Mercator’s Lithuanian–Russian Borderlands: Russiae pars amplificata (1595) and Its Polish Sources

abstract

This article focuses on the inset on Gerardus Mercator’s large map of Russia cum confiniis [Russia with surrounding lands] that was published in his Atlas (1595), and the map Moscovia [Muscovy] published by Jodocus Hondius in the Atlas minor (1607). Comparison of the contents of Mercator’s inset map, titled Russiae pars amplificata [Part of Russia enlarged] and Hondius’s Moscovia map with the Polish propaganda poem Raid on Muscovy by Jan Kochanowski that had appeared in 1583—just after the war between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy—led to the suggestion that both Mercator’s and Hondius’s maps were based on Polish–Lithuanian narrative sources as well as on a map drawn by the Polish royal cartographer Maciej Strubicz. To test the hypothesis, a historical-linguistic analysis of the orthography of the map’s toponyms and hydronyms was employed to distinguish their Polish, German and Latin characteristics. The result confirms that the two maps were indeed based on a Polish military map containing a hidden Polish propaganda message.     

Education and the Origins of Quebec’s International Engagement

ABSTRACT

This article examines some of the ways that education has served as a catalyst for the engagement of Quebec and Quebeckers with the broader world, from the educational activities of French Canadian missionaries beginning in the late-nineteenth century to the growing involvement of secular nongovernmental organizations and of the government of Quebec itself in international educational assistance in the mid- to late-twentieth century. For the government of Quebec in particular, jurisdiction over education was integral to the development of Quebec’s own international identity and the Gérin-Lajoie Doctrine that both articulated and bolstered its claim to international competence. The controversy surrounding Quebec’s international educational endeavors has declined since the 1970s, and with it the relative amount of attention and funding devoted to it by the provincial government, yet education broadly defined remains a bridge linking Quebec and Quebeckers to the wider world and catalyzing their engagement with it.     

Human Rights and International Security: The International Community and the Greek Dictators

The Greek junta was notorious for its use of state torture as a means of control. Yet, for most Western governments and organisations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN), Greece's geostrategic location was considered to be a higher priority than the undemocratic behaviour of the ‘Colonels’. This article seeks to synthesise existing historiography with new research in order to examine the complex and interconnected processes that led Western states and key international institutions to tolerate human-rights abuses in Greece in the face of huge protest from international public opinion. It will look at why Western states failed to explain away the ‘Greek case’, as they had done with Portugal and Spain, as an anomaly on the road to defeating a mortal enemy, the USSR, which was committing far more numerous violations. It will also consider why international opinion focused on Greece so intently. It will show how many in the West were lulled by the regime into believing that human-rights abusers can act as agents of stability and security. The article's footnotes aim to draw attention to the many primary and secondary sources that provide additional information on the issue of human-rights abuses by the Greek junta.     

I never shall be a white man again: race and junior officers in the Mexican War

Throughout the Mexican War, the impact of professionalization was felt on the battlefields of Mexico. This professionalism did not, and could not insulate these officers from social issues such as race. When American junior officers viewed the filthy conditions in Mexico, they argued that these conditions could only be explained by the racial inferiority of the Mexican people as a race. Volunteers and regulars reacted to these issues in exactly the same manner. This fact challenged the traditional fears that a professional standing army would become disconnected with the society they protected, and would thus become despotic. Similarly, the excesses of the volunteers demonstrated that they were not the paragon of virtue which many in the US hoped.     

“We knew no North,no South”: U.S.–Mexican War Veterans and the Construction of Public Memory in the Post-Civil War United States, 1874–1897

In 1874, American veterans of the U.S.–Mexican War 1846–1848 formed the National Association of Veterans of the Mexican War (NAVMW). Until the organization’s demise in 1897, NAVMW members crafted and celebrated a vision of their war with Mexico as a national triumph which had united Americans from all sections of the Union in a common cause. This article examines how, by promoting this particular memory of the war to the American public, NAVMW members sought to remind their countrymen of their shared national history, and so aid the process of reconciliation between North and South in the post-Civil War era.     

Australia's ‘special strategic relationship’ with Japan: another ‘China choice’?

