302 – Really Awful TV Studio Background Maps, Part II

“I was watching TV and noticed an informercial for cure-all vitamin supplement with a unique map background,” writes John Deal, who immediately grabbed a camera and took a few shots for Strange Maps. Good reflexes, John!

“It kind of remembers your Larry King map (#242) – but worse. Australia is still drifting north and Africa has moved into position between Europe and North America. There are two Asias but South America has sunk into Atlantic. Sad. All those poor Brazilians, gone forever.”

A map in a TV studio background performs the same function as a diploma on a professional’s consulting room: it lends an aura of respectability and believability to what goes on there. Maybe putting a really awful map like this in a TV studio background is a subconscious, subliminal way of conveying a message to the viewing public: don’t believe a word we’re saying!

 

301 – Look At the State You’re In: Absaroka

In its short-lived attempt at existence, the US state of Absaroka (pronounced ab-SOR-ka) managed to acquire quite a few trappings of statehood: a governor and capital were selected, Absarokan car license plates issued, and there even was a Miss Absaroka 1939 (the first and only one). The King of Norway also visited, apparently – although he might not have suspected that it was a state visit.

On another continent or in another era, all this might have qualified Absaroka for total independence. But alas, in 1930s America, with its by then well-established administrative divisions, even statehood proved to be beyond the Absarokans’ grasp. And the fledgling state might have faded from history entirely, had it not been recorded by the Federal Writers’ Project, eager to include it as an example of cowboyin’ couleur locale.

That record was one of the sources for an article on Absaroka by New York Times journalist Kirk Johnson (‘A State That Never Was In Wyoming’, NYT, 24 July 08), which was kindly forwarded to Strange Maps by Ruland Kolen and Alex Meerovich. And that is how we first heard of Absaroka – a joyous occasion on a par with our first intimations of Amikejo, Stellaland, Imperial Texas, or any other of the ephemeral states that were discussed previously on this blog (Subcarpathian Ruthenia remains our favourite – independent for only slightly longer than the time it takes to pronounce its name).

Absaroka means ‘children of the large-beaked bird’ and is the name given to the Crow Indians by their relatives, the Hidatsa. It also is the name of a local mountain range. Which is ironic, as the state’s unifying characteristic would have been its rancher culture, which obviously owes more on the horizontality of prairie than the verticality of mountains.

What kicked off the secessionist movement, was the independent-minded ranchers’ opposition to the interventionist New Deal proposed by president F.D. Roosevelt. Absaroka was to be composed of similar-feeling parts of Wyoming and two other states: Montana and South Dakota. The state was the brainchild of a group of aggrieved locals, but mainly of one A.R. Swickard, Absaroka’s self-appointed governor. The NY Times reproduced this map of Absaroka based on one sketched out by Swickard and his co-conspirators in Sheridan, Wyoming – the ‘capital’ of Absaroka.

“It was 90 miles of dirt road to the county seat. There was just nothing there. What Swickard did was exciting,” Mr Johnson quotes local resident Helen Graham (89). Things are really bad when secessionism is the only freely available form of decent entertainment. It remains unclear how serious the clamour for Absarokan statehood really was, or when and how it ended. Any additional information - including a higher-res map or a picture of Miss Absaroka (providing it’s from 1939) – would be greatly appreciated.

Update 15 July 2009: Many thanks to Nate Pedersen, who recently wrote a piece on Absaroka for South Dakota Magazine, and was kind enough to send in these goodies: 

A map from the Sheridan Press (d.d. Sunday 5 march 1939), detailing how ‘Absaroka’ the 49th State in the Union, was again proposed here Saturday as the outgrowth of a chide at the apparent lack of republican patronage committee appointments in this area. A.R. Swickard,city street and water commissioner, started it off with a petition for Sheridan county to join Montana, but since then has developed into the formation of a new state embracing the areas designated in the map below.

 

A large picture of Dorothy Fellows, a.k.a. Miss Absaroka  (on the left), in the company of A.R. Swickard, the ‘governor of Absaroka’, and Esther Aspaas. The ladies are holding the proposed flag for what would have been the 49th state.

 

Many thanks to Mr Pedersen for sending in these pictures. Credit for providing them is due to the Wyoming Room at the Sheridan Public Library.

300 – The Reign in Spain (1850)

Spain, now a fully integrated member of the European Union, once was considered so alien to the rest of Europe that Alexandre Dumas is known to have remarked that “Africa begins at the Pyrennees” (see #22).

The Pyrennees are a prime example of how geography is destiny. This mountain chain that so neatly divides the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe also seems to have cut it off for so long from the European cultural, political and economical mainstream. It’s certainly true that many casual observers of history (like me) will be hard pressed to tell you anything about Spain between Columbus and Franco.

