My background in cultural geography has been invaluable as both motivation and foundation for this project. Now that my collection of images has grown to over 4,000, depicting haymaking in exactly 100 countries and all 50 United States, I’m constructing a pictorial gazetteer to celebrate the geographic diversity of our subject. Keyword searching for place-names is imperfect. For example, keyword searching for “new york” retrieves not just pictures of haymaking in that state or city, but bibliographic citations to sources published there. In order to make the search for places more accurate, I reconstructed every record, inserting a separate field for geographic names. If you go to the database, you'll now find a place box, containing, thanks to my "enabler" Emily a pulldown menu of countries, states and Canadian Provinces. I have selected an image to illustrate hay in each of these places, a simple task for those having only one picture, more challenging for those having several hundred.
Not surprisingly, the country with the highest number of hay images (over 2,000) is the USA, followed by: England (over 580), thanks to the English (and my own) infatuation with their countryside; France (over 450), thanks to all its nineteenth century landscape artists; and The Netherlands (over 140), thanks to Wim Lanphen, my generous and equally obsessed Dutch connection. A few other countries (Italy, Russia, and Ireland) and a couple of states (Montana and Minnesota) have also exceeded a hundred hay pictures. At the tail of the distribution, about a third of the represented countries have only a single image. They, however, will be the easy places to illustrate in the following pictorial gazetteer, in which I have selected a quintessential hay picture for all 150 places (country or state), with short descriptive justifications for my choices. The number following the place-name is the total number of hay images for that place in the database. If you click on this number (assuming that it's greater than 1), you will be linked to all the other images for the place.
Table of contents.
Countries A-D
Afghanistan Albania Algeria Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bangladesh Belarus Belgium Bhutan Bohemia Bosnia-Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burma Cambodia Canada Chile China Croatia Cuba Czechoslovakia Denmark
Ecuador Egypt England Estonia Ethiopia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Greenland Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivory Coast Japan Kenya Kyrgyzstan