In July 2014, Australia's new Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and his Japanese counterpart, Shinzō Abe, elevated the status of bilateral ties to a ‘special strategic relationship'. Both sides also agreed on intensifying their defence technology cooperation, including in the submarine space. As well, Prime Minister Abbott called Australia a ‘strong ally’ of Japan. Yet, the prospect of a further strengthening of Australia–Japan defence relations has led to criticism by Australian strategic commentators. In particular, critics argue that closer strategic relations with Japan could damage Australia's ties with a rising China. In a worst-case scenario, Australia might even become ‘entrapped’ in a Sino-Japanese conflict. However, this argues that a closer defence relationship is in Australia's strategic interests in the face of China's increasing challenge to the rules-based order in the region. China's uncompromising position in the South China Sea and its more assertive behaviour have led to a greater congruence of threat and risk assessment between Australia and Japan. Indeed, Australia and Japan are increasingly facing a security dilemma vis-à-vis China, albeit to varying degrees. Therefore, for Australia, promoting Japan's ‘security normalisation’ contributes to regional stability. As well, the article points out that closer strategic ties with Japan do not automatically come at the expense of Sino-Australia relations. China's leverage to ‘punish’ Australia for unwanted strategic behaviour is limited, and concerns about ‘entrapment’ in a Sino-Japanese war are exaggerated. However, the more China exerts coercive diplomacy, the closer Australia–Japan defence relations are likely to become.     

War stories: British and American writers in/on the Italian front (1915–18)

In 1919 the British historian G. M. Trevelyan complained about the ‘not very large stock of English literature on Italy’s part in the war’ that had just ended, a phenomenon he attributed to ‘the mutual ignorance of the English-speaking and Italian peoples’. Nearly a hundred years later the situation seems to be no better. Secondary sources as there are devote only passing mention (if any) to the war stories that were put together by British and American writers who visited, served or worked as volunteers in the Italian front between 1915 and 1918. This article intends to give some details about the Italian front writing of these committed individuals, whose praiseworthy contribution to the war effort was, indeed, fighting the above-mentioned ignorance.     

Greenland in the center: what happened when the Danish–Norwegian officials met English and Dutch whalers in Disko Bay, 1780–1820

Between 1780 and 1820 crucial changes took place in the economic and cultural relationship between Denmark–Norway and its North Atlantic dependencies. In Greenland, the state imposed a stringent set of social and economic controls, at the same time when the restrictions on trade in Iceland and Northern Norway were relaxed. In 1776 the Royal Greenlandic Trading Company was established, but during the eighteenth century the waters around Greenland were a hub of international whaling trade as Dutch, American, and British ships came into contact with the Inuit, who were legally under Danish-Norwegian social regulation. This article uses records of Danish officials in Greenland and those of incidental observers to understand the disjuncture between the law of Denmark–Norway and the realities of Disko Bay. The officials contended with better equipped foreign ships, the Inuit desire to trade with these ships, and communication problems with the capital. This period is characterized by experimentation with different methods of production, contrasting strongly with the later nineteenth century, in which Danish–Greenlandic policy became more restrictive. By the nineteenth century international whaling trade had followed the declining whale stocks westward to the Canadian and American waters, so Denmark-Norway could impose these restrictions more easily.     

A variation on forced migration: Wilhelm Peters (Prussia via Britain to Turkey) and Muzafer Sherif (Turkey to the United States)

ABSTRACT

In 1933 the Turkish Republic formally offered university positions to 30 German-speaking academics who were dismissed with the coming to power of the National Socialist Government. That initial number went up to 56 with the inclusion of the technical assistants. By 1948 the estimated total had increased to 199. Given renewable five-year contracts with salaries substantially higher than their Turkish counterparts, the foreign émigrés were to implement the westernization program of higher education. The ten year-old secular Turkish Republic’s extensive social reforms had encompassed the adoption of the Latin alphabet, and equal rights for women, removing gender bias in hiring. Such a high concentration of émigré academics in one institution, “the highest anywhere in the world,” provides a unique opportunity to study a subject which has been neglected. In this article two cases in psychology will be examined: Wilhelm Peters (1880–1963), who came, via Britain, to Istanbul in 1936 from the University of Jena in Germany, and Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988) who went to the United States from Ankara University in 1945. The purpose of the comparative analysis is to identify the features that are specific to the German experience, and those that are shared and underlie translocation in science within the multifaceted complexity of the process of forced migration.