Sep 27, 2022
Nasa has successfully crashed its Dart spacecraft into an asteroid.
The American space agency was testing whether space rocks that might threaten Earth could be nudged out of the way. This is the first experiment of its kind by Nasa.
The asteroid hit was not headed for the Earth, however scientist Dr Elena Adams said “earthlings should sleep better” knowing they had a planetary defence solution.
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Sep 30, 2022
Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig and former U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal discuss reporting that the former president’s newest lawyer has advised him to “turn down the temperature.”
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Sep 30, 2022
Climate change is too big to stop, Even if you stop driving anywhere, turn off all of your electricity, Climate Change will still get worse.
Climate Change is not a problem you or me as individuals can solve but governments can solve climate change. The biggest polluters in the world are giant corporations and the militaries of nations around the world, and even if all of us cut back on electricity or gas usage, we would not cut emissions enough.
The solution has to come the biggest cause of climate change.
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Sep 30, 2022
The January 6th Committee prepares for its likely final hearing as the chairman reveals “significant information” has not been revealed yet. It comes after the committee interviewed conservative activist Ginni Thomas, who is also the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
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Beinecke Library at Yale – Sep 28, 2022
Ray Clemens, curator of Early Books and Manuscripts, will discuss the current building-wide exhibition, The World in Maps, 1400-1600. (Exhibition information: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/wor…) Part of Mondays at Beinecke online, a virtual series of gallery talks every Monday at 4pm. Talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and question and answer beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.
See related:
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Sep 30, 2022
Noam Chomsky joins us from Brazil with Vijay Prashad just back from Brazil to discuss Sunday’s Brazilian election between Brazil’s far right president Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Chomsky and Prashad are co-authors of the new book “The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.”
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Sep 30, 2022
Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro faces former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s presidential election. Lula is a former union leader who held office from 2003 through 2010. He’s running on a leftist platform to uplift Brazil’s poor, preserve the Amazon rainforest and protect Brazil’s Indigenous communities, and is supported by a broad, grassroots alliance, explains Brazilian human rights advocate Maria Luísa Mendonça. Polls show Lula has a strong lead over Bolsonaro, but it is unclear if he will win the majority of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. This comes as Bolsonaro and his party appear to be attempting to prepare to stage a coup if he loses the election, says reporter Michael Fox, former editor of NACLA and host of the new podcast “Brazil on Fire.” Despite fear over a coup, Fox says people in Brazil “are really hopeful that they’re going to see change on Sunday.”
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Through these astonishingly beautiful and functional charts, the author traces developments in trade and warfare, exploration and colonial domination from the late medieval period through the Renaissance and into the Age of European Enlightenment. With an introduction by Tony Cambell.
Author: Richard Pflederer
With an introduction by Tony Campbell.
The story of sea charts, of manuscript portolan charts in particular, is a story intimately intertwined with the history of the western world during some of the most significant and eventful periods of recorded history. Through these astonishingly beautiful and functional charts, we can trace developments in trade and warfare, exploration and colonial domination from the late medieval period through the Renaissance and into the Age of European Enlightenment.
Beginning with their introduction in the late thirteenth century, these sometimes quaintly fanciful portolan charts enjoyed an important place in the navigator’s sea chest until they were finally superceded in the eighteenth century by their cheaper but far less charming printed cousins. In the mid-fifteenth century when the Europeans first ventured beyond their home waters and into the open oceans, their successes and their sometimes-heroic failures were documented on charts of the newly discovered oceans and coasts. These new charts, although depicting faraway coasts and employing the latest navigational techniques, were drawn on vellum in the same style as Mediterranean Sea charts. They served the dual purposes of recording information gleaned from previous voyages and guiding the mariners of subsequent voyages.
See recent discussion of portolan charts as part of the Yale Beinecke The World in Maps, 1400-1600 exhibit:
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Beinecke Library at Yale– Sep 6, 2022
Ray Clemens, curator of Early Books & Manuscripts, explains what is on view in the Beinecke Library’s building wide exhibition.
For more information: https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/wor…
This exhibition presents maps from several different historical groups and demonstrates how maps functioned to place people within a larger world context. While primarily focusing on European maps, it also includes Middle Eastern and Asian world maps to illustrate common elements and also highlight significant differences. In addition, the exhibition presents some map forgeries and how they were determined to be fakes using scientific and historic analysis. For more information: The World in Maps is on view through January 8th, 2023.
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[N.B. The Africa Map Circle is an informal group of scholars, educators and students who meet to share research ideas and information about African historical cartography. The close study of Africa maps is essential for an in-depth understanding of African history and culture within Africa itself and within the broader context of Africa’s relation to the wider world since the beginning of the early modern era.
The “map chats” that are occasionally recorded from these sessions are shared online with the intention to encourage more extensive research on the topics discussed.]
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From Portolan Charts to Printed Maps: Trade, Slavery & the Imaging of the Atlantic World
[a map-chat of The Africa Map Circle, (forthcoming)]
[Material for this map chat is drawn, in part, from the Yale University Library Map Collection and selected maps from the online Afriterra cartographic library. Special thanks are extended here to Dr. Raymond Clemens and Kristen Herdman, curators of the current exhibit of the Yale Beinecke Library entitled, The World in Maps, 1400-1600 and to Dr. Gerald Rizzo, President of Afriterra for their professional assistance in assembling the material discussed in this map chat.]
Discussing the 1507 Waldseemuller map, John Hessler has focused the attention of cartographic scholars of all early maps upon what he calls “the problem of transmission” and specifically the “networks of transmission.”
We need now to examine in detail the “networks of transmission” between the makers of portolan charts and the communities of geographers and cartographers whose work appears in the early printed maps of Africa.
One of the earliest Portuguese portolan charts that is preserved is in Yale’s Beinecke Library collection:
This chart by Jorge de Aguilar from 1492 — described in this brief excerpt by Raymond Clemens — contains a very interesting “insert” drawn in the interior of West Africa but representing the coastline details south and west from the Cape Verde area (current day Senegal) down past what it labels as Sierra Leone and all the way to the castle of Elmina, which the Portuguese began constructing in 1482, a decade before the 1492 discoveries of Columbus in the “new” world.
1619 – Anonymous ms. Portugese portolano of the Atlantic Ocean – Yale University Library
For example, this 1619 portulan chart needs to be compared carefully with the 1635 map printed in Holland and others like it printed later. What are “the problems of transmission” here that, as John Hessler has suggested, future scholarship needs to address?
1635 – Dutch Map of Africa, Brazil and the Atlantic
and
For consideration of discussions at the Library of Congress on topics including the portolan charts and the first printed maps of the Americas see:
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See as well:
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Transition Studies 