The Development of Polish Cartography since the World War

TO the rl6e that maps play in emphasizing national consciousness anyone may bear witness who calls to mind how much more intimate is his knowledge of his own country than of foreign countries, even those immediately adjoining his own. Apart from the greater familiarity inevitably brought about by residence, domestic travel, and early acquaintance with national literature and history, this disparity is in no small measure due to the more detailed treatment accorded his own country in the geographies he used at school and in the general reference atlases he may have been using since. In the post-war era it is naturally the citizens of the newly created states in Europe who have been most in need of this unifying portrayal, and none more so than those of Poland, whose reconstituted territory had been for over a century under the jurisdiction of three powers of widely divergent culture and administrative systems. To provide such a picture in the field of geography, and especially graphically by means of cartography, is the task to which no one has addressed himself with more conspicuous success than Professor Eugene Romer of the University of Lw6w

Archaeology · Art history · Cartography · Geography · World War II · Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland · History · Language and Culture · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies