Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
featured
All Stories
As insolvable problems go, it’s right up there with attempts to square the circle. Try as you might, it is impossible to render a three-dimensional object (the Earth, say) on […]
In 1852, when New Mexico was at its newest, the territory bearing that name was more than double the size of the eponymous present-day state. Of the many changes that […]
“On a recent trip to Taiwan, I purchased this bottle opener at the Taipei 101 building (technically still the tallest building in the world until the Burj Dubai opens),” writes […]
n Well, the jury is in. The country with the most functional geography is… France. As proved by this diagram, France’s jagged, hexagonal shape makes it the ideal, multiple-use household […]
n Ay caramba! Absolut Vodka has found a surefire way to put its US sales figures in a downward spiral. This map, used in a Mexican ad campaign, shows what […]
At some point early in the previous century, island nations particularly were gripped with air raid angst. The relatively new threat of airborne destruction was especially poignant for countries that […]
As any journalist knows, news has to be about people – they either make it, or are affected by it. No people, no news. It therefore stands to reason that […]
n It’s déjà vu all over again. Post #163 of this blog (d.d. Aug 5, 2007) dealt with a secretive plan by the European Union to carve up the United […]
n n People of a very religious disposition have been known to see the face of Jesus in a slice of burnt toast, or the Virgin Mary’s silhouet in a […]
n n The First World War ( 1914-1918 ) obviously didn’t get that name while it was still raging*, on account of the Second one still being a few decades […]
n n n The notable absence of Swiss people from the long list of explorers and discoverers might not just be due to the Alpine country’s lack of access to […]
n n Abraham Simpson never explained what his problem with the Show-Me State was, but Homer’s cranky old dad did offer this reason for owning a 49-star American flag: “I’ll […]
n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]
n Ever since the Mexican-American War (1845-49), the Rio Grande has been the border between the two nations from El Paso to the Gulf, giving Texas a natural southern boundary. […]
The exclave exists only because the Austrians wanted to spite the Swiss
“I’m a female and a feminist. I dislike the usage of the word ‘ho’. However, as a geography major, I find this song hilarious, and had to map it,” says […]
n Have you ever seen the constellation named ‘The Tyrants’, spanning the stars Robespierre and Kubla Khan, stringing together Hitler, Mussolini and Attila along the way? Or how about the […]
Except for some of the harsh, impermanently inhabited and sparsely visited inlands of Kerguélen, there are no places left on Earth to name. Those with a penchant for baptising should […]
He barely made it to the other side’s penalty box
A treasure map of the voyage to sobriety
How a farmer’s breakfast morphed into the symbol of a language border
Is this map merely absurd or does it make a political point?
“While on vacation in Dubrovnik, Croatia this summer, we ran across an old Yugoslav atlas which included this map on the entry for the US. My Serbo-Croatian isn’t so good […]
“This map makes clear the Nazi design, not only against South America but against the United States as well”, said FDR
Texas and Tennessee are the two states most mentioned in country lyrics
Chicago would have been in the state of Assenisipia, north of the state of Illinoia
n One could call it cautionary cartography, this map of a thoroughly germanified New York – something that might have happened in an alternate universe, where the Nazis not only […]
The pessimist mourns the glass’s half-emptiness, the optimist rejoices that it’s semi-full and the engineer just thinks the glass is twice the size it should be. What would a space […]
n “I used to work in a library and an old gentleman came in with it”, is about as much info as Jayson Emery can offer up about this map […]
Cuius Regio, Eius Religio – this Latin saying applies to Europe, and to the principle that ended religious warfare: “Whose region (it is), whose religion (shall predominate)”. But it sprang […]