Michael Heffernan

The Politics of the Map in the Early Twentieth Century

Drawing on material from several countries, principally Britain, France, and the United States, this paper considers the politics of mapmaking in the years before, during, and immediately after World War I. Following a discussion of some noteworthy but hitherto overlooked mapping projects from the period around 1900, the paper examines the wartime production of maps as aids to geopolitical strategy in three Allied cities—London, Paris, and New York—with particular reference to the major geographical societies in these locations.

Research travel and disciplinary identities in the University of Cambridge, 1885–1955

This article considers the role of overseas academic travel in the development of the modern research university, with particular reference to the University of Cambridge from the 1880s to the 1950s. The Cambridge academic community, relatively sedentary at the beginning of this period, became progressively more mobile and globalized through the early twentieth century, facilitated by regular research sabbaticals. The culture of research travel diffused at varying rates, and with differing consequences, across the arts and humanities and the field, laboratory and theoretical sciences, reshaping disciplinary identities and practices in the process. The nature of research travel also changed as the genteel scholarly excursion was replaced by the purposeful, output-orientated expedition.

History, Geography and the French National Space: The Question of Alsace‐Lorraine, 1914‐18

The restoration of French authority in Alsace and Lorraine, the regions ceded to the new German Empire following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, was a major preoccupation of Frances political leadership before 1914 and was the principal French war aim during World War I. This paper examines how French politicians and intellectuals sought to reinforce this territorial claim between 1914 and 1918. In the early years of the war, the propaganda campaign was dominated by conservative politicians, business élites and senior figures in the army whose preoccupations were mainly economic and strategic and whose proposals were often unrealistic. Later in the war, moderate and less obviously self-interested geopolitical arguments were developed by leading French academics, particularly the historians and the geographers, with the active support of their government. This campaign emphasised cultural, historical and political questions, drew on the ideas of earlier French theorists of the nation-state, notably Ernest Renan, and had a significant impact on the subsequent development of Frances renowned interwar tradition of geo-historical research.

“A Dream as Frail as Those of Ancient Time”: The in-Credible Geographies of Timbuctoo:

The author considers the politics and poetics of belief and disbelief in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain and France, with particular reference to the mythologies and controversies about the location and nature of Timbuctoo, a city widely believed to be the hub of a fabulously wealthy African trading system. Like other episodes in the history of European exploration, from the quest for the North-West passage to the search for the source of the Nile and the races to the North and South Poles, the scramble to reach Timbuctoo was sustained by intense international rivalry and spawned a widespread speculative discourse involving politicians, scientists, scientific patrons, explorers, and journalists. Drawing on recent work on the social history of truth, the author considers how and why different geographical descriptions of Timbuctoo were deemed credible by the scientific communities of London and Paris. Judgments about ‘new’ geographical information were influenced, if not determined, by a complex and shifting rhetoric of adjudication in which moral assessments about the character and status of rival claimants loomed especially large. When the French explorer René Caillié claimed the prize of the Paris Geographical Society as the first explorer to reach and return from Timbuctoo in 1828, his achievements sparked an acrimonious debate between British and French geographers that raised fundamental questions about the purpose of African exploration and the nature of geographical truth. Of central concern were the legitimacy of disguise as an exploratory tactic, and the importance of physical courage and bodily comportment in assessing an explorers scientific credibility and moral authority.

From Geo-Strategy to Geo-Economics: The ‘Heartland’ and British Imperialism Before and After MacKinder

In this paper we examine the changing perception of Central Asia and the Caucasus to Imperial Britain from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries and consider the importance of Mackinders 1904 paper ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ to this process. In it we argue that Central Asia and the Caucasus are seen first as an important buffer zone essential to keeping the Russia aggressors at bay and ensuring Britains continued dominance of India. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the region had emerged as a major source of raw materials, particularly oil, and as such was no longer seen as merely a buffer zone, but a considerable prize in itself. Mackinders paper, which emerged at a critical point in this transition, served as an important synthesis of these long-standing and widely shared British concerns about the region and provided a clear and concise assessment of the regions geo-strategic and geo-economic importance and as such its global significance.

