4/7/2023 0 Comments Battles of tannenbergThe London based Stanford’s Geographical Establishment was a prolific commercial publisher of maps whose aim was to elucidate various aspects of the war to the public. As can be seen, this map was produced some time prior to the entrance of the United States into the war on the side of the Allied Powers. The yellow regions show countries and colonies of the Central Powers and the green regions show those of the Allied Powers while pink is reserved for neutral countries. The map is in French as well as Chinese, Khmer, and Vietnamese. This map is all the more remarkable for being produced in one of those colonies, being published in Hanoi by the government of French Indochina, and was intended for use in schools there. Deceptively entitled, in French, a “Map of the European War,” it is actually a world map that depicts the major combatants and their various colonial holdings. One map that exemplifies the global nature of the conflict in a variety of aspects. The languages printed on the map mirror the international range of the conflict. And at the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division we have no shortage of maps of all kinds that date from the war.Īmong the hundreds of maps from the Great War, you'll find commercial maps produced for sale to the general public, pictorial propaganda maps, newspaper maps intended to illustrate the unfolding conflict, and military maps produced for a variety of purposes including training, planning offensive and defensive operations, troop dispositions and more. Schwarzman Building we have an exhibit of WWI propaganda as it related to the American involvement in the conflict in “Over Here: WWI and the Fight for the American Mind” (now extended to August 15, 2015, so get in and see it). With the passing of the centennial of World War I there has naturally been a lot of interest in the conflict. The modern countries of Saudi Arabia and Yemen were among those created from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 between France and Great Britain with the acquiescence of Imperial Russia determining the modern borders of Syria and Iraq are just a few of many such examples. We are still living with the effects of decisions made in the heat of that conflict and in its direct aftermath. Naval engagements likewise ranged throughout the globe. Major land campaigns were conducted all over the map, from the fields of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Alpine mountains, the coasts of Turkey, the Caucasus, Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and more. This was a truly global conflict which was far from limited to the muddy fields and trenches of Western Europe that have persisted in the popular imagination. In the course of the war, no less than three major empires fell and were dissolved and new countries were created with the stroke of a pen or born in fire and blood. This past August we marked the centennial of the Great War, a cataclysm that forever altered our political map.
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