In this paper we examine the history, production, and use e practical and rhetorical e of maps created by the United States government during World War II as related to the development and execution of aerial bombing policies against Japan. Drawing from a range of maps and primary documents culled from libraries and archives in the United States, we argue that maps provide an important, and hitherto neglected, means through which to trace the exploration and eventual embrace of the incendiary bombing of Japan's cities. In particular, our aim is to show how maps, along with the men who made and used them, played a central role in the planning and prosecution of air raids on urban Japan. We also address the mobilization of American geographers into the war effort, the re-configuration of America's spatial intelligence community during World War II, and the ways in which maps were constructed in the context of total war.
This article examines the ondol—the cooking stove–cum–heated floor system conventional to Korean dwellings—as a site of contestation over forest management, fuel consumption, and domestic life in colonial Korea. At once a provider of heat essential to survival in an often frigid peninsula and, in the eyes of colonial officials, ground zero of deforestation, the ondol garnered tremendous interest from an array of reformers determined to improve the Korean home and its hearth. Foresters were but one party to a far-reaching debate (involving architects, doctors, and agronomists) over how best to domesticate heat in the harsh continental climate. By tracing the contours of this debate, this article elucidates the multitude of often-conflicting interests inherent to state-led interventions in household fuel economies: what the author calls the politics of forest conservation in colonial Korea. In focusing on efforts to regulate the quotidian rhythms of energy consumption, it likewise investigates the material underpinnings of everyday life—a topic hitherto overlooked in extant scholarship on forestry and empire alike.
This article examines the emergence in colonial Korea of a command economy for forestry products following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). It does so, first, by tracing the policy mechanisms through which the colonial state commandeered forest products, especially timber, firewood, and charcoal. Second, through an analysis of the wartime promotion of a “low temperature lifestyle,” it offers a thumbnail sketch of the lived experiences and corporeal consequences of state-led efforts to rationalize fuel consumption. Considered together, these lines of analysis offer insight into not only the ecological implications of war on the Korean landscape, but also the bodily privations that defined everyday life under total war—what might be called the “slow violence” of caloric control.
History records many foolish notions regarding the shape of the earth. Although it is stated that Pythagoras and Thales taught that the earth is spherical, their teaching was without avail, as for nine centuries the shape of the earth was the subject of all kinds of theories.… The triangulation and the astronomic observations.… made by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey furnish the most valuable data for the determination of the figure of the earth that have been contributed by any one nation. Each civilized nation maintains an organization for similar purposes.
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