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Cartographic curiosities
It seems impossible to find an online map showing all of the European Union’s so-called Euroregions. Why doesn’t the EU showcase these transnational regions, conceived to promote economic development and cultural understanding among neighbours that too often in the past have been strangers or ...
If the Earth is hollow, where does all that magma spewing out of all those volcanoes come from? Somebody must have a half-convincing answer to that question, presumably that handful of people who still believe the Earth is an empty shell. The idea seems quite ludicrous now, but in pre-scientific ...
“West Floriday, that lovely nation, Free from king and tyranny, Thru’ the world shall be respected, For her true love of Liberty!” So goes a marching song that never got to mature into a national anthem. Too brief was the independence of a smallish North American state calling itself ...
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a satire of contemporary England dressed up as a faux traveller’s tale by Jonathan Swift, narrating in the first person the voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver. The book, divided in four parts, tells of Gulliver’s shipwreck on Lilliput (which is inhabited by people no ...
At present, Monaco is the world’s second-smallest state (Wikipedia mentions both 1,64 and 1,95 km², although another source mentions 1,49 km²) after the Vatican (0,44 km²) as well as the most densely populated (at 23.660 inhabitants/km²). Yet at one time, Monaco was decidedly less mini than it ...
This map, made by Mahmud Kashgari bin Husayn bin Muhammad, was included in his Divanu Lügat-it-Türk, a scientific work he published in 1072 (AD) for the benefit of the Caliph of Baghdad. It is the first world map of Turkish origin known in history, and is preserved at the General National ...
Following World War II, the city of Trieste and its environs was administered as the Free Territory of Trieste. The area was contested between Italy and Yugoslavia. Trieste was the southern point of the newly-descended Iron Curtain, as Yugoslavia had turned communist, therefore ‘upgrading’ a ...
Most people think East Germany ceased to exist in 1990, when the (East) German Democratic Republic was absorbed by the Federal Republic of (West) Germany. So did I. Turns out I was wrong: the GDR lives on, and in a very comfortable climate to boot: a small island off Cuba is the last official ...
This map is from the Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps (Pepin Press, 2005). It’s a British map dating from 1897, explaining geographical terms by showing them in the sort of landscape they’re supposed to describe… In the process producing a map of the most generic country ever ...
No cloud without a silver lining: the extensive bombing damage to London during the Second World War provided an opportunity to develop a drastic plan for a green, open-spaced city in the post-war era. Even before the bombing began, London already had a reputation as being an open-spaced place ...
Another traffic map of sorts. If this world map vaguely looks like it’s highlighting a remnant of the British Empire, that’s no coincidence. This map shows which side of the road traffic drives on. Dark blue: drives on left (mainly British ex-colonies). Light blue: used to drive on right ...
The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (Eisenhower Interstate System for short) spans the entire USA, including Alaska and Hawaii. The EIS serves all major American cities and has a total length of 75.376 km (2004). And yet most of it is represented here in ...
Nowadays, the southern tip of Africa is dominated by a single state, the Republic of South Africa (punctuated by Lesotho, one of the world’s few enclave-states). But starting about a century and a half ago, when the usurping British were pushing the Dutch-originated Afrikaners inland, the ...
Notwithstanding the fact that celestial objects of a certain mass generally are spherical in shape, an article in My Magazine, dated May 1918 (and titled What the World May Come To: The School Maps As They May Be in Millions of Years to Come) predicts that the earth is spinning itself into a ...
Many New Yorkers feel their city is more than just the (self-proclaimed) capital of the world. They think it actually is most of the world, the rest of the planet merely being the unavoidable orchard in which their Big Apple grows. Several cartoons illustrate this metropolitan hubris, and they ...