Monday, January 20, 2014

It's Where You've Been Living This Whole Time


This clip  from The West Wing blows my mind every time I watch it.  I mean, it totally blows my mind.  I still can't wrap my head around the different projections - I'm just as freaked out as CJ when the map gets flipped -  but I'm fascinated by the idea that there are so many different ways to explain who and where we are.  As Max Fisher of the Washington Post writes, "Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to."

Since I didn't entirely leave my love of history behind at school, I'm especially interested in the maps that show how borders have shifted as people have migrated, invaded, and colonized over the centuries, and I really think we can only understand the impact of these changes once we're long past them.  It's stunning to see, for example, how the reckless carving up of entire stretches of the globe have led to conflict that continues to this day, or how trade priorities led to the non-native place names that we still use on our maps.  I wanted to share a few of the ones that I have studied in the past or want to learn more about; I've tried to put them roughly in chronological order here for historical flow.  (Yes, I know, I'm a huge nerd.)  If this is your thing, too, click on the sources (at the bottom of this post) for context and further information!











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17 comments:

  1. I love my little home state of New Mexico, and the fact that there's so much diversity there. xx

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  2. It's pretty rare to learn a TON from a blog posts but I feel like I just had a history lesson that was actually super super interesting. Not to be Amercian-centric or anything but the last map was really cool to see. Thanks for sharing all of this! A little change in perspective is never a bad thing.

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  3. This is definitely interesting! I took a 20th Century Latin America class in college and we spent a lot of time discussing inverted maps and their sociopolitical implications. I love it! You might also like this YouTube video about maps (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dldHalRY-hY) and their contexts. Ahhh nerdy fun!

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  4. I don't know enough about so much of the US - good thing Jon wants to do a cross-country road trip so we can learn more :)

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  5. oh YAY so glad you enjoyed my nerdiness :) there was a cool map of where place names in the Americas comes from - you might like that too! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2014/01/etymomap21.png

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  6. haha I love how excited that guy is. and it's SO TRUE - maps say more about the people that create them than the land they claim to describe! thank you friend :)

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  7. I don't understand what makes one spot one country (or state) and what makes another in a lot of cases. I mean, bodies of water and mountain ranges make sense (if you really need to divide an area…), but others are just arbitrary. But then, I don't understand (and believe me, I know how "We are the World" this sounds) cultural conflicts and religious conflicts and the need for imperialism, etc. I understand why, in our society, we need municipalities (because humans are gross and greedy), but who cares if the ethnic Hungarians in Romania want to become their own country? Why did over 100,000 people have to die in the Bosnian War and another 2 million have to leave their homes and land?
    Geography just depresses me, especially when socio-political motivators are involved.
    Sorry. I'm a downer.

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  8. Okay, that clip is crazy! I never thought about it like that. There's a book on how we got the US state boundaries that I've been wanting to read b/c in general some of them seem so arbitrary.

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  9. This is so incredibly interesting, particularly in terms of how Africa was colonized. I knew that Ethiopia was one of the only African countries that was never colonized, but I didn't realize that Liberia made up the second of a total of two. That is crazy. I also never knew that Italy had Libya. In South Africa, the Dutch initially colonized the country, then it was taken over by the British in the early 20th century and then returned to Dutch rule under Apartheid until 1994. These things fascinate me!

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  10. That American ancestry map is fascinating! I wonder how you actually classify as "American" though and why it's so concentrated. Very cool.

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  11. I don't think there are real reasons for US state boundaries in many cases! we should read @Amanda's book with her. I remember learning about the Louisiana Purchase and just being like WAIT, WHAT? http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ah-louisianapurchase.html

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  12. I was wondering that too! also, I'd be interested to see the breakdown between Spanish and Hispanic, especially since Puerto Rican gets its own color.

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  13. if I'm remembering properly, Liberia was FOUNDED by freed slaves who went back to Africa. I think having Liberia there assuaged European/American guilt so they left it alone?

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  14. It is fascinating. When I read books that take place way back in the day, it always fascinates me how France and Germany and Italy aren't what I know. It still blows my mind a bit even though I KNOW that's the way things were.

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  15. This kind of thing is so interesting to me too! Anything having to do with history, ancestry, or dialects is totally up my alley. I love that I come from such a Scotch-Irish area (though the last map says my ancestry is "American") and that I moved somewhere completely different. I spent about an hour looking at these 40 maps: http://asheepnomore.net/2013/12/29/40-maps-will-help-make-sense-world/

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  16. What, they define Norwegians but not Swedes in the ancestry breakdown? I could swear, we're all over Minnesota and Nebraska. We probably all mixed during one of the centuries outlined in that Scandinavian expansion map...which probably explains why you can listen to Canadians, Scottish, Minnesotans, and Swedish, and the accents aren't all that different.

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