American Geographical Society’s Map of Hispanic America

American Geographical Society’s Map of Hispanic America

The International Map of the World (IMW) was an eye-catching example of early 20th century geographical internationalism. The idea of an internationally recognised 1:1 million world map, compiled by existing national cartographic agencies from the huge cartographic archive that existed by the end of the 19th century, was first proposed by the German geographer Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) at the International Geographical Congress in 1891. Penck’s proposal had distinctly utopian objectives to create a new, 20th century and post-national image of the entire globe. The explicit objective was to encourage collaboration between national cartographic agencies previously dominated by military concerns and national rivalries. IMW conferences in London and Paris, in 1909 and 1913, thrashed out agreements on the projection, symbols, colouring and style, based on the Greenwich meridian and the metric system. The IMW suffered a significant set-back in 1913 when the United States, previously closely involved, withdrew from the project which then foundered completely, at least as initially imagined, during World War One, though some national cartographic agencies produced their own versions of IMW sheets for different reasons. Following a request from the War Office, the Royal Geographical Society prepared a simplified 1:1 million base map of Europe and the Middle, based on IMW protocols, for use in future peace negotiations. The IMW was revived after 1918 and spawned related mapping projects, notably the beautiful 1:1 million Map of Hispanic America prepared during the interwar decades by cartographers in the American Geographical Society (AGS). On completion, the 100 plus Hispanic Map sheets were given pride of place in a large exhibition, The World in Maps, at the AGS headquarters in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan in the summer of 1939. In a memorable exercise in cartographic ‘street theatre’, the Hispanic Map sheets were also assembled into a single cartographic image of Latin America and the Caribbean in the AGS courtyard, just off Broadway. A colour photograph of that event later appeared in Life magazine on 8th December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

American Geographical Society Photographic Collection