10 – Manhattan neighbourhoods

Any and every American city is built up out of Avenues and Streets, most of them numbered. A much nicer way to describe a city is by mapping its neighbourhoods. As in this map of Manhattan.

9 – Germany wins World War I(French worst case scenario)

What would Europe have looked like, had Imperial Germany won World War One? This image is taken off a French magazine at the start of the war, painting an exaggerated picture of German (and Austro-Hungarian) land-grabs in a Europe dominated by the victorious Central powers.

8 – Re-drawing the map of the Middle East

The Americans are sinking into a quagmire of their own making in Iraq, but still fantasise about re-drawing the map of the whole Middle East more to their liking. One startling example is this map, produced by the Armed Forces Journal, who in their June issue portray a region that is further balkanized, and basically split up along ethnic lines, thus creating a maximalist Kurdistan (which probably would be quite US-friendly, just like the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq at present), a greater Yemen, an Iran that would move eastward (acquiring certain areas of Afghanistan while losing a part of its west to Azerbeijan and an Arab shia state), and so forth.

7 – Greater Albania

The Albanians are descendants of the Illyrians, an ancient Balkan people who preceded the Slavic populations surrounding their native territories. They presently have an independent nation – Albania, in their own language ‘Shqipëtar’, meaning ‘Land of the Eagles’ – but are also the majority in Kosovo, nominally still a part of Serbia but de facto a semi-independent state under UN tutelage. There are other significant Albanian populations in Montenegro, Serbia proper, Macedonia and Greece. This map shows the maximum extent of Albanian territorial ambitions – ‘Greater Albania’. 

6 – Market Reef

So you’re a map nerd and you think you know about every cartographic anomaly in the world, from the bizarre Belgian enclave of Baarle-Hertog in the south of the Netherlands to the three little islands in the Beagle Channel that almost caused a war between Chile and Argentina.

5 – The 38 state Union

In the 1970s, geography professor C. Etzel Pearcy proposed redrawing the borders of the US states, reducing them from 50 to 38. Each new state’s name was chosen to represent a physical of cultural aspect of each new territory. This realignment was supposed to be more ‘organic’ and more logical, as major population centres such as Kansas City would no longer be located in two different states. Needless to say, the idea never left the drawing board.

4 – Imperial Texas

Texas is a special state within the US – not only the biggest of the contiguous 48 states, but also culturally distinct. Furthermore, it was at one time an independent state, after secession from Mexico and before absorption by the USA. This map shows what Texas might have been, had it remained independent and prospered.

3 – United States of Canada vs. Jesusland

This map started popping up after the 2004 Presidential election in the US, when George W. Bush got re-elected (with a legitimate majority this time). Democratic challenger John F. Kerry only won a handful of states, mainly on both coasts – where the electorate is more ‘liberal’ than in the more rural ‘flyover’ states in the middle. This map was to demonstrate the political divide between the Bushites on one side and rational people in the US and elsewhere.

2 – Stephen King’s Maine

Horror writer Stephen King is a native of Maine and still lives there. Most of his books are situated in the state, although not all the towns he uses are real. This map shows real-world burgs in Maine (in green) and fictional localities (in blue).

1 – lunatic asylum districts in Pennsylvania

I like maps. I like weird maps, the kind you won’t find in a regular atlas. Maps of countries that never existed – or never will exist. I’ve given up on categorizing the maps I’ve collected so far – irredentism, alternate history,… – and decided to just be a little less anal. So, just for fun, here are the weirdest maps I found on the internet.