108 - The Geography of France’s Presidential Elections

 

The frequently fascinating and highly recommended Catholicgauze (“a blog on geography, geographic thought, and cool geography links”) presents an interesting map showing the results of the first round of France’s presidential elections on April 22, 2007.

About a dozen candidates participated in that first round, but the three main contenders turned out to be Nicolas Sarkozy (right-wing; 31,2%), Ségolène Royal (left-wing; 25,9%) and François Bayrou (centrist; 18,5%). Sarkozy and Royal, the two best-scoring candidates, face each other in the second round on May 6, 2007. 

The map shows which of the three main contenders came out on top in each of France’s 100 départements (91 in France proper, France’s 9 overseas départements are represented by dots on the left-hand side of the map). And in doing so tells a more interesting story than the mere percentage points mentioned above.

For starters, it shows how localised support really was for Bayrou, who only succeeded in winning his home département of Pyrennées-Atlantiques.

Sarkozy, on the other hand, must regret France has a proportional electoral system for the presidency and not a ‘first past the post’ one as in the US (where the biggest vote-getter in a state receives all the political capital - i.e. Presidential Electors - for that state). For he is the biggest vote-getter in 74 out of the 100 départements.

‘Sarko’ wins 6 out of 9 overseas départements (all 4 Pacific ones - New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte; and 2 in the Americas - French Guyana, Guadeloupe) and 68 out of 91 of the ‘metropolitan’ départements.

Royal wins in 24 départements - 3 overseas (Martinique and St Pierre and Miquelon in the Americas, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean) and 21 in France itself. Those are, aptly, left of centre (cartographically speaking).

The geographic distribution of Sarko and Ségo’s respective electoral strongholds is quite striking. Sarkozy holds sway unopposed north, east and south-east of the country. Royal dominates Brittany (the ‘nose’ of France) and the south-west, and won in two electoral exclaves in Sarko-territory: a part of Paris, and the département of Nièvre.

These exclaves notwithstanding, the areas in which each of the two main contenders won, are mainly contiguous, as if they were ’sub-countries’ gearing up for a confrontation. I am reminded of election maps of Ukraine’s most recent presidential elections, in which the west of the country voted for the Viktor Yushtchenko (who wanted to move his country ‘westward’, into the EU and NATO) and the east voted for Viktor Yanukovich (who was more oriented towards Russia, Ukraine’s eastern neighbour).

Catholicgauze mentions that the voting pattern this time around was similar to previous elections: “The east and north parts of France vote conservative while the southwest, the west, and Paris go Socialist.”

It would be interesting to find an explanation for this geo-electoral phenomenon. Mesdames et messieurs, vos commentaires, s’il vous plaît!

PS - I’m hopeless with numbers, so please excuse any discrepancy, inconsistency or fallacy in my tallying up of the départements. Especially since one département is left blank on this map, as I’ve just now noticed: Haute-Savoie, bordering Switzerland (just below Lake Geneva, to be exact).

PPS - Another oversight is the white dot towards the south coast of France: an exclave of the département du Vaucluse, just to the south of it.

107 - Asia From Irkutsk

 

How delicious is this: obviously a sister-map to the one in posting #103 (’Europe From Moscow’), but this time applying an unusual perspective to the Cold War situation in Asia in the early nineteen fifties. The map, found here at the University of San Diego and originally published in Time Magazine in 1952, visualises the communist threat as it existed at that time.

To contemporary anti-communists, it must have seemed like an unstoppable wave poring over the continent, a feeling exacerbated by the perspective of this map. Russia obviously already was communist before the World War, as was Mongolia (a Russian vassal since 1911 and a communist one since 1924).

With the victory of Mao Zedong’s Chinese communists, the ‘red’ wave reached parts of the old Chinese Empire that had more or less escaped its grasp. Formerly independent or autonomous areas such as Tibet, Sinkiang and Manchuria are marked separately, but also in the Chinese tint of communist red - underlining the expansionist threat of Chinese communism. Red-shaded areas bordering China but outside of the country itself are North Korea and part of what was to become North Vietnam, clearly stressing China’s influence.

The swathe of land separating communist-held territory in Tibet from the Indian Ocean seems precariously thin, thereby threatening to landlock a large part of non-communist Asia - a threat only contained by the height of the Himalaya mountains.

