In the report of July 23, 2022, by the German public television broadcaster Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), the project Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800–1945). A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha is being featur...
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 cartogr...
Part map and part perspective view, the “Vue panoramatique” depicts a geopolitical fantasy in the year 1855: the construction of the Suez Canal was to start only four years later, and it would take another decade until the first ships were seen crossin...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
An Exploration Route Map of Southeast Asia In the autumn of 1908 Dr Robert Brunhuber, a journalist and academic from Cologne, and his companion Karl Schmitz, set out from Rangoon. Their aim was to explore the remote upper reaches of the Salween River. ...
Within the vast library of maps within the Perthes Collection are a number of curiosities and objects of fascination. One such map has always intrigued me since I first came across it, not because of the aesthetic value or the craftsmanship of its desi...
Picture in your mind’s eye a map of the world. If asked to point to Asia, where does your finger land? The answer to this question has shifted throughout the centuries, depending on who you were and where you lived. For European cartographers of the ea...
