person:john wesley

Who Decides What Names Go on a Map?
▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150918-us-board-geographical-names-125th-anniversary-national-geographic-maps-place-names/?sf13237209=1

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Would a place by any other name smell as sweet? Maybe. But how would you find it on a map?

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names (BGN) has spent the past 125 years making sure that’s not an issue. By standardizing place names on government maps, it eliminates problems that arise from inconsistencies and redundancies—a boon to mapmakers and map-readers alike.

As the BGN celebrates its quasquicentennial anniversary on Friday with a gala symposium at the Library of Congress, it’s time to look back at why the board was founded (by a group that includes several charter members of the National Geographic Society), how it works, and why it’s as essential to clear communication in 2015 as it was in 1890.
What It Is

The BGN comprises members from six federal departments and the Central Intelligence Agency, the Government Publishing Office, the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Postal Service. It rules on hundreds of naming decisions each year and maintains geographical databases (available at geonames.usgs.gov) containing more than two million domestic records and over 11 million records for foreign names.

#toponymie #géographie #cartographie #manipultion #propagande #colonialisme

How White Came to Be Synonymous With Clean and Good - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-white-came-to-be-synonymous-with-clean-and-good

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White has a physical purity. White light contains roughly equal amounts of every color in the visual spectrum, and activates all three types of cone cells in our eyes related to color. As a result, we perceive materials that don’t absorb color, and reflect light back to us, as achromatic—white.The union of white and purity in Western culture may have its first roots in religion. That’s how Kathleen Brown, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, sees it. “Historically, white is one of the ways men of the cloth signified their calling,” Brown says. Later, this association with religious purity evolved into bodily purity. (“Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” declared John Wesley in an 18th-century sermon.) Brown’s book, Foul Bodies, chronicles cleanliness in Europe beginning with (...)