As the previous one was centred on Moscow, this map is centred on Irkutsk, a large Soviet city close to China, as if to indicate that this was the ‘nerve centre’ of communist expansion in Asia. I have no idea of how realistic such a notion would have been, but at that time, Soviets and Chinese were still on the same page.

Soon afterwards, ideological and other differences caused a rupture between China and the Soviet Union, providing some relief to the other side in the Cold War. But not much: communist expansion in Korea and South-East Asia (and the military reaction to it, at least half successful in Korea but eventually a total failure in Vietnam) dominated world politics for decades to come, and proved extremely costly in lives lost on both sides. 

106 - The ‘Bloodless Aroostook War’ and Maine’s Northern Border

“From the northwest angle of Nova Scotia, to wit, that angle which is formed by a line drawn due north from the source of the St Croix River to the highlands, along the said highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves into the St Lawrence, and those which fall into the Atlantic Ocean, to the northwestern most head of the Connecticut River…”

That definition of the border between what were then the District of Maine (a possession of the US State of Massachusetts) and the British colony of New Brunswick was mentioned in the 1783 Treaty of Paris that officialised American independence. The wording of the text proved too vague – especially when that lumber-rich area became coveted by loggers from both sides of the ill-defined border.   The dispute heated up after 1820, the year in which Maine gained statehood - before, it had formed a non-contiguous ‘District’ of Massachusetts. Surveyors sent out by the new state to – literally – mark out its territory were surprised to find on both banks of the St John River thriving communities of Acadians. These French-speakers came from further up north, and thus were British subjects. Maine granted land to American settlers in the adjacent Aroostook River valley, leading to disputes in which the King of the Netherlands was asked to arbitrate.

In 1832, the US Senate rejected the border proposed by the Dutch King (although it would have given the US more territory than the eventual settlement of 1842).  In 1837, a Maine official conducting a census in the disputed area was arrested by New Brunswick officials. The Maine legislature dispatched a 200-strong force of ‘red shirts’ up north to confront the New Brunswick ‘blue noses’, and the US Congress raised a 10.000-strong militia to support Maine’s cause.

The Americans seized ‘British’ timber to build blockhouses to defend against British intrusion, but no actual fighting ever took place. This frontier version of what was later called a Sitzkrieg (the ‘sitting war’, after the declaration of war but before the actual beginning of hostilities between France and Germany in World War Two) became known as the ‘Aroostook War’, or the ‘Pork and Beans War’, or also the ‘Lumberjack War’ and lasted from 1838 to 1839.

In spite of its many names, the war was completely bloodless. Yet legend has it there was one casualty: either a Canadian pig wandering over the border, or a cow shot by mistake while wandering outside the Fort Kent blockhouse.  Or that one casualty might be private Hiram T. Smith, buried in Haynesville (ME) and frequently cited as the ‘only casualty of the Aroostook War’ – a shaky claim, as no one seems to know exactly what he died from. Further casualties were avoided, as in 1839 it was agreed that (US) Congressman Daniel Webster and (British) Lord Ashburton should work out a compromise border.

In 1842, they settled that the US would get over 18.000 sq. km (7.000 sq. mi) of the disputed area, up to the St Johns River, which would be opened up for free navigation by both countries. Great Britain got almost 13.000 sq. km (5.000 sq. mi) of disputed territory, allowing them an overland route between Lower Canada and Nova Scotia that was usable year-round – the Halifax Road.

Other achievements of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty were the fixing of the US-Canada border in the Great Lakes area, and the setting of a peaceful precedent for resolving territorial and other disputes between the US and its northern neighbour.  

In its entry on the Aroostook War, Wikipedia has this interesting cartographic bit of trivia: “Webster used a map found in the Paris Archives by the American Jared Sparks (and said to have been marked with a red line by Benjamin Franklin in Paris in 1782) to persuade Maine and Massachusetts to accept the agreement. As the map showed the disputed region belonged to the British, it helped convince the representatives of those states to accept the compromise, lest the “truth” reach British ears and convince the British to refuse a compromise. It was later discovered that the Americans had hidden their knowledge of the Franklin map. A map said to be favorable to the United States claims was apparently used in Britain, but this map was never revealed. Some claim the Franklin map was a fake created by Britain to pressure the American negotiators as their map placed the entire disputed area on the American side of the border.”

