WORLD HISTORY
Mental Map
Draw a map of the “world”.
• Draw/Label the following:
• 5 physical features (think rivers,
mountains, etc…)
• 5 political features (cities, countries,
etc..)
• 5 economic features (resources, goods)
• 5 scientific/technological features
(inventions, ideas)
Continued….
• 5 cultural features (works of arts,
literature, music, religion)
• 5 world historical features (events,
peoples, processes)
• 5 arrows to show movement across
space (plague, trade routes, migrations)
QUESTIONS
• What does the way you drew your map
say about how you view the world?
• Where are the “blank features”?
• How does your map reveal “bias” and
“worldview”?
Map Projections &
Their Effects on
Perceptions in
the Study of
World History
Medieval European T-O Map. In medieval Europe one of the
most common forms of rendering the earth was the mappae
mundi of which more than a thousand have survived. The T-O
map is one kind of mappae mundi. The T-O image reproduced
here comes from the encyclopedia of knowledge produced by
Isidore, Bishop of Seville, in 630 A.D., and was printed in
Augsburg in 1472.
The Maya Cosmos. Adopted with modifications from Linda Schele and
David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya
(N.Y.: William Morrow, 1990), p. 67, fig. 2:1. Drawing by Linda Schele,
courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.
(permissions Nov. 7, 2002).
An ancient map that strongly suggests Chinese sailors were first to round the world. It seems more likely
that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets
roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical
records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called "The Marvellous Visions
of the Star Raft". One of Zheng He's fleet's adventures, blown off course to the east to the New World,
provides a fascinating thread in Neil Stephenson's fabulous fiction, Cryptonomicon. It is a copy, made in
1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book .
Each fleet would have at least one "Treasure ship", used by the commander of the fleet and his deputies
(nine-masted, about 120 meters (400 ft) long and 50 m (160 ft) wide).
The greatest "inventor" of sixteenth century Europe was map maker
Gerhardus Mercator whose 1569 summary map, publicized by the learned
Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the
English Nation (London: 1589), liberated cartography from dependence on
Ptolemy, and included a projection that allowed navigators to understand the
coasts of the New World.
These maps silently promoted a Eurocentric view that privileged the
Western image. Generations of European and American students have been
indoctrinated with the glories of nationalism and colonialism through this map.
Seventeenth Century Atlantic
Basin.
Lines indicate direction of
movement of goods from
Europe and Africa to the
Americas and from the
Americas to Asia. Europe was
the source of financial and
commercial activity, while Africa
was primarily important for the
slave trade—so that the main
cultural impacts were those of
Europe upon Africa, and Africa
upon America. This was the
transoceanic arena in which an
Atlantic World emerged in the Age
of Empire, and the geographical
stage for cross-cultural
encounters, Spanish treasure
fleets, a transatlantic slave trade,
and the movement of European
peoples.
Adopted with permission from D.W. Meining, The
Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on
500 Years of History. Volume 1, Atlantic America,
1492–1800 (Yale University Press, 1986), p. 56
North America appears to be more involved in the Pacific Basin than South
America (its eastward location pulling it toward the Atlantic). Finally, this
map reveals a major truth about the earth, and that is that the earth is
mostly water not land, the Pacific Ocean amounting to 64,000,000 square
miles (over twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean).
Miller World Map Centered on 180 Meridian: The Pacific Perspective.
South is at top of map. After 1850, a Pacific perspective must be added. With
the United States acquiring Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii (and taking
possession of the Philippines), followed by Pearl Harbor and the Pacific theater
of World War II, the strategic importance of the Pacific for the United States
becomes obvious. With China emerging as a major power, the twenty-first
century may become the Pacific century.
Robinson Projection
• This projection was presented by Arthur H. Robinson in 1963, and is
also called the Orthophanic projection, which means right
appearing.
• Scale is true along the 38º parallels and is constant along any
parallel or between any pair of parallels equidistant from the
Equator. It is not free of distortion at any point, but
distortion is very low within about 45º of the center and along
the Equator.
• This projection is not equal-area, conformal, or equidistant;
however, it is considered to look right for world maps, and hence is
widely used by Rand McNally, the National Geographic Society, and
others. This feature is achieved through the use of tabular
coordinates rather than mathematical formulae for the graticules.
The Peters Projection Map from
Two Perspectives: In 1974, as
an effort to reduce the political bias
of conventional maps, Arno Peters
created the 'Peters Projection' of
the world so that one square inch
anywhere on the map represents
an equal number of square miles
of the earth's surface.
Comparing Projections
"Political" Map
The Myth of Continents
• The current sevenfold categorization of the earth into the continents (that
•
•
is, continuous, discrete masses of land) of Asia, Europe, Africa, North
America, South America, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), and
Antarctica, is a recent convention beginning with the threefold system of
the Ancient Greeks and modified over time into today's system. The
problem with this kind of classification is that most people consider
"continents" to be "real" geographical realities "discovered" through
scientific inquiry, instead of what they are—the product of creative
imagination and metageography.
Continents not only supposedly reflect physical reality, but natural and
human features as well . In the field of geology, tectonic plates do not
respect the geographer's continental system, with Europe and Asia sharing
the same plate for more than thirty-five million years, and India being
tectonically linked, not to Asia, but to distant Australia!
While it is ridiculous to conceive of Europe as a continent and India a
subcontinent, the continental status of Europe (which shares a land mass
with Asia), serves to reassure Europeans that their sense of western
superiority and false dichotomies (Europe equals West; Asia equals East)
will go unchallenged.
The Myth of Continents
• The traditional notion of continents can be abandoned
•
(or at least modified). The idea of a North American
continent, separate from South America, encourages
false dichotomies that do not reflect actual biological,
geological, and cultural realities, and that overlooks
many themes that parallel the history of both regions
(from cowboy culture to urbanization).
By substituting a world regionalism scheme for the
continental one, today's students will be using a regional
classification that better fits the realities of ethnicity,
culture, and history. This, then, would be the beginning
of an attempt to look at the New Old World in a new
way.
Regional World Map
http://desip.igc.org/worldmap.html
Which map projection does the College Board use in their WHAP materials?