What Makes a Good Border?
What Makes a Good Border?
This chapter explores how citizen mapmakers in modern France and Germany invented new kinds of unofficial territorial boundaries that rivalled the official state borders discussed in Chapter 1. These unofficial territorial boundaries—including ethnic, historical, linguistic, and racial borders—served the function of orienting and bounding national territory according to cultural parameters. The patriotic mapmakers who developed a passion for mapping idealized visions of French and German national territories were scholars from the nineteenth century’s budding social scientific disciplines: ethnographers, anthropologists, statisticians, linguists, geographers, and historians who were deeply interested in the social and cultural identity of land. In order to promote their claims to disputed Alsace-Lorraine, French and German nationalists disseminated unofficial border maps to a variety of civil associations and displayed them in prominent public settings.
Keywords: citizen mapmakers, unofficial borders, ethnic borders, national borders, historical borders, racial borders, linguistic borders, social scientists
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