Episode Highlights
Episode 1: Heaven and Earth
Highlights
- Throughout history, humans have created representations of their landcape and what lies beyond–even into the spiritual realms.
- Extrapolating from his discoveries of the mathematical relationships among musical tones, Pythagoras speculated about the shape of the cosmos and a "harmony of the spheres" in the 6th century BC.
- Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy in the 3rd century BC.
- In the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy created his Geographia, outlining maps of the world, including latitude and longitude, and positing the existence of an undiscovered southern continent.
- Speculation about the location of Biblical sites such as the Garden of Eden continued from medieval times well into the 19th century.
Questions to Consider
- Why do you think we have a deep-seated need to map our environment? How valuable do you believe the study of geography is?
- Do you have a particular map that's important to you for practical, psychological, or sentimental reasons? Discuss its personal significance.
- Does your sense of geography shape your political thinking? How so?
- How would you imagine a map of spiritual realms or the afterlife?
Episode 2: Secrets of the Sea
Highlights
- More than 700 years ago, maps were crucial to acquiring wealth and power because they contained information about sea lanes and Asian ports vital to trade.
- In the late 13th century, Genoese seafarers proposed sailing to China, a remote, wealthy empire far more advanced than Europe.
- In 1375, Abraham Cresques created the Catalan Atlas for King Charles V of France, which showed fantastic faraway lands full of strange peoples and vast wealth.
- Venice used knowledge of geography to consolidate its control of the spice trade in the 15th century.
- By the late 15th century, Portuguese explorers such as Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama had reached the southern tip of Africa and beyond, establishing Portugal as a major commercial rival to Venice.
- In 1517, the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan arrived in Spain with a plan to sail west to the Spice Islands. His expedition ultimately circumnavigated the globe and revived the competing claims of Spain and Portugal to new territories.
Questions to Consider
- In the Age of Exploration, maps of the seas contained closely guarded knowledge that held the key to riches. What kinds of maps hold keys to wealth and power today?
- In retrospect, how would you evaluate the khans' decisions to isolate China and halt foreign ventures?
- How might Portugal have better protected its cartographic information? How would that have changed history?
Episode 3: Staking a Claim
Highlights
- In 1507, mapmaker Martin Waldseemueller christened the New World "America" after Florentine seafarer Amerigo Vespucci, who had visited it at least twice under Portuguese and Spanish flags. Though it mistakenly attributed the land's discovery to Vespucci, the name stuck.
- In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish, French, and English expeditions conquered, claimed, and mapped areas of the New World. The Europeans saw land as a source of status and an exploitable commodity–a view that fundamentally conflicted with Native Americans' sense of land as a gift held by the community.
- By the 17th century, the Dutch had acquired Portuguese charts and soon displaced their rivals as masters of the spice trade.
- In the 18th century, John Harrison created seaworthy chronometers to precisely measure distances east or west of a reference point, or prime meridian–essential for standardizing longitude.
Questions to Consider
- Imagine you're an advisor to Cortes or Montezuma during the tense, eight-month-long Spanish occupation of Tenochtitlan. What reasons would you give your leader for attacking the other side? For peaceful coexistence?
- What do you think happened to the English settlers who vanished from Roanoke Island?
- How does the conflict between the ideas of land as a commodity and as a communal right manifest itself today? In your opinion, how are they usually reconciled?
Episode 4: Empire!
Highlights
- In 1799, immediately after the British consolidated their power in southern India by putting down the Tippu Sultan's uprising, Capt. Colin Mackenzie–the first surveyor general of India–began a detailed topographical survey of the state Mysore.
- In 1802, William Lambton launched the Great Trigonometric Survey–an ambitious effort to survey and map every square foot of the Indian subcontinent.
- The survey used triangulation, a method known in Europe for about 300 years and applied by Giovanni Cassini to accurately survey Louis XIV's France more than 100 years earlier. It involved precisely measuring a baseline between two points, and then calculating the distances from those spots to a third point using trigonometry.
- After Lambton's death, George Everest took over the Great Trigonometric Survey, eventually establishing a "spine" down the center of the subcontinent.
- Surveyors–often disguised as monks to avoid detection– completed Everest's work by surveying the Himalayas, including the world's tallest peak.
Questions to Consider
- Lambton's proposal initially met stiff opposition. What arguments would you make to justify the survey's expense?
- Compare Mackenzie's approach to indigenous Indian culture with Lambton's. Which do you think made more sense?
- The Great Trigonometric Survey ended up costing hundreds of lives. Do you think it was worth the price? Why or why not?
Episode 5: Pictures of the Invisible
Highlights
- In 1858, the French balloonist Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon) invented aerial photography, ushering in a new mapping tool.
- Today, aerial photography and spectrographic imaging can indicate the presence of oil deposits or minerals such as gold.
- In the 1950s and '60s, sonographic mapping of the ocean floor by Dr. Bruce Heezen of Columbia University provided evidence for the geologic theory of continental drift.
- In the 1960s and '70s, airborne radar mapping of Antarctica revealed the continent's two geographies: the ice sheet above and the landscape below.
- Started in 1970, Brazil's RADAM Project (Radar in the Amazon) used side-scanning airborne radar to map the vast river basin under cloud cover and tree canopy. Soon after, deforestation efforts began, leading critics to question the project's values.
Questions to Consider
- Do you believe we should map the ocean floor? Why or why not?
- How do you explain the remarkable similarities between Orontius Finaeus's 1531 map of a southern continent–drawn with no knowledge of Antarctica whatsoever–and today's radar maps?
- To what degree do you think RADAM carries the blame for deforestation of the Amazon rain forest? Given what we've learned since the 1960s, do you think the project was worthwhile, or did it simply enable destruction?
Episode 6: The Writing on the Screen
Highlights
- Potentially lifesaving applications of computerized mapping include EMS dispatch, air traffic control, weather forecasts, and risk assessment for earthquake response.
- Seismic tomography can reveal three-dimensional images of subterranean features, which might someday lead to earthquake prediction.
- In medicine, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) gives cross-sectional pictures of internal organs.
- Using techniques pioneered by John Snow during the 19thcentury cholera outbreak in London, epidemiologists can map the spread of infectious diseases such as AIDS.
- Satellite mapping can help predict the effects and risks of global warming by giving scientists a better understanding of the complex relationship between ice mass, sea levels, and atmospheric conditions.
Questions to Consider
- Narrator Patrick Stewart says, "Even at the everyday level, we make compromises between our safety and our convenience." In what ways do you balance risk and convenience in your life? How do maps help you make such decisions?
- Scientists expect rising sea levels to threaten the Chesapeake Bay, Florida, and other coastal areas around the globe within the next 50 years. In your opinion, should we protect those areas or abandon them?
- What are your thoughts on global warming? Do you take steps to combat it?
- Development in places like the Amazon Basin has brought prosperity to the local economy while damaging delicate ecosystems essential to the planet's survival. How do you propose that governments reconcile local needs with global ones? And how can maps help with those policy decisions?
