A Pacific counterpart to Atlantis, Mu is supposed to have been a large continent in the middle of the ocean and the home of an advanced civilisation, having sunk beneath the […]
Ironically, the original name for the desert planet is Berber for 'water springs'
Although you probably instantly recognise its shape on a map, you may be forgiven for never having heard of Jutland. This northern European peninsula is not an independent entitiy: it’s […]
Post #38 of this blog showed a spoof map of the world, supposedly according to Ronald Reagan – the avuncular 40th President of the US, an icon of conservatism to some, […]
Amikejo was located in Neutral Moresnet, a geopolitical anomaly that managed to survive for a whole century after the Congress of Vienna.
In 1849, the Mormons who had recently settled the Wild West near the Great Salt Lake, ‘proposed’ the state of Deseret. It’s not clear to me whether this ‘proposal’ equalled […]
Maps on old postcards look really cool, I think (see previous post). So I looked for another one, and found this postcard, dating from 1929. Coincidentally, it illustrates another area […]
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
