PROFESSORIMRE DEMHARDTCartography: The Golden Age of Explorative Cartography, Charting Manifest Destiny and Colonial Africa

ST LEE VISITING PROFESSORIAL FELLOW 2014–15

It might not be politically correct today, but in 19th-century exploration men made history and maps. And one of their favoured playgrounds was the Arctic with the ultimate quest for the North Pole. Taking August Petermann (1822–78) – eminent cartographer, journal editor, gatekeeper of geographical exploration in his time and, last but not least, in 1845–7 with Edinburgh’s own cartographic firm W. & A.K. Johnston – as pilot and cartographic chronicler, the lecture navigates the polar regions from renewed interest in the Northwest Passage in the 1810s to the most disputed ‘conquest’ of the Pole in 1908–9.

Venue: University of Edinburgh, Old Library, Institute of Geography, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP RSVP: mwilso18@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

Unveiling the Earth’s Face: August Petermann and the Golden Age of Explorative Cartography

In association with the British Cartographic SocietyThe Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the lost War of 1812 inevitably turned expansionism of the booming United States continental westwards before, having reached the Pacific coast and digested these acquisitions, the US–Spanish War of 1898 paved the way to global imperialism. After setting the socio-political framework the lectures aims at a tour d’horizon on ‘how the West was won’ by focusing on the army’s topographical engineers. They not only were charged with the military reconnaissance of conquest but also the survey of infrastructural key projects like the trans-continental railroad arteries.

Venue: Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, Wolfson Room (NB01), Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU RSVP: sas.events@sas.ac.uk

Rarely has the knowledge about any continent changed so dramatically within just a century than that of Africa between about 1800 and 1900. For most of that time European exploration and mapping was a rather slow paced amicable competition and even co-operation. But the colonial turn of the early 1880s, creating exclusive spheres of interest, both nationalized and dramatically intensified spatial research for the ultimate benefit of exploitation. Taking German interest in the continent as a case study the lecture traces patterns, actors and cartographic achievements on both sides of the paradigm shift.

Venue: University of Oxford, Weston Library Lecture Theatre, Broad Street, Oxford, OX1 3BG RSVP: nick.millea@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Charting Manifest Destiny: 19th-Century Exploration of the Trans-Mississippi West

From Cosmopolitan Exploration to Colonial Penetration: Germany and the Colonial Turn in the Cartography of Africa

12 March 2015, 15:30–17:00

9 June 2015, 17:30–19:00

11 June 2015, 17:00–18:30