The Spread of the Mercator Projection in Western European and United States Cartography

Author(s):  
Michele Abee

En 1569, le cartographe hollandais Gérard Mercator publiait une projection qui allait révolutionner la navigation maritime. Bien que l’importance de la projection de Mercator soit soulignée dans la documentation existante, la façon dont elle en est venue à jouer un rôle prépondérant dans la production de cartes du monde en cartographie thématique et en cartographie de référence n’a pas retenu l’attention. L’institutionnalisation de la projection de Mercator dans la cartographie de l’Europe occidentale et des États-Unis découle du rôle joué par les navigateurs, les sociétés et les organismes scientifiques, ainsi que les producteurs de cartes de référence et de cartes thématiques de même que d’atlas à l’usage du public. Les données, que l’auteure soumet à une analyse de contenu, proviennent du registre de publication de cartes du monde individuelles et apparaissant dans les atlas, et elles sont comparées et confrontées aux données historiques de sources complémentaires. L’étude révèle que l’utilisation impropre de la projection de Mercator a commencé après 1700, au moment où elle a été rattachée aux travaux des scientifiques auprès des navigateurs et à la création de la cartographie thématique. Au cours du dix-huitième siècle, la projection de Mercator a été diffusée dans les publications et les rapports destinés aux sociétés de géographie qui décrivaient les explorations financées par l’État. Au dix-neuvième siècle, l’influence de scientifiques bien connus faisant usage de la projection de Mercator a filtré dans les publications destinées au grand public. L’utilisation de la projection de Mercator dans la production de cartes du monde en cartographie de référence et en cartographie thématique est un choix qui résultait de la validation indirecte de cette projection par les milieux scientifique et universitaire depuis le dix-huitième siècle jusque tard au dix-neuvième siècle.

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sérgio de Oliveira Birchal ◽  
Âmara Fuccio de Fraga e Silva

European direct investment in Brazil dates back to the discovery of the country and has been since then either hegemonic or more important than a superficial observation can grasp, as this work aims at showing. During the 20th century, the United States has replaced Britain as the worlds economic superpower and the largest direct investor. US dominance in the world economy and geographical proximity to Brazil would suggest that US investments were by far the largest in the country during that century. Furthermore, as Japan had become the second largest economy in the world in the 1980s, we would expect that this would be reflected in the data of the largest multinationals in Brazil. However, as our investigation suggests, Western European direct investment has been as large (and in many occasions even larger) as that of the USA and Japanese firms have never had a prominent presence among the largest firms in Brazil, at least until the late 1990s.


Author(s):  
Richard Alba ◽  
Nancy Foner

This chapter describes how immigrant religion generally has become a more significant social divide, a greater challenge to integration, and a more common source of conflict with mainstream institutions and practices in Western Europe than in the United States. There are three main reasons for this. Of paramount importance are basic demographic facts. The religious backgrounds of immigrants in Western Europe and the United States are different, mostly Christian in the United States as compared to Western Europe, where a large proportion is Muslim. Muslims of immigrant origin in Western Europe also have a lower socioeconomic profile than those in the United States. Moreover, Western European native majorities have more trouble recognizing claims based on religion because they are more secular than religiously involved Americans.


Author(s):  
Toufoul Abou-Hodeib

This chapter explores modern domesticity as articulated by men and women in the pages of the press and on lecture podiums, arguing for a project that carved out an economic and cultural place for an emerging middle class. As industrial production in Europe and the United States brought wider swathes of society in contact with new commodities, articles in the press on the use and disposition of objects at home attempted to differentiate the consumption habits of the middle class from the tasteless riches of the upper classes. While this functioned to culturally distinguish the nascent middle class in its social surroundings, the chapter argues that the debate went beyond, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing this middle class from “ifranji” (Western/European) modes of consumption and attempting to ground modern domesticity in “Oriental” or “Syrian” authenticity.


1987 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 23-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Hassner

The European community holds a range of contradictory, changing, and evolving views of the United States and the Soviet Union. Hassner notes that the United States is seen both as an individualistic agent with a guilty conscience that intervenes irresponsibly and hypocritically, and as a model for resistance to oppression. The Soviet Union is also viewed antithetically, both condemned for totalitarianism and praised as more humanistic than the United States. Hassner sees these oppositions as reflecting the profound differences between the superpowers and indicating the challenge the United States and the Soviet Union face in establishing a common ethics.


Author(s):  
Enrique Miguel Tébar Martínez

While adequate for English-speaking users in the United States, as well as many Commonwealth countries and other English-speaking jurisdictions (e.g., Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa among others), typing in Romance Languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian) by using a standard US-QWERTY Keyboard is not easy since it is not adapted to special characters such as accented vowels, tildes and cedillas or ligatures, used in Romance Languages. With regard to the International Layout, intended to enable access to the most common diacritics used in Western European Languages, the problem comes from the fact that accented vowels are spread throughout the Keyboard layout, and their uppercase versions need chord combinations which can require good manual dexterity. This paper will analyze how the Spanish or Portuguese Keyboards are the best options for these users since they are QWERTY-based and the most compatible ones for the different character sets in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian Languages.


Author(s):  
Alaina Lemon

To what extent is “Russian mysticism” the product of diplomacy and political conflict? A history of nonsymmetrical comparisons has led us astray from seeing connections. Some of these connections are evident in the practice of Russian theatrical training and its uptake in the United States, for instance, or in the popularity of a Russian version of a Western European reality show that pits psychics against each other. This introduction justifies comparative and connective analysis of the historical grounds and categories for communicative contact and its failures. It also establishes the importance of paying attention to the social structuring of attention in performances and in interactions, including interactions that are mass mediated as examples of unmediated or psychic contact.


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