List and thanks to Tosca for the things stay.
And thanks to doubly, it's the body not only for hosting,
but also for supplying in the midst of lockdowns and by great archive material, which I'll introduce later on in the show.
This is a code presentation between myself and thought.
My colleague Mike Heffernan will both be here for questions at the end.
But now I'm going to spend the next 50 minutes talking you through the political cartographer's of Matter Wrightman.
So another argument was born in 1910, died 1964.
She was ethnically Polish, Jewish during practise.
She was very much an internationalist figure.
She lived barely two years in Polish territories and she developed an internationalist form of photography.
And she was something of a celebrity in her day, renowned, as one review put it, for her high standards of clarity, simplicity and accuracy.
And her name was attached to bestselling popular Atlas's.
A period of fame was relatively brief from about 1938 to 1944.
Was punchy published? Mustaffa works when she was between the ages of just 28 and 34.
It is rather sobering thought. But in that period, she published a substantial and significant body of work.
And what follows? I'm going to take a kind of broadly chronological path through her through her life, her education, her career,
and then her political cartography is sheer economic broughton's socialist cartography,
her antifascist cut cartography and her geo strategic cartography.
And I'll probably spend most time on the antifascist off in the store, particularly in relation to Sheeter Grant does work Europe and the Czechs.
So she was the daughter of Ludvik, right, and the renowned Polish physician and bacteriologist,
she was the second daughter born in 1910 in what was then Austria and Poland and Krakoff.
But the family moved swiftly to London,
where the defect was appointed by the Royal Institute of Public Health and where the family lived during the war.
During the war live, it became more politically active than immediately upon the cessation of hostilities.
He returned to Warsaw, where, with the backing of the new Polish government, he set up a National Institute of Epidemiology and his good work.
That meant that he was noticed by Eric Herman, who appointed him as the very first director of the League of Nations new health action.
The family moves again to Geneva. They're Ludvik, along with another employee of the League of Nations after Sweetzer and their wives.
Maria Ruth. Yes, the Geneva based educationists Al Feria and Paul may offer plans for the world's first international school.
The international school. And she even UN is excellent.
Founded in 1924, the writers would be in charge of recruitment and the Sweetser is in charge of finance.
One of the most notable retreats that Wrightman made was the pastor's job for Paul Dupee, who at the age of 70,
retired from a long and distinguished career at the Akello months here in Paris to teach our Akela from 1925.
And deeply extended the founding philosophy of the international school into his teaching.
He believes that geography and cartography should be taught from an international standpoint.
Is also a believer in active teaching methods.
Native students practise cartography by drawing maps that would illustrate the geopolitical subjects today.
And here I'm drawing on work by RICO Frenzy with the party standing at the back next to this Great Wall in his classroom here.
This is an example of this is a matter of fact, of maps produced by DePuy students hanging on the side of the wall of his classroom.
We developed a special bond with Master Iceman. Here we see a hand draw a matter of his ready to be mounted on a globe which
he dedicated to Thomas Reisman and remains in the possession of her family.
He is also in Reitman's own recollections, his years writing in 1946.
In fact, here she is in this photo. Martha Wrightman is here second.
Right. And if we it again, she recalled, I think with emotion about the years spent at Akela.
I'm fine. Is a student of Mr. DePuy. It seems to me that every faculty is logical and intelligent work I owe to the professor and dear friend.
In 1929, she graduated from Excellent studied for a couple of years.
Instead of the planned Geneva and in 1941, she goes to study geography at the Sorbonne.
The department, though, is headed by Emmanuel D'Amato, who is at that very time developing a course on cartography,
which he envisioned as a kind of a professional training course, which would last one and a half years.
And we're train five cartographer geographers per year to the very highest.
And he will say to his blackboard that only two students were admitted to this course from the first year,
but they both went on to great renown and fast maths, Wrightman and Jack.
Now, today, that town's probably the name, which is really known to us.