The End of Atlanticism: Habermas, Derrida and the Meaning of Europe in the Twenty-first Century

The Cold War idea of an ‘Atlantic Europe’, shaped as much by the interests of the United States as by the peoples of (western) Europe, was seriously compromised by the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union, the re-unification of Germany, and the break-up of other communist federations in east-central Europe. These events transformed not only the political map of Europe but also the geopolitical assumptions on which that map had been created. In the euphoria that accompanied these seismic changes, long forgotten panEuropean dreams suddenly resurfaced with a vengeance, on both sides of a formerly divided continent. In the memorable words of François Mitterand in January 1990, ‘Europe is returning to its history and its geography’. The prospect of a new, independent Europe seemed broadly compatible with US interests under the administrations of both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Backed by an isolationist (or at least unilateralist) Republican Congress, Bush announced to the American people that he would ‘not be a foreign-policy president’ and even Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state, famously observed that US foreign policy had been ‘too Eurocentric for too long’. Under Christopher’s direction, the State Department’s allocation to support US foreign aid, diplomacy, the UN and all other international organisations slumped to an all-time low of barely one per cent of the federal budget. While Bush, Clinton and most European political leaders repeatedly re-affirmed their faith in the Atlantic alliance, everyone seemed to accept that the United States and Europe (whether viewed as the EU or as a group of independent nation-states) would henceforth be freed from the Cold War geostrategic constraints that had bound them together for so long. Optimistic observers, still in the majority on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990s, hoped and expected that the new arrangement

The American Geographical Society's Map of Hispanic America: Million-Scale Mapping between the Wars

ABSTRACT The 1:1 million Map of Hispanic America, compiled at the American Geographical Societys New York headquarters between the First and Second World Wars, has been seen as a landmark in twentieth-century cartography. In this essay we re-evaluate the Hispanic Map as a technical and scholarly project and re-assess its wider significance for the history of twentieth-century topographic mapping in the light of the cultural and political factors that shaped its development. When finally completed in 1945, the Hispanic Map was rightly judged an unsurpassed scientific achievement and a major work of art. But it was already out of date, superseded by newer cartographic technologies, particularly aerial survey and reconnaissance, that had removed the need for the kind of meticulous and painstaking compilation that the Hispanic Map exemplified.

Cultural Memories: An Introduction

The revival of public and scholarly interest in collective cultural memories since the 1980s has been a genuinely global phenomenon and is somewhat paradoxical. Memory is a form of temporal awareness more readily associated with traditional, nonindustrialized societies rather than with the globalized, mobile, and deracinated world of today, which ostensibly floats free of all historical moorings, disconnected from earlier generations and periods. Yet the rise of a self-consciously postmodern, postcolonial, and multicultural society seems to have reanimated memory as a social, cultural, and political force with which to challenge, if not openly reject, the founding myths and historical narratives that have hitherto given shape and meaning to established national and imperial identities. This trend, initially accelerated by the lifting of the censorship and political constraints that had been imposed in both the “East” and the “West” during the Cold War, has been facilitated since the mid-1990s by the Internet, the default source of information in the global public sphere. Uncovering the historical experiences of marginalized communities, previously silenced because of their ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexuality, is now a primary objective of historical inquiry. It is inspired in part by an emerging “politics of regret” (Olick & Robbins, 1998, p. 107) but also by a desire to provide a sense of historical legitimacy and depth to newly established social, cultural, and political constituencies. This change has necessitated an increased level of systematic analysis of different kinds of nontextual evidence, from oral testimonies to the many other nonwritten ways in which intergenerational individual and collective memories have been articulated.

Professor Penck's Bluff: Geography, Espionage and Hysteria in World War I

Abstract This article considers the image of geography during World War I through a discussion of newspaper controversies about the pre‐war activities of German and British geographers. Early in the war, Sven Hedin and Albrecht Penck, renowned geographers whose achievements had been widely celebrated by the British geographical establishment, were named in the media as enemy spies whose supposedly disinterested scientific inquiries in Britain and the Empire had masked their real intention to pass sensitive information to the German High Command. British geography stood accused of collusion with enemy ‘super spies’. This article examines how Britains geographical community, represented by the Royal Geographical Society, sought to defend the disciplines patriotic virtue and head off a full‐scale media witch‐hunt. In so doing, the article comments on the medias role in shaping the image of geography and on geographys place in public debates about the sanctity of the national space.

‘Autograph of a Nation’: The Daughters of the American Revolution and the National Old Trails Road, 1910–1927

In 1912, a group of women within the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) undertook to become architects of the first continuous transcontinental automobile route, to be called the ‘National Old Trails Road’ highway. Consistent with many of the private road improvement initiatives during the heyday of Americas good roads movement, ‘Daughters’ in many states were involved in mapping the route and posing a variety of marking schemes that would etch upon the landscape the DARs sponsorship of the route. In doing so, the Daughters staked an explicit claim for the DAR and for American women in the project of nation‐building, by promoting their National Old Trails Road as a culmination of Manifest Destiny. This episode highlights the interrelationship of gender and the nation. This article argues that while women function passively in nationalist rhetoric to symbolise the nation, one must also acknowledge the agency of conservative womens groups in constructing and perpetuating nationalist narratives in ways that were often surprisingly complex and not simply imitative of men.