Carl Withers
Biographic Data
| ID | 380227 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carl Withers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carl |
| FAMILY NAME | Withers |
| SIGNATURE | WITHERS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5219-5653 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 103 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 476 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 103 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1950 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Atlas Making: A Study of Alexander Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas , 1848–1856
This article examines the making of Alexander Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas: the 1848 first edition, the second and enlarged 1856 edition, and the intermediate reduced edition of 1850. In examining the editions of the Physical Atlas attention is paid to Johnston’s personal papers and unpublished correspondence to reveal how he worked, with whom, and to what end. The article draws upon work in processual map history, the history of science, and …
Mapping Europe in war and peace, 1915–1919: B. C. Wallis and the 1919 Peoples of Austria-Hungary geographical handbook and atlas
The paper examines The Peoples of Austria-Hungary geographical handbook and the accompanying Atlas of Austria-Hungary , published by Britain's Naval Intelligence Division in 1919 and, in greater detail, the antecedent mapping and statistical studies of Bertie Cotterell Wallis, a London schoolteacher, who undertook to study Hungary's nationalities and demography from 1915 as part of the 1:1 M mapping project coordinated by Arthur Hinks in the Roya…
The Geographers Royal: A summary and partial history
The paper presents a summary biographical history of those persons who have held the title Geographer Royal or a variant since its inception in 1682. The distinction can be made between individuals who held the title because of their personal standing and geographical accomplishments, and those, principally map makers and geographical publishers, who held the title as a reflection of excellence in the commercial production of maps and atlases. Th…
Geographical print culture in the German-speaking territories, c.1690—c.1815
Mitigation of Airborne Contaminant Spread through Simple Interventions in an Occupied Single-Family Home
Historically, reducing aerosol-based transmission of respired viruses in indoor environments has been of importance for controlling influenza viruses and common-cold rhinoviruses. The present public health emergency associated with SARS-CoV-2 makes this topic critically important. Yet to be tested is the potential effectiveness of simple interventions that create an isolation zone (IZ) for a suspected/confirmed sick or sensitive person requiring …
Map Making, Defamation and Credibility: The Case of the Athenaeum , Charles Tilstone Beke, and W. & A. K. Johnston’s Edinburgh Educational Atlas (1874)
This article examines an 1874 court case brought by the leading map-making firm W. & A. K. Johnston against the Athenaeum, a literary periodical, for publishing a review that criticized the quality of Johnston’s Edinburgh Educational Atlas. The review, by geographer Charles Tilstone Beke, impugned the reputations of mapmaker Alexander Keith Johnston and of the Johnston firm, questioning their credibility. Testimonials given at the trial reveal th…
Disguise—Trust and Truth in Travel Writing
This article contends that “disguise” has been both overlooked in studies of travel writing and is more complex than current studies suppose. The performance of disguise raises important questions about trust—in the traveler, in the truth of what is narrated, and in the knowledge gained in exploration. The article examines examples of disguise in action: nineteenth-century exploration; woman travelers dressing as men; use of scientific instrument…
Geographical education in the eighteenth-century German-speaking territories
This paper examines debates over the nature, purpose, and reform of geographical education in schools in the eighteenth-century German-speaking territories. Attention is paid to contemporaries’ concerns over the cognitive content of geography – what geography was – and, in greater detail, to their views concerning how the subject might be taught, its teaching improved, and the end in view of teaching it, namely to produce informed citizens. The p…
Obituary
Instrument provision and geographical science: The work of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830– ca 1930
This paper examines the Royal Geographical Society's provision and management of scientific instruments to explorers and expeditions in the century following its foundation in 1830. Assessment of the Society's directives concerning appropriate scientific instruments for the conduct of geography reveals the emergence (slow and uneven) of policies concerning the assignment of instruments. From examination of Council minutes and related manuscript s…
On Trial—Social Relations of Map Production in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain
This article examines the social relations of map production in mid-nineteenth-century Britain with reference to moments when maps and their makers were ‘on trial’—legally in court in Edinburgh in 1853 and by public opinion in London in 1854 following a lecture. The principal protagonists include Alexander Keith Johnston of the map firm W. & A. K. Johnston, the German cartographer August Petermann, the mapseller Trelawney Saunders and John Bartho…
Geography and “thing knowledge”: Instrument epistemology, failure, and narratives of 19th‐century exploration
The paper examines the relationships between instrument epistemology, failure, and textual authority with reference to the place of scientific instruments in published narratives of 19th‐century exploration. The paper draws on Baird's work on instrument epistemology and “semantic ascent” and Gooday's work on failure and on the morality of measurement. Its empirical focus comes from examination of RGS manuscript AP 52, a list of instruments provid…
The Work That Maps Do
Martin Brückner's The Social Life of Maps will appeal to scholars from many disciplines-material studies and English literature (his home fields), geography, American studies, and, not least, the U.S. historical community. Maps have never been the preserve of geographers, certainly not in their making nor, as Brückner convincingly shows, in the various practices of public and popular "mappery." One of the strengths of this book is that it re-affi…