He would go on to play a significant role both in the development of French
cartography institutionally and in his seminal books on cartographic theory,
most notably, that's from his terminology graphics.
At the time, it was the 24 year old Reichmann that was the star pupil and the 16 year old, but very much played a supporting role.
And we see this in Demosthenes rapports, annual rapports to the University Unell,
in which he tells us that Breitman prepared the complete illustration of a work on political and economic geography.
And more or less finished with the help of Jack, but to the preparation of a war map of Poland.
She also collaborates in tomatillos, great projects of the time, his Atlas Diphones.
Upon graduation, Wrightman moved swiftly into paid employment as a cartographer and here's the kind of selected bibliography of her made up.
I want to draw your attention to her two points here. The first is the congested time period.
So we Thebe 1938 was very much a kind of an mirabilis with four major works published and a fifth Pringle's.
China's Struggles for Unity was meant to be published in 38.
Ends up being published in the first month of 1939.
The second thing I want to draw your attention to is her kind of gradual growth to prominence as a name.
So she she starts off on the front cover, but on the inside here, maps by Reichmann, graduates to the front cover.
Text by Pringle, maps by Reichmann. And then becomes co-author.
We see here this blog, Hudson Unwrite Men share equal billing and eventually to top billing.
Martha Reitman sole authorship and the descriptive text is very much a secondary consideration.
I can move on now to work in support of Sheila Grant Duff Europe.
European cheques. Sheila Grant Duff was British for a foreign correspondent.
Again, a very young woman. Twenty five. At the time that this was published in nineteen thirty eight.
And it was a book written in haste to convince the British in particular of the need to defend the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia.
It was very much in haste,
Grunter forfeited her royalties in the first 60000 copies in exchange for sped up production and the necessity that it would get out there.
And she insisted that free copies be delivered to every MP. Get unhealthy and hear those, of course, targeted for while dissemination.
It was part of Alan Lane's Penguin special series, which was designed for cheap public consumption.
We see here an online site is an incubator, which is something of a marketing gimmick.
But it was true that these volumes were available on every railway station in the country and it was a success in terms of sales.
The book sold eighty thousand copies in its first three weeks.
However, it did not, of course, prevent nudity.
And here we have a passage from sheet of memoirs where she recalls travelling back to London on the 30th of
September 1938 and thing in W h Smith the morning newspapers announcing the Munich agreement beside her,
her book, Europe and the Czechs,
and she fights against the background of a map of Europe or in black cover showed the blood red outlines of the Czechoslovakia and no longer existed.
It was my first fight, but this now useless book. If we open the books to take a look at the cartography we see here, this illustration.
And of course, as the German threat to Czechoslovakia and just like his natural defences would make a couple of points here.
The first is it's obvious kind of conferences with geopolitical mapping in
terms of the way in which Reichmann illustrates the threat to Czechoslovakia,
but from encirclement from Germany, it's very much the inverse of contemporary forms of geopolitical nothing that the map,
the threat to Germany, encirclement budgets back in.
But the second point I want to make kind of runs counter to that one and the way in which Righton felt uncomfortable with certain elements,
the geopolitical orthodoxy. I'm here. I'm gonna turn to the the archive.
Grant Duff's archives are best at the bottom. And we see in the archives that she did Grant Duffett requested the Wrightman only show the
Sedates Mountains in order to emphasise this point of Czechoslovakia's natural frontiers.
But Reichmann protests. She writes to the publisher, saying it would much exaggerate their importance in the middle of Europe.
And as a matter of fact, personally, I do not believe anymore in natural defensive frontiers.
And we think the compromise that was reached, which was a straight months of shipping in black and other mountains in Hachey.
If I'm going to move on now briefly and kind of cover the rest.
A career in May 1939. Right. Themselves with Shalosky to Cape Town, where he had been appointed vice consul and were married in 1948.
The family with a new baby son emigrated to Washington, D.C., where Martha's family already lived.
And while in the US, Martin published a series of Atlas's educate the public on the geostrategy and geography of the world.
