“The past,” as English writer Leslie Poles Hartley once quite quotably quipped, “is a foreign country; they do things different there.” I thought of that line when I saw this map, sent in by Michael Goodwin. The map summarizes world events for the year 1937, a year known to us mainly for not being the beginning of the Second World War quite yet. The events of the 1939-1945 war are by comparison very familiar, which – bizarrely – makes the tense but (mainly) peaceful year of ’37 seem even more remote.

The map has a mysterious origin, as Mr Goodwin explains: “I found (this newspaper clipping) in an old atlas, bought at an estate sale in Philadelphia. It’s full of what people thought was important in 1937, some of which turned out to be important, some not so much.”

He adds, as to the strange label marking the Mediterranean as the ‘scene of (a) pirate hunt’: “It was a sideshow of the Spanish Civil War, when German or Italian submarines roamed the coasts off Loyalist-controlled Spain. Everyone knew whose submarines they were, but the German and Italian governments of course denied it. Which led to the diplomatic fiction that these were mysterious ‘pirate’ submarines.”

Below the map is this inscription: “Any year will turn up a good many big news developments which can be most readily understood only when seen on a map. But few years, map-makers probably would agree, have produced more map stories than 1937. Among them two groups stand out: 1. Territorial changes wrought by the year’s two wars, in Spain and China; 2. Trails blazed around and over the top of the world by the year’s aviation pioneers. The maps above bring these, and 1937’s other major map stories, into focus.”

Here follows a more detailed look at the map.

The main map:

• Indicates the Chinese territory held by the invading Japanese by 1937, from the coast up to the Mongolian border and another area around Nanking.
• Shows the path of a solar eclipse passing over the Pacific, from west of Canton Island all the way to Peru.
• Labels three brewing conflicts in Latin America: the Chaco dispute, over which Bolivia and Paraguay had already waged a war some years previously, the Ecuador-Peru boundary dispute which would erupt into war in 1941, and the ‘stamp war’ between Honduras and Nicaragua, of which I unfortunately don’t know the first thing.
• Mentions the take-over in Brazil by “dictator” Vargas: that Brazilian president assuming dictatorial powers in ‘New State’ system reminiscent of European fascist regimes.
• Plots the last air voyage of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviatrix.
• Also shows the trajectories of ground-breaking Pacific and Atlantic transocean flights.

US: ‘Proposed Conservation Areas’

The Columbia Valley, Southwestern, Arkansas Valley, Missouri Valley, Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes – Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley and Atlantic Seaboard were areas apparently marked out for conservation, although I couldn’t find any more information on why this would constitute so major a news story as to be included on this map. Some events are marked on the map:
• A school explosion in New London, Texas, which on March 18 killed over 300 people, mainly children. The gas explosion led to the mandatory addition of an easily identifiable smell to previously odourless gas.
• The Mattson kidnaping: young Charles Mattson (10) was kidnaped on December 27, 1936 by a masked, armed man who intruded into the family home in Tacoma, Washington. A ransom note for $28.000 was left, but Dr William Mattson isn’t able to contact the abductor of his son, whose lifeless body is found on January 11. The crime remains an open FBI case.
• The Hindenburg disaster probably is the best-known of all events marked on this map, as it was recorded on film: the eponymous Germain airship, the largest aircraft ever built, was destroyed by fire while docking at Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937, killing 36.
• The map also indicates the ‘Auto and Steel Strike Area’, probably the result of socialist agitation (yes, there once were socialists in the US).

‘Europe chooses sides’

By 1937, the Old Continent was already divided into sides – not two, but three:
• (more or less) democratic states,
• communist countries and fascist and
• totalitarian ones.