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
Archie Archambault, that’s who! The philosophy graduate turned printer struck upon the concept of circular maps after moving to Portland. In Oregon’s biggest city, he felt something that must have […]
Put a pair of newborn rabbits, a buck and a doe, together in a pen. Assume it takes them a month to start reproducing, and another month for the female […]
Five score and seventeen years ago, the United States was a boxy, silver-coloured dog with a chunky tail of dark gold. That bizarre image, embedded in the familiar outline of […]
The conflict is too complex for a single map.
The rising tide of evil, the relative safety of a few sanctuaries: these are the two main vectors of zombie cartography. In the first category, the epidemiological map shows the […]
Just our luck… the only part of the UK with tight border controls. The picture on the front page of Private Eye shows a long line of cars queueing to […]
If you’re a cartography nerd, you’re probably also a bit of an election geek. Because nothing beats election night on TV. Exit polls, voting patterns and the results of previous […]
Judas was often portrayed as a redhead. But now the gingers are fighting back
If you think that trawling the internet for cartography is a harmless endeavour, you are sorely mistaken. Think again. If you still can, that is. The relentless perusal of maps […]
It’s a good season for subterfuge. While the rest of the world is watching Syria – or, more precisely, the omnishambles following Obama’s “red line” in the Syrian sand – […]
Isn’t this the craziest, twistiest international borderline you’ve ever seen? Unless you’ve studied the hyper-enclaved border zone of Cooch Behar [1], between India and Bangladesh, it probably is. But why […]
Driving through Yosemite a few years ago, we came upon a blackened patch of the park still smelling burnt. By the look of this map, it must have been the […]
That would make it about ten times older than the oldest accepted examples of cartography
To condemn the riots that rocked Belfast last Friday as “shameful”, as the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Theresa Villiers has done, fails to address the two conflicting […]
The long, slow process of towards adult lactose tolerance started some time after the last ice age.
Jules Verne used the failed project as inspiration for his last adventure novel
It’s the morning of Wednesday, 13 September 1939. In an America supremely at peace, newspapers hit front lawns with headlines screaming of war. The horrific conflict splashed across the front […]
To Orthodox Jews, eruvin are a crucial component to their faith. To everybody else, it is as if they didn’t even exist
The afterlife, in the words of Tennyson [1], is “that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move”. Death is the ultimate one-way trip, its […]
Draw two dots above a straight line, place them in a circle, and even children a few years old will spot the semblance with a human countenance. Whether it’s the features […]
‘Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Dante Alighieri was about 35 and suffering from what […]
There’s much to criticise about this map of Pangea [1], but in spite of the geological anachronisms, it’s hard to tear your eyes away from it. The map shows a […]
Maybe you’ve never heard of Emmaland or Sophialand, but if you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a better than 90% chance that you live in either one of […]
Dakota was sliced in half to generate two extra Senators, and separated north from south because of resentment over the location of the capital
Dull Flag, Tongue of Gangsta and dozens more strange toponyms dot these windswept Scottish archipelagoes
How fear of swimming led to two very different evolutionary approaches to conflict resolution
Isogloss maps are irresistible, even if they are about cucumbers
It disappeared from central London in 1869, after an archeological magazine praised its historical value