Here below is reproduced the ‘Aroostook War Fighting Song’, composed in Bangor in February 1839 to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. For its lyrics, and much of the historical information in the text above aswell as the map reproduced here, I’m much indebted to the website of Scott Michaud, who recounts his Franco-American family’s history in northern Maine.  Nowadays, the northernmost county of Maine is still called Aroostook, and still boasts a strong link with its French past. Incidentally, at 17.686 sq. km Aroostook County is the largest US county east of the Mississippi. Two US towns in Aroostook County, right on the St John River across from Canada, were named after American leaders in the ‘war’: Fort Kent (after then Maine governor Edward Kent) and Van Buren (after then president Martin Van Buren).

The Aroostook War Fighting Song

We are marching on to Madawask,
To fight the trespassers;
We’ll teach the British how to walk
And come off conquerors.

We’ll have our land, right good and clear,
For all the English say;
They shall not cut another log,
Nor stay another day.

They need not think to have our land,
We Yankees can fight well;
We’ve whipped them twice most manfully,
As every child can tell.

And if the tyrants say one word,
A third time we will show,
How high the Yankee spirit runs,
And what our guns can do.

They better much all stay at home,
And mind their business there;
The way we treated them before,
Made all the nations stare.

Come on! Brace fellows, one and all!
The Red-Coats ne’er shall say,
We Yankees, feared to meet them armed,
So gave our land away.

We’ll feed them well with ball and shot.
We’ll cut these red-coats down,
Before we yield to them an inch
Or title of our ground.

Ye husbands, fathers, brothers, sons,
From every quarter come!
March, to the bugle and the fife!
March, to the beating drum!

Onward! My lads so brave and true
Our country’s right demands
With justice, and with glory fight,
For these Aroostook lands! 

 

Please also check out Chip Gagnon’s page about this map on the Upper St John River Valley website (aussi en français).

 

 

105 - The Tory Atlas of the World

For me, this might be the original strange map. When I was a kid, I had the Spitting Image book that contained this map. I spent hours (well… whole quarters of hours) poring over it, chuckling away every time I ‘got’ a reference. For those who don’t know it, ‘Spitting Image’ was a British satirical tv show in the nineteen eighties, centred around hilariously exaggerated figurines of politicians, entertainers and other celebrities.

It being ‘eighties Britain, the butt of most jokes was the party then in power, the Conservatives (or Tories) and their leader, Margaret Thatcher. The ‘Iron Lady’ was mocked by exaggerating the perceived steeliness of her resolve, compared to which most other figures appeared to be comically weak. Especially her American ally, president Ronald Reagan, who was portrayed as the acme of cluelessness.

This map mocks the supposed world-view of the Tories, who were perceived as being extremely right-wing, unashamedly Anglocentric (even to the detriment of other parts of the UK), overtly racist and romantic about Britain’s imperial past. All of this is reflected on the map, which oversizes (former) British territories, minimizes others and renames quite a few.

Those readers not accustomed to foul-mouthed British invective should avert their eyes now. An overview, starting with Britain itself…

I’ve always wondered how people in the north of Britain (or England, for that matter) deal with the fact that the southeast of England is called the ‘home counties’, implying everywhere else on the island of Britain is somehow foreign. The map illustrates this dichotomy well, in oversizing the south of England (and incidentally the whole of Wales, without naming it), naming Scotland ‘Ghillie Jocko Land’ and connecting the two via the M1 motorway (effectively erasing the rest of England above Grantham). The Isle of Wight is also oversized, Northern Ireland is called ‘Bogland (UK)’ (the Irish republic is below sea level) and Iceland is conveniently British too.

The Americas:

Most of ‘real’ Canada is made up of ‘The Commonwealth (UK)’, leaving only a thin strip for Canada. The US is labelled ‘Yanks’ (with Washington named ‘Chez Reagan’), Alaska is ‘Eskimo Land’. The only label for the whole of Central America and the Caribbean is ‘West Indies and so on’, while ‘British Honduras’ (actually Colombia) is the former colonial name for present-day Belize. ‘Greasy Gaucho Spic Land’ is Brazil (although the gauchos live in Argentina, I thought) and ‘Various darkies, cannibals and huns’ occupy most of the rest of South America - ‘huns’ might be a reference to Nazi fugitives. Argentina gets a mention as ‘Argies’, which is almost correct and probably a badge of honour for having had the guts to invade the Falkland Islands, grossly oversized as they were successfully recaptured by Margaret Thatcher. Other Brititsh Atlantic possessions are also magnified: South Georgia, Tristan da Cunha and Ascension Island (’Where the triangular stamps used to come from, but now crawling with our coloured brethren, of course’).