Enlightenment Geographies
The Enlightenment, usually taken to be an intellectual phenomenon and a historical period, broadly equivalent to the “long” eighteenth century in Europe, should also be understood as a matter of geography with global reach and significance. The term “Enlightenment geographies” embraces three related concerns: the importance of where questions, and matters of scale, space, and place, in explaining what the Enlightenment was; the explanation of phi…
Language Geographies
The term “language geographies” involves the study of the changing geographical distribution and social usage of language, or of its constituent parts and variant forms, and of the ways in which language embodies and enables power and authority. Three main and related themes connecting the study of geography and language may be identified. The first includes the proper words we use to describe the world, geography's terminology included, and is e…
Trust – in geography
Trust is central to the social world and to the knowledge claims we make as academics. Yet trust has not been a central focus of research in human geography. This article examines the widespread divergent attention given to trust in disciplines other than geography and considers the limited research on trust in geography. Trust, the article claims, is geographical in several senses. Distinction is made between the spatial dimensions of trust in t…
American Geography and Geographers: Toward Geographical Science
The uses of space in early modern history
Afterword: Geographers, historical geographies, war
Afterword: Geographers, historical geographies, war
The longitude question
The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment 1740–1820
Space, geography and the global French Enlightenment
The Sage Handbook of Human Geography: Two Volume Set
Mastering the Niger: James MacQueen's African Geography and the Struggle over Atlantic Slavery
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History
Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in History Charles W. J. Withers I. Introduction A few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits-and consequences-of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not…
Place, Memory, Monument: Memorializing the Past in Contemporary Highland Scotland
Authorizing landscape: «Authority», naming and the Ordnance Survey's mapping of the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century
Geography and Imperialism 1820-1940
List of figures and tables general editor's introduction notes on contributors introduction, Morag Bell et al agents and agencies in geography and empire - the case of George Grey, James M.R. Cameron imperialism and the discourse of desiccation the institutionalisation of global environmental concerns and the role of the Royal Geographical Society, 1860-1880, Richard Grove imperial landscapes - photography, geography and British exploration, 1858…
Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
Examines the Highlands and islands of Scotland over a long period and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of Anglicization have largely succeeded
Rethinking ‘disciplinary’ history: Geography in British universities, c. 1580–1887
Against a background of recent work in the history of geography and of geographical knowledge, the paper considers evidence for the place of geography within British universities before the formal establishment of the first departments of geography. Attention is paid to geography’s discursive connections with other subjects within given university curricula, and to the values placed upon its teaching by contemporaries. The paper argues that extan…
Constructing ‘the geographical archive’
The recent success of the RGS–IBG in securing funds to develop the Society’s archives provides a moment in which those interested in the history of geographical knowledge and of geography as an academic discipline might reflect on the nature of ‘the geographical archive’ that is constituted in and by the academic department. Drawing, in part, upon the work of Derrida and of Foucault, the paper firstly examines what an archive is and what it does.…
Natural history societies, fieldwork and local knowledge in nineteenth-century Scotland: Towards a Historical Geography of Civic Science
This paper examines the role of fieldwork in the activities of natural history societies in Victorian Scotland. Fieldwork, it is argued, was an important constituent in the making of local natural knowledge. Being and doing ‘in the field’ was a means to establish through fieldwork given scientific fields and, in turn, to promote civic identity through scientific conduct
Trust – in geography
Trust is central to the social world and to the knowledge claims we make as academics. Yet trust has not been a central focus of research in human geography. This article examines the widespread divergent attention given to trust in disciplines other than geography and considers the limited research on trust in geography. Trust, the article claims, is geographical in several senses. Distinction is made between the spatial dimensions of trust in t…
Science and Sociability: Women as Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-1901
This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of populari…
Geography's other histories? Geography and science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831– c .1933
With reference to the history of modern geography in Britain and from assessment of the archives of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this paper examines the role of the BAAS in promoting geography from the Association's foundation in 1831 to the 1930s. Particular attention is paid to BAAS Section E (Geography) in the period after 1851. Geography's place is considered with respect to its funding, content and relations…
Travels into print: Authoring, editing and narratives of travel and exploration, c .1815– c .1857
This paper examines the relationships between authorship and editing in the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The context to the paper is the widespread interest in exploration and travel writing in geography and related fields, and the materialist hermeneutic apparent in the conjunction of geography, book history and the history of science. Through assessment of archival and printed evidence relating to the authorship and editi…
Mapping the Niger, 1798–1832: Trust, Testimony and ‘Ocular Demonstration’ in the Late Enlightenment
