What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy
Manufactured by leading American globe-making companies, slated globes were adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century as educational aid materials, recommended for teaching world geography from the 4th grade on. Focusing on their production and use in the US context at the turn of the twe...
Shranjeno v:
| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| Glavni avtor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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European journal of American studies
2020
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | Manufactured by leading American globe-making companies, slated globes were adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century as educational aid materials, recommended for teaching world geography from the 4th grade on. Focusing on their production and use in the US context at the turn of the twentieth century, and following an examination of their role in teaching American children the fundaments of terrestrial geography, I probe these now forgotten, blank, black, educational table globes’ capacity in offering a timely “spatial fix” to the prosaic finality of an already overly and overtly known world that the globally rising US Empire was grappling with. Provoking, in equal measure, playfulness and patriotism, I argue, slated globes were washed of imperial colors and freed of the border lines imposed on them, drained of water and emptied of landmasses, only to be once more scathed, and tattooed with lines, colors, and names, watered and landed—in sum, to be “globed” in the hands of the generations of American youth, future stewards of the US Empire who were learning how to (re-)imagine the terra that was already made cognita by earlier colonial powers. Furthermore, I read slated globes as generative of terra incognita iterum (territory made unknown again)—a terra incognita of a different kind and for different purposes than the terra nondum cognita (territory yet unknown) of the previous centuries: a blank fraught with colonial urges of a young empire and charged with imperial pedagogics. |
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