Africa:

More racism like that in the naming of the Maghreb countries (’filthy shoplifting Arabville’), Egypt (’Gippos’), the Sahara and Sahel countries (’Bongo Bongo Land’) and several of the incorrectly drawn West and Central African nations (’Coon Coast’, ‘Slave Coast’, ‘Nignogeria’, ‘Nasty Smells’, ‘Begins with T’ and ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Land’). Exceptions are made for ‘British’ territories such as the neutrally termed ‘British Guyana’ (actually in South America, now the independent country of Guyana) and ‘Kenya‘ (though it is coloured in as an independent country). A huge swathe of Central and Southern Africa is taken up by ‘The Much Maligned South Africa‘, then still an Apartheid state. Two slivers of African coast are termed ‘Portugal’, supposedly in the eyes of Tories a country little better than an African one, and easily mistaken for one. Madagascar, finally, is disinterestedly labelled ‘Borneo?’

Europe: 

The Scandinavian peninsula is summarily divided between several ‘nordic’ countries, such as ‘Holland’, ‘Lapland’, ‘Finland’, ‘Denmark’, ‘The Other One’ and ‘Plucky Little Poland’.

Where Denmark actually is, ‘Pornoland’ is marked (Holland?), with below ‘Moustachioed Shortarses’ (I don’t know who these are supposed to be), ‘Frog Land’ (actually only half of France), ‘Slimy Dago Town’ (the other half; named after an insulting word for the Spanish) and ‘Gib’ (Gibraltar, occupying the whole Iberian peninsula). Southern Italy is ‘Wop Land’, northern Italy plus Switzerland is ‘Wog Land’ (the difference eludes me), most of the Balkans is called ‘Greek Homo Fellows’ and Eastern Europe is ‘Federal Republic of Bulletheaded Krauts’ (West Germany, actually). The text in the territory to the west is illegible on this map. To the east lie the ‘Commie Federal Republic of Sausage Eating Krauts and Lesboes’ (East Germany) and other communist states such as ‘Nicaragua’, ‘Austria-Hungary’, ‘Moldavia’ and ‘Transylvania’. The biggest country on the map, the Tories’ posturing notwithstanding, is the ‘Union of Soviet Russian Commie Bastards’.

Asia:

‘Slanty-Eyed Chinky Takeaway Land’ could have been a name for China thought up by upper-class British anachronisms such as Prince Philip. Japan gets a positive mention as ‘The Wonderful Hardworking Japanese’. Straight above lies the Kamchatka peninsula, incorrectly labelled as ‘Used to Be British, But Gone to the Dogs Now’. Coloured in British pink are an oversized Hong Kong, and the Philippines (labelled ‘Channel Islands’ and ‘Au Pair Land’). Australia is ‘Singapore’, Tasmania is ‘Thingy’. Indonesia is ‘No Idea’, ‘Nope’, ‘Who Cares?’ and so forth. The former British Raj in the Indian subcontinent is labelled ‘Pakis’, while the Middle East rounds out Asia with another ‘Portugal’ (on the southern coast of Arabia, where Yemen and Oman are), and a few other descriptions too nasty and in any case too illegible to reproduce here.

Please be assured that none of the prejudices expressed in this map reflect my own convictions. Except where they refer to the French, of course.  (Je plaisante, bien sûr!)

104 - Your Antipodes Most Likely Have Fins

Imagine that you could drill a hole straight through the Earth. Suspend your disbelief for a moment, ignoring the molten core that would fry you. Or that you would fall into the cavernous inside of the Hollow Earth. Where would you end up?

In geographical coordinates, the answer is quite simple(*): If the coordinates (longitude and latitude) of a point on the Earth’s surface are (x, y), then the coordinates of the antipodal point can be written as (x ± 180°, −y). So the latitudes are numerically equal, but one is north and the other south. And the longitudes differ from each other by 180 degrees. Plus or minus: it doesn’t really matter in which direction you count those 180 degrees, as either way will lead you to the same point (a circle having a circumference of 360 degrees).

