Word: meridian
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...Meridian, Miss., Mayor Clint Vinson called on his fellow townsmen to pray for world peace every day at noon, ordered the city waterworks' whistle blown to remind them...
Classic definition of the Western Hemisphere was a line drawn by Pope Alexander VI. confirmed in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The line ran from the Arctic to the Antarctic on approximately the 46th meridian, 1,475 miles west of Cape Verde. All lands discovered east of this line (including the Azores) went to Portugal; everything west of it was part of the New World which Columbus had just claimed for Spain. Iceland, by this definition, would belong to Europe. So would most of Greenland. So would a large part of Brazil...
When President Roosevelt last January called in Dr. Isaiah Bowman, 62-year-old President of Johns Hopkins University and a famed geographer, to find a definition of the Western Hemisphere. Dr. Bowman first suggested the 26th meridian, which would still leave Iceland in Europe's hemisphere. When the 26th meridian proved unsatisfactory to the President, Dr. Bowman pondered some more, obligingly came up with Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson's mid-channel theory. According to Explorer Stefansson, the line should run midway through the "widest channel" between Europe and the Americas, would give Iceland to the Western Hemisphere...
Same day that President Roosevelt told Congress that the U.S. had moved into Iceland, the National Geographic Society gave out still another definition. The "arbitrary line" which is "generally accepted" by geographers, said the Society, is the 20th meridian, which runs squarely through Iceland, assigns Portugal's Cape Verde Islands and the Azores to the Western Hemisphere...
...gave a further nip to American adrenals by announcing that Germany's two powerful battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (each 26,000 tons, each faster and better-armed than the late pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spec), were indeed at large and as far west as the 42nd meridian. Displeased with the scare, the Axis press nevertheless aggravated it by jubilating at the alleged sinking of the first shipload of U. S. armaments bound for Britain under the Lend-Lease...