New cartographics: Photography and the artistic mapping of the American West, 1969‐79

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Swensen

This article examines the work of a diverse group of photographers who in the late 1960s and 1970s employed mapping techniques and devices as a means of artistic creation. Products of photography’s unprecedented growth, photographers John Pfahl, Michael Bishop, Kenneth Josephson and the participants of the Rephotographic Survey Project employed cartographic and topographic strategies as part of their exploration of the history of their medium and the American West. These artist-photographers, moreover, responded to the nineteenth-century surveys of the West as well as its relation to other, better-known contemporary movements like ‘New Topographics’. In all, this article provides the first exploration of this distinctive group of American photographers which may be collectively termed: ‘new cartographics’.

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


1977 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Sussman

The history of the professions in the West since the French Revolution is a success story, a triumph, but not always an easy one. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in continental Europe the professions had a great attraction as careers presumably open to talent, but the demand for professional services developed more slowly than interest in professional careers and more slowly than the schools that supplied the market. Lenore O'Boyle has drawn attention to this discrepancy and the revolutionary potential of the frustrated careerists produced by it.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


Author(s):  
JOHN BOARDMAN

This chapter discusses the interest of the west in the history of Central Asia. It explains that central Asia has been studied by many western scholars and explorers, including British archaeologist Aurel Stein and traveller Sir John de Maundeville. Central Asia figured prominently in the days of political concerns about the safety of British India in the nineteenth century and this generated the interest of scholars. Today, the boom in Central Asian studies is further encouraged by the presence in Britain of those who have worked in this field and the source of many new publications on both prehistoric and historic periods.


Author(s):  
Andrew Denson

This book began with tourism. In the summer of 1994, a friend and I drove from Bloomington, Indiana, where I attended graduate school, to Florida for a short vacation. As we sped along Interstate 75 through northern Georgia, I spotted a brown roadside sign announcing that, at the next exit, we would find New Echota, a state historic site interpreting the history of the Cherokee Nation. For a brief time in the early nineteenth century, New Echota was the Cherokee capital, the seat of the national government created by tribal leaders in the 1820s. The Cherokee National Council met at New Echota in the years prior to removal, and it was the site of the Cherokee Supreme Court. During a time when the United States and the state of Georgia pressured Cherokees to emigrate to the West, the new capital represented the Cherokees’ determination to remain in their homeland. It was also the place where, in late 1835, a small group of tribal leaders signed the treaty under which the United States forced the Cherokee Nation to remove. I had recently become interested in the history of Cherokee sovereignty and nationhood, and I concluded that I should prob ably know about this heritage attraction. We pulled off the highway and followed the signs to the site....


Author(s):  
Stephen Aron

‘Introduction: American Wests’ shows that the confusion of legend and fact, of myth and history, makes it hard to disentangle the stories we have told about the development of the American West from our understanding of what really happened. This VSI explains how the gap between projections and reality has shaped the development of the West and confounded our interpretations of its history. This history of the American West expands the chronology, enlarges the geography, complicates the casting, and pluralizes the subject to show that across the centuries, the movements of peoples and the minglings of cultures have shaped the history of sharp confrontations and murky convergences.


1956 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-507
Author(s):  
Francis Dvornik

Interest in Slavic and mid-European studies,* so long neglected, is growing considerably in the United States. Unfortunately it concentrates mostly on modern history. In Slavic studies, too much time is often devoted to the history of Russia since the Revolution, and to the analysis of the new social and political order established in that country under the influence of non-Slavic social ideas which had originated in the West, and especially in Germany (K. Marx and Lasalle) in the nineteenth century. The earlier evolution of Russia, other Slav nations, and their mid-European neighbors, is still undeservedly neglected. It is a mistake. In the Middle Ages, the Slavic nations, the Hungarians, and the Rumanians played a prominent role in the civilizing of Europe. The memories of their glorious past helped the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs, Bulgars, Magyars, Rumanians and also the small Albanian nation to survive the difficult period of oppression by foreign rulers and inspired their national leaders in their fight for independence and freedom.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Roger

In 1975, two landscape photography exhibitions were held concurrently in upstate New York; Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885, at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, in Rochester (now The George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film). Era of Exploration treated nineteenth-century landscapes of the American West while New Topographics addressed contemporary landscape practices. Though applying fundamentally different approaches to their subject matter, each exhibition proved to be extremely important to the understanding and development of not only landscape photography, but also the genre's place in photographic history. This thesis examines the essential literature relating to these two landmark exhibitions, through the construction of two extensive annotated bibliographies. Each bibliography comprises nine sections that present and evaluate significant materials, published both before and after the exhibition, relating to the exhibitions and their publications, the included photographers, and the exhibitions' influence as revealed in subsequent specialized studies and general histories of photography. The bibliographies' chronological listing allows readers to re-construct the exhibitions, and to trace the development of historical and curatorial interest in the exhibitions, the photographers, and American western landscape photography. The thesis describes the process of compiling and annotating this literature and offers reflections on how these two important exhibitions, while employing very different curatorial approaches, influenced the aesthetics, methodologies and concepts of landscape photography.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danila Kashkin

Abstract Between 1633 and 1639, the Tokugawa shogunate had published a series of edicts, expelling all Westerners except the Dutch from the country, curtailing international commerce and missionary activities, as well as forbidding the Japanese from ever leaving their homeland. The Edo government maintained its isolationist course with varying degrees of success for more than two hundred years, finally caving in under foreign pressure in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although the border control was exceptionally strict, small merchant craft and fisherman boats were still navigating between the islands of Japan. The sailors could rarely find a way back home after a shipwreck. Saved by passing whalers or washed ashore in a distant land, some of them survived their ordeal and ended up in the West where they were often employed as guides, interpreters and language teachers. Several countries sent diplomatic missions to Japan, using repatriation of castaways as a pretext to open negotiations with the shogunate. In this article, we will try to deconstruct the history of the relations between Japan and the Western powers through the eyes of these castaways and identify several methodological challenges that such a research entails.


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