This paper is about the role of trust, testimony and direct observation in the making of maps and about the ways in which these issues were apparent in the mapping of the Niger River. By the late eighteenth century, the Niger River was a two‐thousand‐year‐old geographical problem. Although classical writers, Arab geographers and French authorities had produced maps of the river, its direction of flow was not confirmed by direct observation until …
Encyclopaedism, Modernism and the Classification of Geographical Knowledge
general principles, whether of morality, rationality or scientific law. The Encyclopidie sought to connect these separate knowledges and principles. Finally, because such thinking was, as I have tried to show, associated in the Encyclopidie, as elsewhere, with reform and change, it has a strong prescriptive and moralizing tone. Manifest in ideas of progress and varying notions of utility, enlightened thought was concerned with the ways in which a…
Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth‐century British geography
The paper explores the promotion of method in nineteenth‐century British geography. Attention is paid to the emphasis accorded scientific instruments in a period when scientific subjects were, in practice and in personnel, ‘disciplining’ themselves. The role ascribed to scientific instruments and method is examined with reference to the work in the Royal Geographical Society of Julian R. Jackson and his What to observe, or the traveller’s remembr…
History and philosophy of geography 2004-2005: Biographies, practices, sites
Memory and the history of geographical knowledge: The commemoration of Mungo Park, African explorer
How Scotland came to know itself: Geography, national identity and the making of a nation, 1680–1790
Stepwise migration and Highland migration to Glasgow, 1852–1898
Plainville Fifteen Years Later
Eighteenth-century geography: Texts, practices, sites
This essay examines recent work on geography in the eighteenth century. Although it principally considers Britain, the paper also incorporates evidence from other countries and, in its concentration upon the eighteenth century rather than ‘early modern geography’ (the period c. 1600-1850), the essay offers a focus different from much other work. It is argued that, although geography may in its books have been understood by contemporaries as a con…
Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
On Enlightenment’s margins: Geography, imperialism and mapping in Central Asia, c.1798–c.1838
The spectacular and the sacred: Narrating Landscape in Works of Travel
This article - drawing upon the archives of the London publisher John Murray - addresses the narration of landscape in 19th century printed accounts of travel and exploration. The geological work of the earth scientist Charles Lyell, and the textual and cartographic investigations of the scriptural geographer Edward Robinson, are used to examine the construction of narrative as a question of inscriptive practice, rhetorical desideratum, and inter…
History and philosophy of geography, 2002-2003: Geography in its place
American Folk Songs for Children
Plainville Fifteen Years Later
What They Say in New England and Other American Folklore
The Treasure at Home
Postgraduate symposium at the I.B.G
A Geography of Language: Gaelic-Speaking in Perthshire, 1698-1879
To be anything more than a narrative of distributional shifts, the geographical study of languages and their change over space and time should investigate the social processes underlying language usage as well as the spatial extent of language areas. Studies of the changing geography of the Celtic languages within Great Britain have provided much insight into the nature and patterns of language shift over space and time and the social processes a…
The shifting frontier’ the Gaelic-English boundary in the Black Isle, 1698–1881
Deer forests, landlords and crofters: The western highlands in victorian and edwardian times
Ireland and Scotland 1600–1850: Parallels and contrasts in economic and social development
An historical geography of Scotland
Gaelic in Scotland, 1698-1981: The Geographical History of a Language
Kirk, club and culture change: Gaelic Chapels, highland societies and the urban Gaelic subculture in eighteenth‐century Scotland∗
Highland migration to Dundee, Perth and Stirling, 1753–1891
Mapping the industrial revolution
Gaelic in Scotland 1698-1981: The Geographical History of a Language
Destitution and migration: Labour mobility and relief from famine in Highland Scotland 1836–1850
Highland migration to Aberdeen, c. 1649-1891
Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
Give us land and plenty of it’: The ideological basis to land and landscape in the Scottish Highlands
(1990). ‘Give us land and plenty of it’: the ideological basis to land and landscape in the Scottish Highlands. Landscape History: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 45-54
Population mobility in Scotland and Europe, 1600-1900: A comparative perspective
Scottish social and demographic history has seen important developments in the last two decades. Patterns of population turnover, permanent mobility, and emigration are now becoming clear. This article summarises a large body of recent literature on geographical mobility and sets population movement in its social and economic context. A relatively "traditional" economy and society in the seventeenth century, Scotland industrialised rapidly in the…
The Great Highland famine: Hunger, emigration and the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century
In the beginning was the word: Culture and meanings in print
Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Culture Region
Examines the Highlands and islands of Scotland over a long period and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of Anglicization have largely succeeded
Stepwise migration and Highland migration to Glasgow, 1852–1898
Teaching qualitative geography as interpretative discourse
The paper discusses the teaching of qualitative geography in relation to the constraints and opportunities of modular degree programmes. Attention is paid to a number of examples from undergraduate taught classes and to the issues raised in the use of qualitative methods and interpretative geographies in undergraduate dissertations
Geography (67 works) · History (66 works) · Sociology (52 works) · History (49 works) · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought (40 works) · Archaeology (31 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · Scottish History and National Identity (30 works) · Political science (29 works) · Social science (26 works)