Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
sixteenth century, the problems of the Julian calendar had become so severe
that it had fallen 11 days behind the earth's succession. Critically, in the eyes
of Christians, the Julian calendar inaccurately re
fl
ected the date of Easter,
de
fi
ned by the Council of Nicaea in 325
ad
as the
fi
first Sunday after the spring
full moon, with the spring equinox
xed on March 21. In 1582, Pope Gregory
XIII, in one bold stroke, dropped ten days out of the calendar by issuing
a papal edict in which Thursday, October 4 would be followed by Friday,
October 15. The Gregorian reform was immediately adopted by Catholic
countries, but was strongly resisted by Protestant ones. When England
fi
finally
switched two centuries later, in 1752, riots ensued over the 11 “lost days.”
Worldwide, the Gregorian calendar gradually became the international stan-
dard for civil time measurement as Western culture gained hegemony over the
planet, often as part of modernizing initiatives. In China, the Gregorian calen-
dar was introduced in 1912, following the nationalist revolution, although the
older, traditional one is still used for religious observances. Not until 1923 did
the Orthodox Church in Greece, Romania, and elsewhere adopt it. In Russia,
the Julian calendar remained in place until the Bolshevik Revolution, and the
Gregorian was not implemented until 1940. In Turkey, modernizer Kemal
Ataturk abandoned the Muslim lunar calendar in the 1920s and adopted the
Gregorian solar one.
In North America, there was little intercourse among the various British
colonies prior to the Revolution of 1776-1789. The early American canal
system, built in the early nineteenth century and supplemented by turnpikes,
relied primarily on generating ties among various rivers that ran among the
colonies, and re
fi
ected intense interurban competition among centers such as
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Many of these were instru-
mental in opening the trans-Appalachian West to increased agricultural
exports. By lowering transport costs, these canals generated a steady cost-
space convergence: for example, moving goods from Albany to the Hudson
declined from $100 to $32 per ton after the completion of the Erie Canal in
1825 (Vance 1990:109). Similarly, the St. Lawrence waterway allowed the
agricultural frontier to expand signi
fl
cantly in southern Canada. Canals were
supplemented by a system of turnpikes built primarily by private interests,
culminating in the National Turnpike or National Road, which collectively
reduced transport costs over land by as much as 50 percent. American trans-
port services were complemented by the new postal service initiated in 1764,
which of
fi
ers a prime example of cost-space convergence (Abler 1975): in
1792, it adopted a step function of distance; successive rate reductions in
1845, 1851, and 1855 ultimately led to a
ff
flat-rate service in 1863, generating
an equality of mailing costs throughout the country.
fl
Rationalizing time and space in revolutionary France
The remaking of French time and space in the aftermath of the Revolution
of 1789 of
ff
ers a particularly instructive example of the new geographies
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