On Friday, May 4, 1906, Bruno Domann left his desk at the Perthes publishing house in Gotha carrying travel accounts, maps and instruments. However, he did not take the materials home in order to finish maps for the new printing run of the Stieler’s Hand-Atlas or Petermann’s Geographische Mittheilungen. Domann was on his way to the inn Zum Schützen, where...
One of the most important legacies of August Petermann was undoubtedly his founding and editorship of the Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt (later Petermann’s Geographische Mittheilungen, or PGM) in 1855, a scientific and cartographical journal that was widely received by expert communities as well as by an interested general public. Given its wide distribution and general acclaim, the journal...
On May 16, 1893, the cartographer Paul Langhans (1867–1952) wrote to German explorer Joachim Graf von Pfeil und Klein-Ellguth (1857–1924), a former farmer in the Orange Free State and colonial politician: “Highly esteemed Count! […] The crossing of Neu-Mecklenburg in 1:200,000 is now in autography, […]. I request a short text for the map, according to which also the lettering...
Location: Centre for Transcultural Studies, Gotha Research Campus Dates: 24th–25th November 2022. This conference will explore cartography and the construction and contestation of territoriality in Asia from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. In particular we seek to answer the question of how ideas of territoriality were cartographically produced, circulated and interpreted within Asia and between Europe and Asia....
Often this blog has alluded to the networks of the Justus Perthes Publishing House, which were nurtured and maintained by its leading spokesmen during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. August Petermann, a central figure in the history of the company and its leading cartographer from 1854 to 1878, fostered, systematized and institutionalized much of the global outreach of the...
On January 18th, 2022, the team of the digitisation project Cartographies of Africa and Asia (KarAfAs) hosted a panel under the title “Epistemologien der Digitalisierung. Digitale Repositorien und ihre Folgen für Wissenschaft und Forschung” to discuss epistemologies of digitisation and to reflect critically on the impact of digitisation projects on ongoing historiographic research. The panellists shared their experiences at the...
