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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Tourism, Proximity and British Perceptions of France and Germany Before the First World War
Description
An account of the resource
This collection explores British perceptions of France and Germany before the First World War, and how they were influenced by proximity, both in terms of simple distance and in terms of how easy it was to travel there. There are four elements (one of which isn't a historical map). <br />The first is a graphical representation of the quickest routes from London to different places in Europe, as advised by Thomas Cook and Son travel agents in 1913, and how long it would take to travel to each destination. These graphs give us a sense of how far places in Europe actually were from London in 1913 (admittedly a limited sense given I haven’t found useful information on the prices of these journeys, or how many times a day they ran). They also show which places routes ran through, thus showing which places travelllers would be familiar with simply by having to frequently pass through.<br />The second map is a cartoon map of Europe made in 1900. It supposedly shows the different countries responding to Britain’s war in South Africa. It is interesting for how France—at the time far from an ally—is shown as far less threatening than Germany, which in turn is less threatening than Russia. It is interesting to apply information from the previous element to this one (if we assume that travel patterns in Europe had not radically changed between 1900 and 1913). The relative proximity of France, and number of routes through Paris, perhaps meant that more people had been there, and did not find it excessively foreign or sinister, while the distantness of Russia (Moscow is 102 hours from London) arguably result in it being depicted as a terrifying, autocratic octopus (a depiction surely grounded in common British stereotypes and attitudes). <br />The third element seeks to answer a question posed by the comparison of the first and second. The first element shows that Germany was not very distant, and that many routes passed through it, especially through Cologne. Yet the second shows that Germany seemed to be more foreign and threatening than France. The third element is a map of Europe made in 1880. It labels western Germany—the Rhineland that accounts for so many nodes in the first element—“Germany,” and the rest of the German Empire “Prussia.” While it was probably the result of parsimonious atlas makers reusing pre-unification plates, the existence of such a map (and of other examples, which are hyperlinked), suggests that the British maintained a mental distinction between the Germany they encountered and the threatening, militaristic Prussia they did not. Either that map echoes a distinction that was already salient, or it and others helped to create or maintain such a distinction. It is no accident that Germany is represented in element two by the Kaiser eagerly stockpiling battleships, echoing a pre-unification cartoon map of <a href="http://maps.bpl.org/id/16826">Prussia</a>, in which that state is embodied by the Kaiser and an armed and dangerous Bismark.<br />The last element is a fragment of a map of Paris from an English language guidebook published in 1878. It gives us a loose sense of what sort of places would have grounded British perceptions of the French capital. Specifically, government buildings feature prominently, suggesting that visiting Paris in some way entailed visiting the French state, and perhaps coming to understand it as similar to the British state. One might wonder whether visitors to Berlin would have had the same response to the German state, had many people visited Berlin.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Routes from London to Europe in 1913
Description
An account of the resource
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This network graph has as its nodes points at which passengers would embark or disembark trains or boats on long journeys from London to various European destinations, as advised by the table of quickest routes in the index of <em>Cook's Continental Time Table.</em> One can trace the quickest journey back to London by clicking on any destination and following the arrows. This graph shows how British travellers to Europe did so overwhelmingly via a small number of places -- most notably Paris but also Cologne and Basel ("Bale" in the time table). Thus we can see that France, and the French state as encountered in Paris, was very familiar to British travellers. And while the Rhineland was familiar, Prussia and Berlin were distant and passed through relatively seldom.
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YXwrcaGqE6rjLcXjIMt34FIvRSccrRPqnReyI5N6hR0/pubchart?oid=1122356638&format=interactive" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="600" height="371"></iframe>
This map shows most of the data points on the network graph on a modern map of Europe, with the size and colour of the dots indicating distance in hours from London as indicated in Cook's Time Table. Regrettably, to allow Google's geotagging feature to work, it uses modern place names and country names. Those points with more than one dot represent multiple routes taking longer or shorter amounts of time. This kind of scale gives one a more meaningful sense of how far different places in Europe were from London, and thus perhaps how distant and foreign they seemed to British people before the First World War.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Compiled from data in <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021229151;view=1up;seq=1"><em>Cook's Continental Time Table, Steamship and Air Services, </em>1913.</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Data Visualization
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Continental (but neither of these are historical maps)
1900s
1913
Britain
Europe
railways
transportation
transportation network