"America at the center"
Sep. 13th, 2005 06:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinI've heard in various places the claim that world maps made in the US always put the US near the center, but I don't think I've ever actually seen such a map. It seems to me that it would be awkward to split Eurasia in two, and I'd probably have noticed the oddity (this page on south-at-the-top maps mentions a correspondent having one made by the George F. Cram company, so I suppose they exist).
Most of the ones you can get here split the globe near the International Date Line, so that Europe is near the center in longitude. This is partly Western ethnocentrism (the Prime Meridian, an arbitrary British creation, is in the middle), but it's also convenient because there's not much land in the middle of the Pacific. Sometimes there's some special handling of the split near where Russia meets Alaska.
This stock photo library has some with the Americas at the center. They're weird-looking.
Most of the ones you can get here split the globe near the International Date Line, so that Europe is near the center in longitude. This is partly Western ethnocentrism (the Prime Meridian, an arbitrary British creation, is in the middle), but it's also convenient because there's not much land in the middle of the Pacific. Sometimes there's some special handling of the split near where Russia meets Alaska.
This stock photo library has some with the Americas at the center. They're weird-looking.