An example. If you start out at, say, 46,95 degrees longitude West and 39,00 degrees latitude North , after you’ve dug through the Earth’s core you’ll end up at longitude 133,05° East (133,05 being the result of 180,00 - 46,95) and latitude 39,00° South.

Only, for most people, the place where you’ll end up won’t be land, but water. The oceans cover about 70% of our planet’s surface. Your antipodes (a Greek word translatable as: ‘those whose feet are on the other side’) mostly don’t have feet, but fins. If you could ’sandwich’ the Earth, as is done in this map made by Rebecca Catherine Brown (who got the idea from this site, but produced it herself and submitted it to strangemaps@gmail.com), the overlap of land would be surprisingly small.

I’m reminded of the movie ‘The China Syndrome’, the title of which refers to the idea that if you dig a hole through the Earth starting in the US, you end up in China. This map shows it ain’t so. In fact, only a little bit of China overlaps - and with the southern part of South America. Funnily enough, the good people of Argentina seem to have taken this into account when naming the city of Formosa, which is the antipode of Taiwan, the island off the Chinese coast formerly known as… Formosa. There’s almost no overlap in North America, none in Africa and just a bit in Europe (the Iberian peninsula with New Zealand’s North Island).

The website Antipodes Map allows for interactive searching for antipodeal locations. Which will probably end up in some ocean or other. Anybody know the Greek word for fin?

(*) if not for me: see comments #2 and #3.

103 - Europe From Moscow (in 1952)

Perspective and the right choice of colours can help to infuse a map with meaning, this one being a very good example. The map is entitled Europe From Moscow, and was featured in the Time Magazine issue of March 10, 1952.

At that time, the world was dominated by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Even though the Nazis were defeated less than a decade ago, it seemed Europe – divided between American allies in the west and Soviet satellite states in the east – could become a theatre of war, if the Soviets were to push into Western Europe and ‘finish the job’ they started by virtually annexing the Eastern European countries they conquered in the Second World War.

Those countries are shaded in a lighter tone of red in this map, thus underlining the image of Communism seeping into Europe from Russia, making the ‘uncontaminated’ parts of Europe look threatened.

“The effective psychological strategy demonstrated by this map is an illustration of the powerfully innovative propaganda work achieved by R.M.Chapin, the primary cartographer for political maps in Time,” says this page at the website of the Newberry Library (in Chicago), showing this and other interesting examples of Cold War Popular Magazine Cartography.

102 - Exclaves of West Berlin (2): Laßzinswiesen

Not much info on this, the third (*) of former West Berlin’s ten tiny enclaves within former East Germany. This website on Berlin exclaves merely mentions that Laßzinswiesen “was an exclave just north of Laßzinssee, only tens of meters from West-Berlin but completely unaccessible from the West.” As is shown on this Soviet map. The text inside the exclave contains the words ‘perechod’ (’access’) and ‘granitsa’ (’border’), but that’s where my acquaintance with Russian ends. Any help with the translation would be very welcome.

Other sources list Lasszinswiesen as having an area of 13,49 hectares, making it the third largest of West Berlin’s exclaves. For a complete list of the exclaves and their sizes, go here. All territorial anomalies between West Berlin and East Germany (except West Berlin - or East Germany - itself) were resolved in three stages of Gebietsaustausch (exchange of territory) in 1971, 1974 and 1988. The Wall fell just a year after the last exchange.

(*): See post #99 for a map and some information on Erlengrund and Fichtewiese, the first two exclaves mentioned on this blog.

101 - If Planets Were Countries…

 

… then “Jupiter would be revoking democracy in Russia, Saturn would be curling in Canada, Uranus would be trying to figure out how to speak Kalaallisut, Neptune would be desperately looking for water in Saudi Arabia, and Earth would be searching in vain for Borat.”

Puzzled?

This is a size comparison map, taken from this page at the website statastico.com, which figures a number of intriguing maps. This one is home-made by the author of the site, who got to wondering about an eyecatching way to demonstrate the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system. She/he explains:

“What if the planets were shrunk down to the size of countries on Earth? If we scale all of the planets down to about 1/3600th of their total surface area, we can find a comparably-sized country for all of the planets and plutons.”

