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
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 […]
n Here’s a map reminiscent of the Bruceville map – another piece of musical cartography treated earlier on this blog (entry #134). This one charts the haunts of Tom Petty, […]
n Egyptians one generation more ancient than the ones we usually call Ancient Egyptians perhaps thought the pyramids to be detestable eyesores on the desert skyline, and Greeks old enough […]
n For cartophiles, the main problem with this map is not that interviewer Larry King‘s head covers most of Europe, or that the bulky figure of his guest, moviemaker Michael […]
5,000,000 Hits n Thirty hits – that’s how many this blog accumulated for the whole of September 2006, the first month of its existence. The numbers for October were a bit better – […]
As most news bulletins prove, the world is not, alas, an harmonious place. The same point is proved, if inadvertently and on a more symbolical level, by this stunning musical […]
There is a ‘precious’ level to this map, and a naughty one.
What if New York had somehow managed to remain New Amsterdam?
… But some are more insular than others. Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, according to this disputed article on Wikipedia “best known for his ceramics and his cross-dressing”, is the […]
The famous and not-so-famous dead of Pere Lachaise
Ebenezer Howard’s utopian plan to blur the line between gardens and cities produced a number of depressing ‘new towns’