This map illustrates the ‘Totem Foods’ of North America, celebrating “the many distinctive regional food traditions on the North American continent by featuring a totem food key to the identity of […]
A variation on post #10 in this blog, done by Alexander Cheek and to be found on this page of his website. The differences between these two maps indicate that […]
This parody map shows the world as Ronald Reagan (US president 1980-1988) might have imagined it. Even as parody, it indicates an interesting duality: on the one hand, it presents […]
The application of the suffix -stan (Persian for ‘home’) generally refers to countries in central Asia – in fact, the formerly Soviet states that occupy Central Asia are sometimes referred […]
They could have made it more complex, but they would have had to try very hard
n Russell Richards is an artist who (as far as I can tell) lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. I like his work, very funny and direct. In my mind, […]
This isn’t a political, but a commercial world map: it specifies the six distinct global ‘DVD regions’ of the world. DVD is short for ‘digital video disc’, the successor to […]
The The once sang about Great Britain being the ’51st State of the USA’ – a comment on the culture and foreign policy of the United Kingdom, which were then […]
Not so much strange as just darn purty, this map of Newfoundland on a postage stamp, probably dating from before 1949, when it became a province of Canada (this happened […]
Double taxation without representation? No wonder this grey area declared its independence.
If you crave adventure, you couldn't wish for a better alien planet on which to crash-land
Finland gained independence from Russia right after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. A civil war ensued, along the lines of the post-revolution conflict in Russia itself: ‘Reds’ against ‘Whites’. The […]
Now one of the smaller states, it once covered half the continent
Funny how something as arbitrary as map orientation can skew the perception of countries. On this map, from the vaults of the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of […]
‘Volkstaat’ is Afrikaans for People’s state – the people in this case being the white South Africans who identify themselves as ‘Afrikaners’ (mainly descendents of Dutch settlers, speaking a language […]
I don’t remember where I got this map from, but the context seems quite straightforward. The two figures in the foreground are saying “ein Geschwür!” (literally: “an ulcer”) and “Da […]
All results of a nationwide election in the US can usually be translated into a ‘binary’ map, divided into red states (Republican, mainly in the middle) and blue states (Democratic, […]
This map is yet another dissection of Europe, this time focussing on the north-south divides in the continent. Some of the boundaries here were already present in one or both […]
Beyond the pale is an English expression for anything beyond the limits of the law or of accepted morality. The aforementioned ‘pale’, far from being a symbolic separator, at one time […]
Post #12 shows a map identifying three core areas of Europe with transition zones in between. This map here has a different approach to European cultural diversity. On the one […]
