Continuing
from the previous post regarding the condition of the United States at the time
Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith regarding information about plates on which is
recorded information about a people of this continent and land and from whence
they sprang.
The United States in 1823, at the
time Moroni visited Joseph Smith. Four countries: Russia, Spain, Britain and
Canada held territory of the future U.S. at the time
In
addition to the United States in 1823, we need also look at the term
“continent” at the time Moroni visited Joseph Smith. As has already been
reported in this blog, when Moroni visited Joseph Smith in 1823 with the first
of his instructions, he said, “He called
me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of
God to me, and that his name was Nephi.
That God had a work for me to do, and that my name should be had for good and
evil, among all nations, kindreds, and tongues; or that it should be both good
and evil spoken of among all people. He said there was a book deposited written
upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this
continent, and the source from whence they sprang” ("History of Joseph
Smith,” Times and Seasons 3 no. 12, 15 April 1842, 753;
"History of Joseph Smith From the 'Times and Seasons'," Millennial
Star 3 no. 4, August 1842, 53; name Nephi erroneously recorded).
Today,
we consider this continent as North America, which is the
planet's 3rd largest continent, and includes 45 countries overall—including all
of the Caribbean and Central America countries, Bermuda, Canada, Mexico, the United States of America, as well as Greenland—the world's largest island. It is almost exclusively
located in the Western Hemisphere and the Northern Hemisphere. However, in
Joseph Smith’s time and at the time Moroni visited Joseph, the “American
Continent” was the entire Western Hemisphere, made up of both North and South
America plus all the adjacent land, including Greenland.
Prior to World War II it was
generally accepted by all map makers that there were five continents: Europe,
Asia, Africa, America, and Antarctica. Not until World War II did the U.S. began to
demand that North America was a separate continent
However,
in 1823, all of America was considered one continent, The American Continent, and
so labeled on maps from 1507 (Martin Waldseemüller map, Universallis Cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei
traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes) and taught in American schools up until the Second World War
(Martin W. Lewis; Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: a
Critique of Metageography, Berkeley: University of California Press,1997, ISBN 0-520-20742-4, ISBN 0-520-20743-2).
While it might seem surprising to find North and South
America still joined into a single continent in a book published in the United
States in 1937, such a notion remained fairly common until World War II. By the
1950s, however, virtually all American geographers had come to insist that the
visually distinct landmasses of North and South America deserved separate
designations).
It might
be of interest to know that once Europeans crossed the
Atlantic, they gradually discovered that their threefold continental system did
not form an adequate world model. Evidence of what appeared to be a single
"new world" landmass somehow had to be taken into account. The
transition from a threefold to a fourfold continental scheme did not occur
immediately after Columbus, however. First, America had to be intellectually
"invented" as a distinct parcel of land—one that could be viewed geographically,
if not culturally, as equivalent to the other continents.
According
to Eviatar Zerubavel, professor of Sciology at Rutgers University, and the
author of Time and Life Maps, this reconceptualization took
nearly a century to evolve, in part because it activated serious
"cosmographic shock." For a long time, many Europeans simply chose to
ignore the evidence; as late as 1555, a popular French geography text entitled La Division du monde pronounced that the
earth consisted of Asia, Europe, and Africa, making absolutely no mention of
the Americas. The Spanish imperial imagination persisted in denying continental
status to its transatlantic colonies for even longer. According to Walter
Mignolo, "The Castilian notion of 'the Indies' remained in place up to the
end of the colonial empire; 'America' began to be employed by independentist
intellectuals only toward the end of the eighteenth century." Yet by the
early sixteenth century, the Portuguese cosmographer Duarte Pacheco and his German
counterpart Martin Waldseemüller had mapped the Americas as a continent. While
cartographic conventions of the period rendered the new landmass, like Africa,
as distinctly inferior to Asia and Europe, virtually all global geographies by
the seventeenth century at least acknowledged the Americas as one of the
"four quarters of the world."
As this brief account suggests,
accepting the existence of a transatlantic landmass required more than simply
adding a new piece to the existing continental model. As Edmundo O'Gorman has
brilliantly demonstrated, reckoning with the existence of previously unknown
lands required a fundamental restructuring of European cosmography. For in the
old conception, Europe, Africa, end Asia had usually been envisioned as forming
a single, interconnected "world island," the Orbis Terrarum (The World or The Earth).
The Orbis Terrarum, the first true Modern Atlas, written by Abrahanm
Ortellius and originally published on May 20, 1570, by Gilles Coppens of
Antwerp who published 53 maps under this title. The works were considered the
summary of 16th century cartography
The existence of another such
"island" in the antipodes of the Southern Hemisphere—an Orbis
Alterius (Alternate World)—had often been hypothesized, but it was assumed that it would
constitute a world apart, inhabited, if at all, by sapient creatures of an
entirely different species. Americans, by contrast, appeared to be of the same
order as other humans, suggesting that their homeland must be a fourth part of
the human world rather than a true alter-world. Thus it was essentially
anthropological data that undermined the established cosmographic order.
In the long run, the discovery of
a distant but recognizably human population in the Americas would irrevocably
dash the world island to pieces. Over the next several centuries the
fundamental relationship between the world's major landmasses was increasingly
seen as one of separation, not contiguity. In 1570 Ortelius divided the world
into four constituent parts, yet his global maps did not emphasize divisional
lines, and his regional maps sometimes spanned "continental"
divisions. By the late seventeenth century, however, most global atlases
unambiguously distinguished the world's main landmasses and classified all
regional maps accordingly. Thus, the Greek notion of a unitary human terrain was disassembled into its constituent continents, whose relative
isolation was now ironically converted into their defining feature.
Although
the possibility of an Orbis Alterius was never again taken seriously, the
boundaries dividing the known lands would henceforth be conceived in much more
absolute terms than they had been in the past. Even as the accuracy of mapping
improved dramatically in this period, the conceptualization of global divisions
was so hardened as to bring about a certain conceptual deterioration.
It is almost humorous to see that
at the present time we find numerous Land of Promise theorists who are
embarking on the same transition of accepting a time when the North and South
American continents were considered one continent, and Moroni’s comment of
“this continent” could possibly have included the entire Western Hemisphere. Their rejection of this idea is almost ironic as we compare it to the rejection of a new fourth part of the world for more than two centuries in European thought as shown above.
However, Church leaders have not
had that difficulty. Time and again they have expressed their opinion that the
Land of Promise extended to the entire North and South American landmasses, and
the Western Hemisphere overall.
(See the next post,
“The United States as the Land of Promise –Part III,” for more on the role of
the U.S. in the Land of Promise, and specifically the many comments made by
Church Leaders regarding the location of the overall Land of Promise)
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