this one unusually includes maps of twenty-nine British and Irish towns and cities that seem to be scarcely known.
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