More than four compactors answered the questions.
Meanwhile, the influence had started work for a major pharmaceutical company,
which led the family to spells living in Mexico and off to Argentina, Egypt, Iran and Greece.
In 1951. Martha was diagnosed with cancer, obscure and active.
She used the commission for the Argentinian National Airline to pay for a trip to see her family in France.
And while that, she flew to Washington, D.C. for the 1952 National Geographic Congress,
where she served as the official translator for the Section Cartographic. 1958, Matheny's is the major operations.
The family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1961.
With back to Athens, Greece, where she died at the end of 1964.
So hopefully this is showing something of the international life and cartography
of a woman who brings but extraordinary period that coincided with a more general
ascendancy of the importance of cartography to political communication and education
was very much one of the most prominent and bankable hotspots in the world.
And, Daryn. And any questions you have? Thank you very much indeed.
Ben and Mike, for that really fascinating contribution, I'm sure,
on one of many people who feel we should have heard more about Motter Reisman before.
So thank you for for alerting us to her importance. So a number of questions coming in here.
The question about the international school which she's attending and where she gets much of her geographical conter graphical training,
the 100, if you could tell us a little bit more about the students there and the and the curriculum and what it was intended for.
Chuck, I can say something about that. It was.
I mean, the is the first international school and it really had this extraordinary in off of it was there.
There was a free discipline. The students not to be disciplined was make sex, which is unusual certainly in Geneva at the time.
It was a very kind of modern school is very self-conscious, the modern and it was also self consciously internationalist.
And as befits its status as an international school serving the kind of the international institution of the League of Nations.
And so, yes, I think you can see the kind of modern modern ethos, sadly, in the choice of staff they hired.
And also, I think in that the kind of firm, the work of the Reichmann and other other alumni ended up going on to do was right.
Men attracted to it because it had an emphasis on geopolitics and cartography,
or did she sort of get her interest in geopolitics and cartography because she was that which way did the causal relationship a.
I think both actually in that particular case.
But it is worth emphasising that in the aftermath, first of all,
there was this belief that you needed to completely transform the education system
and the discipline which traditional disciplines were not going to work for,
you know, the cultivation of an international sensibility.
And so they the Geneva School was was part of a much wider idea that you would relaunch higher education.
Is the origins of international relations. Isn't as as a science, as a subject.
So it is part of a much wider initiative, which, interestingly, lots of British people are prominently involved with,
including most being of Oxford, as you well know, Murray and Alfred Zimmer.
All those people who are very prominently involved.
But certain places became very influential in this, notably Geneva as a kind of international centre.
So it's different, though, because I think to the degree to which geography was prominently position within that committee,
that was not always the case in the way that international relations, as it evolved,
was often quite suspicious of geography because of its association with an imperial past.
And the notion that you could have an international geography is itself quite contentious,
could go on in Geneva was an attempt to do precisely that, internationalise the mind, but in geography as well.
Fascinating. Thank you. And we've had a question about Martha Reitman's personal politics and perhaps you could tell us a
little bit about that in the context of the maps that she draws and how she chooses to represent them.
Yeah, that's a really great question. It's there's a lot to depend on in far.
It's hard to nail it down. There's references to her as bear being known as the Bolshevik queen she was not at.
And suddenly she she goes on to illustrate Alexander Rondos, Socialist Atlas.
And so we can perhaps infer something from from those references.
But I think it's notable that as she kind of move away from the cartography that she does for other people and towards her own cartography,
this becomes much more kind of muted and it becomes less and less overtly political in that sense.
And more. I guess she think that is illustrative of kind of trends, global trends, rather than persuasive.
Thank you. Well, I I'm sure we could spend the rest of the afternoon talking about Mr. Rothman,
she's obviously an absolutely fascinating figure that we should should know more about.
But I'm afraid time presses. So we must move on to our next paper.
But thank you both very much indeed for that really, really fascinating and intriguing talk.