Plutons being the name for celestial objects such as Pluto, recently demoted from planet. Confining ourselves to the 8 bona fide planets left in our system, the planet-to-country comparisons work out like this (in descending order of magnitude, I presume):

• Jupiter = Russia
• Saturn = Canada
• Uranus =Greenland
• Neptune = Saudi Arabia
• Earth = Tajikistan
• Venus = Czech Republic
• Mars = Switzerland
• Mercury = El Salvador

Pluto is about the size of the Cape Verde Islands, while other plutons such as Charon (Martinique) and Ceres (Netherlands Antilles) also can be linked to small, tropical island paradises. Who needs to be big when you have beaches and sunshine? The actual planet – I mean, pluton – of Pluto, by the way, is so small that all of its 16,7 million sq. km of surface would fit inside Russia.

100 - A Vulture’s View of Ethiopia

Richard Edes Harrison trained as an architect, but became known as an illustrator for Time (from 1932 onwards) and other national news magazines. His specialty was cartography, applying unusual perspectives and orientations to maps to present information about the global flow of oil, the network of global communications cables or the geographic lay-out of potential battlegrounds (many of his maps were made in the run-up to and during World War Two). Harrison also worked as a cartographic consultant for the US government and lectured at several universities on cartography.

Much of Harrison’s best work was done from 1940 onwards for Fortune magazine, where his characteristic signature was the expansion of the bird’s-eye view to worldwide settings. A selection of Harrison’s Fortune-maps was published in 1944 as ‘Look at the World – The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy’. Out of print nowadays, but I managed to find a copy via Amazon.

This map’s not in it, though – possibly because by 1944, the Ethiopian conflict as prefigured in this map had already played out. In any case, I can’t find the exact date for this map on the site where I found it. The ‘vulture’s view’ and the intriguing legends (*) give it the appearance of a treasure map. The article accompanying the map, reproduced here, also has a very Indiana Jonesy feel to it.

“ETHIOPIA AT STAKE. A Portfolio of Maps Expounding the Strategical Position of the Oldest Unconquered Nation in the West.”

“From the flat, unfruitful, fever-stricken tip of eastern Africa, where the Red Sea empties into the Indian Ocean, there rises a huge natural escarpment which, if its cliffs were not 8,000 to 10,000 feet high, would appear to be man-made, so definitely does it separate the coastal desert from the hinterland. The plateau on top of it is a maze of mountains, some of which rise to 25,000 feet, as cool and fruitful as the seacoast is hot and barren. This is Ethiopia. Remote, all but impregnable, it is a land against whose cliffs the waves of empire have beaten in vain for 3,000 years, the oldest independent nation among those of the West, which Homer referred to as the country in which the sun sets and the gods hold their banquets.”

“Ethiopia achieved its independence in the eleventh century B.C. and it conquered Egypts in the eighth to found the twenty-fifth Egyptian dynasty. It has twice been seriously invaded. The Roman General Gaius Petronius sacked Napata in 24 B.C., which was then the Ethiopian capital but lies in what is now the Ango-Egyptian Sudan. No other invasion was successful until 1868, when Great Britain made war on Ethiopia, and with an expeditionary force of 30,000 men got as far as Magdala. But they did not follow up on their success.”

“The Ethiopians fought off the great Persian Cambyses about 525 B.C. And as Africa’s only native Christian people, they have withstood savage attacks by surrounding Mohammedans. They have twice repelled Italy – once in 1887 when an Ethiopian army surrounded 500 Italian troops at Dogali and killed about 400 of them; and once in 1896, when an Italian army of 14,500 men was overwhelmed by an Ethiopian force of more than 100,000 at Adowa.”

“From the mountain fastness of his ancestors, claiming to stem from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the spiritual, studious Emperor of Ethiopia, who works at a big modern desk surrounded by modern files in the midst of his howling tribes, has suddenly emerged as a man of portentous affairs. Without attempting to expound the intricate international politics in which he has become involved, FORTUNE herewith presents a portfolio of eight maps bearing upon the crisis he has aroused. Illustrating every important geographical angle of the situation, these may be used as ready reference maps in following the moves of the three major chess players, Mussolini, Haile Selassie and Downing Street.”

