1939 Harrison Map of Europe

Details continental Europe and its military installations on the brink of World War II.

This is a 1939 Richard Edes Harrison map of Europe on the brink of World War II. Depicting the entirety of continental Europe, Harrison employs small icons to indicate air and naval bases as well as fortified lines along international borders. The fortifications built between France and Germany, the vaunted Maginot and Siegfried Lines respectively, represent the highest concentration of illustrated military force. Harrison also uses color to identify military alliances as they stood when this map was published. The Allied powers, France, the United Kingdom, and Poland, are shaded blue, while Germany is colored red. It is important to note that Germany’s borders here include the Anschluss, or the Reich’s forced annexation of Austria, and its invasion of Czechoslovakia, neither of which were opposed by the Western powers. World War II began in earnest in Europe on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland from the west, and France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, but did little to come to Poland’s defense. As agreed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the Soviets invaded Poland on September 17th. The Soviets would not join the Allied side until Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa) the June 22, 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Publication History and Census

This map was created by Richard Edes Harrison and published by FORTUNE Magazine. It is catalogued in the OCLC as being part of the institutional collections at Harvard, the University of Michigan, Missouri State University, the University of Texas, Brigham Young University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California-Berkeley.

Cartographer

Richard Edes Harrison (March 11, 1901 - January 5, 1994) was an American cartographer, scientific illustrator, and designer based in New York City, active principally from the 1930s through the 1970s. His journalistic maps combined unconventional viewpoints, expressive relief shading, and carefully controlled graphic design to explain international geography to a broad readership. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, he graduated from Yale College in 1923 with a major in zoology and a minor in chemistry. After working as a scientific illustrator and architectural draftsman, he entered Yale's School of Fine Arts in 1926 and received an architecture degree in 1930. With architectural work scarce during the Depression, he moved to New York and worked in interior and industrial design. A 1932 Time map assignment launched his career in magazine cartography; he later became a staff cartographer for Fortune before returning to freelance work in 1938, maintaining important associations with Fortune and Life. During World War II, Harrison challenged the familiar north-up, Mercator-centered view of world affairs through polar projections, orthographic views, and oblique perspectives that emphasized the Earth's curvature and the proximity of continents in an age of aviation. His Three Approaches to the U.S. (1940) and The World Divided (1941) made American strategic vulnerability visually immediate, supporting an internationalist understanding of the conflict rather than geographical isolation. His influential Look at the World: The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy appeared in 1944. Although admired for their explanatory power, his departures from conventional orientation, scale, and projection also attracted criticism from professional geographers and cartographers. Harrison taught at Syracuse University from 1945 to 1949 and consulted for government agencies, including the Office of Strategic Services, the State Department, and the U.S. Geological Survey. His later publications included The Ginn World Atlas (1963), and he contributed shaded-relief cartography to The National Atlas of the United States of America. He received the American Geographical Society's Miller Medal in 1968. An enthusiastic birdwatcher with a sustained interest in Central Park conservation, Harrison died in New York City on January 5, 1994; the Library of Congress acquired his professional and personal papers in 1995.   Further Details...

Condition

Very good. Light wear along original fold lines. Text on verso.

References

OCLC 34121571.