“Our portfolio includes:
1. Bird’s-Eye view of Ethiopia (below), looking southwest from the land of Yemen on the tip of the Arabian peninsula. This map is especially designed to show the Ethiopian terrain in detail and to give a graphic idea of the difficulties confronting an invader.
2. Africa the melon, opposite page 84, showing Ethiopia’s strategic importance in the biggest of the southern continents.
3. Ethiopia mapped again, this time to show the important military centers and the possible lines of attack.
4. The Mediterranean Sea, showing the powers aligned against Italy – a useful map in case of naval engagements.
5. Arabia and the Red Sea.
6. Geographical distribution of the Moslem peoples.
7. The Nile basin in relation to Lake Tana.
8. Lake Tana itself.”

(*) Such as:

Deepest Ethiopia – concerning which little is known.
Jijiga – reputedly, Ethiopia’s only night club here.
Kaffa – origin of the word ‘coffee’ – here the plant grows wild.
Radio Station ETA – Selassie’s feeble link with the world.
At Mt. Entoffo (?) the war drums are beaten – dense eucalyptus forests.
Danakil – “hell hole of creation”.
Tigre – iron deposits – Italy wants them.

(and finally, talk about Indiana Jonesy stuff: )

Here reposes the Ark of the Covenant.

99 - Exclaves of West Berlin (1): Erlengrund and Fichtewiese

On August 13, 1961, the East German authorities erected a physical barrier in Berlin to prevent their citizens from ‘voting with their’ feet – i.e. fleeing to West Germany. This barrier, consisting of fences, minefields and/or huge blocks of concrete, eventually ran along the entire Deutsch-Deutsche Grenze (the ‘German-German border’), but was particularly poignant in Berlin, where it visibly dissected contiguous city neighbourhoods.

The barrier became known as the Berlin Wall, completely isolating the ‘capitalist island’ of West Berlin by means of a Todesstreifen - literally a ‘death-strip’. This militarized border with impassable fortifications and border guards with orders to shoot to kill is gone now. A decade and a half after the reunification of Germany, it’s hard to imagine this was once a fact of life in one of the major capitals of Europe (and a very lethal one at that).

And yet it gets even more absurd: the pre-war city of Berlin owned a number of exclaves outside its city limits, and these were included in the post-war deal that divided Berlin into four zones of occupation (French, American, British and Soviet), later into two administrative units (the Soviet zone became the capital of East Germany, the other three zones coalesced into ‘West-Berlin’, which was connected to West-Germany by three Autobahn corridors). The ‘hardening’ of the inner German borders in August 1961 gave these exclaves (10 ‘western’ exclaves in East-Germany, but also 3 ‘eastern’ exclaves in West-Berlin) extra significance – and potential to serve as flash-points of conflict.

This map shows two of the 10 West-Berlin enclaves in East Germany: Erlengrund (literally ‘Alderground’) and Fichtewiese (‘Spruce Meadow’). They were located very close to the border of West-Berlin, just north of Spandau Forest. Both enclaves were used by (western) garden societies, whose members farmed small parcels within the enclaves, sometimes owning small cottages within the grounds themselves. Access was limited to certain ‘visiting hours’, and each time the owners had to pass through a gate in the Berlin Wall, continue over a metre-wide path through no-man’s land, pass an access-permit control-post and continue into one of both enclaves.

I will be posting more about these and other former ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ enclaves in and around Berlin. This map was taken from a fascinating website called Berlin Exclaves (http://berlin.enclaves.org).

98 - ‘On the Road’ Map: Kerouac Traces His Trip

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell (MA) Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, and in spite of his fancy name, his French-Canadian parents had to emigrate to Massachusetts to find work. When he died in St Petersburg (FL) 47 years later, Kerouac’s total estate amounted to under 100 dollars. Yet he’ll be immortal as long as books are read, if mainly for just one of his several works: ‘On the Road’, based on his hitchhiking trips around the US.

Kerouac went to study at Columbia in New York on an athletics scholarship, but he quickly joined a group of iconoclastic young poets who later became known as the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s ‘Spontaneous Prose’, an improvised, almost jazz-like style of writing later better known as ‘Stream of Consciousness’, inspired other writers and artists such as Bob Dylan (although Truman Capote famously dissed the technique by saying “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”)

His desire to break free of social mores and restrictions intertwined with his experimentation with drugs – as an ‘expert’ in both, he became some sort of spiritual guru to the 1960s counterculture. He is both referred to as ‘King of the Beats’ as well as Father of the Hippies.

In 1942, Kerouac joined the Merchant Marine and a year later, the US Navy. After the war, he was discharged on psychiatric grounds. He took to ‘drifting’ around the country, alternated with homely periods at home with his mom at Ozone Park in Queens, NYC.

In three weeks in April 1951, Kerouac wrote ‘On the Road’, the book that would make him famous. But only belatedly: the book was first published six years later, and only after severe revisions demanded by the publisher, Viking Press. To mark the 50th anniversary of first publishing, an uncensored edition will be published this year.

In ‘On the Road’, Kerouac tells the thinly veiled autobiographical tale of his trips through the US and Mexico with his friend Neal Cassady (‘Dean Moriarty’ in the book; Kerouacs narrator is called ‘Sal Paradise’). Interestingly, Kerouac never had a driver’s licence until he was 34 (in 1956), meaning that in the time of the ‘On the Road’ trips – to quote the title of a song by the band Guided by Voices – ‘Kerouac Never Drove, So He Never Drove Alone’.

This map was found at the Kerouac Corner of a website called www.wordsareimportant.com. This map , apparently from one of Kerouac’s own diaries, shows the itinerary of a trip from July to October 1947, much of which would later serve as the backdrop for ‘On the Road’:

New York City
Chicago
Davenport
Des Moines
North Platte
Cheyenne
(Denver
Central City)
Laramie
Salt Lake
Reno
San Francisco
Madera
Fresno
Selma
Los Angeles
Prescott
Albuquerque
Dalhart
Kansas City
St Louis
Indianapolis
Columbus
Pittsburgh
Washington DC
New York City

97 – Where (and How) Evolution Is Taught In the US

Scientists generally accept the theory of evolution as the back-story of how animal species (including humans) came into being over a period of several billion years. Religious literalists maintain their belief in creation, as laid down in the Bible: God made the earth and all that is on it (including humans, after His own image) in one week, a couple of thousand years ago.

These are the extreme positions in a debate that has been raging for years now in the United States, and more particularly in the school system. Since each state can determine what should be in the local schools’ curriculum, the teaching of evolution and/or creation differs throughout the country. Yet contrary to what one might think, it’s not so that creation is taught in the Bible Belt states (in the South), and evolution in more liberal states (everywhere else).

This map is taken here from the website Science Against Evolution, which quite cleverly tries to win the debate for creation by arguing that the theory of evolution itself has been discredited by scientific evidence and by numerous scientists. However, the map is drawn up by a proponent of evolution, as can be deduced from the remarks on the map and even its colours (green is good, red is bad).

Green indicates that evolution theory is taught in a ‘very good/excellent’ way. These states include the liberal states of

• California (“Well organized”)
• Rhode Island
• Connecticut
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania and
• Delaware.

But also a Midwestern, more conservative state such as

• Indiana (”Exemplary”)

and even two southern states with a reputation for religiosity:

• North Carolina (“Model of good organization”) and
• South Carolina (“Thorough and challenging treatment”).

Yellow indicates indicates where evolution is taught in a ‘satisfactory/good’ manner. This includes the majority of states, from the north and west not usually included in the Bible Belt, such as

• Washington
• Oregon (“solid if uninspired”)
• Idaho
• Montana (“human evolution ignored”)
• South Dakota
• Nebraska (“marred by creationist notions”)
• Minnesota
• Michigan
• New York (“inclusion of creationist jargon”)
• Vermont and
• Massachusetts (“marred by creationist jargon”)

Similarly, the colour red, indicating where the teaching of evolution is’ unsatisfactory, useless or absent’, is spread out across the entire country, not just in the South:

• North Dakota
• Wyoming
• Illinois (“an embarrassment”)
• Ohio (“the E-word is avoided”)
• Maine (“useless”) and
• Mississippi (“Mississippi seems determined to keep evolution outside its borders”)

The map first appeared in 2002 in Scientific American, and was based on data collected by Lawrence S. Lerner of California State University at Long Beach.