This map dates from towards the end of that timeframe, and comes as a bit of a surprise. Published in 1852 after the First Carlist War (whatever that may have been), it shows a subdivision of Spain many would only associate with the era after the death of Spanish dictator Franco in 1975 and the subsequent democratisation and decentralisation of political life.

And yet it clearly already shows the Basque Country (in the north) and Catalonia (in the northeast) as two separate entities. In all, it shows Spain as being divided into four different areas, each retaining particular laws and institutions.

• “España Uniforme” (orange) : “Uniform or purely constitutional Spain, which comprises these 34 Provinces of the Crowns of Castile and Leon, equal in all economic, judicial, military and civil branches.” This ‘core’ of Spain equates to the former kingdoms of Castile, Leon and Granada.
• “España Incorporada” (green): “Incorporated or assimilated Spain which comprises the 11 provinces of the Crown of Aragon, still different in the manner of contribution and in some points of private law.” This is the former kingdom of Aragon, mostly identical to the Catalan autonomous areas of nowadays.
• “España Foral” (blue): “Statutory Spain.” This was the former kingdom of Navarra, which also included the Basque Country.
• “España Colonial” (yellowish): “Colonial Spain”, which at that time still included the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico – three main remnants of the once much larger Spanish Empire, which would all be taken over by the US following their defeat of Spain in 1898. After that, Spain was left with a few microscopic specks of land in North Africa, which it still holds on to.

Not knowing my Spanish history very well, I’m stabbing in the dark here; but I guess the regionalism shown on this map is not an early form of modern Spanish federalism, but an ancient form of local privileges later to be suppressed in the wars and oppression that were to follow. Regional nationalism in Spain was only allowed to resurface in the post-1975 era, which gives this rather old map a quaintly modern feel…

Many thanks to Joan Camp for showing me this map, from Francisco Jorge Torres Villegas’ “Cartografia hispano-cientifica” (1852), which can be found here at Wikimedia Commons.

 

299 – Niam Niam: the Cannibal Map of the World

(click on map to enlarge)

In this day and age, cases of cannibalism are quite rare (or medium, or well done – sorry couldn’t resist that one). The barrage of media attention unleashed whenever a case does occur speaks volumes of our fascination with this, one of the darker taboos of humanity. More often than not, these cases are enshrined in popular culture by the movies and books about them that are avariciously devoured by a sensation-hungry public.

Two instances immediately come to mind: the story of Armin Meiwes, the German internet cannibal, who in 2001 sollicited (and, incredibly, found) a victim online, prepared to be prepared into a meal by him; an example of collective cannibalism (and a case more inspired by necessity than depravity) was that of the Uruguayan plane that crashed high in the Andes somewhere in the 1970s, forcing its survivors to tuck into flesh of the deceased.

The word ‘cannibalism’ derives from a Spanish term for the inhabitants of  the Caribbean, whom they considered to be man-eating savages (the name of the bad guy in Shakespeare’s The Tempest also derives from the same root: Caliban). Another, less popular term is anthropophagy, Greek for ‘the eating of humans’.

Cannibalism is believed to have been practised by the Neanderthals and, in a more or less ritualistic context, by many ancient (modern) human cultures the world over. The object of the practice seems not to have been hunger so much as power – eating others is the ultimate way of establishing dominance over them, and/or acquiring their strength.

This map, from the German/Austrian publisher A. Hartleben, dating from the early 20^th century by the look of it, presents a map of the range of anthropophagy, both contemporary (in red) and historical (in yellow).

Remarkably, Europe is completely cannibal-free. Are there really no historical records of anthropophagy in Europe’s ancient history?

Africa is marked with some historically cannibalistic tribes (Basuto in Southern Africa, Kakongo in the Congo area, Ashanti and the enigmatically named Flups in Western Africa) as well as a few still active ones, mainly in what was then still deepest, darkest Africa: the Niam Niam (this sounds suspiciously onomatopeic), Kissama, Mangbattu and Manyonoa; further south are the Matabele of present-day Zimbabwe.

The whole of Asia is blighted only by the past sins of the Ostiaks, a Siberian tribe and – bet the Dalai Lama never brags about this – the Tibetans.

Indonesia, Micronesia and the rest of Oceania are marked by many contemporary instances of cannibalism, in Australia, New Guinea, Borneo (Dayaks) and Sumatra (Bataks). Maori cannibalism has been stamped out in New Zealand and many (but not all) of the archipelagos to its north.

Anthropophagy was shockingly widespread in North America (according to this map at least), with a continuous swathe of territory marked by the practice, ranging from the east coast (Algonquins, Iroquois) through the Midwest (Chippeway, Dakota) to the west coast (Oregon peoples). Other areas were to be found in Texas (Apache), Louisiane (Atacapa) and Florida.

Cannibalism also was a well-established practice in Mesoamerica (Aztecs, Mayas) and South America (Caribs, Quechua, Tupi) and still ongoing with some Brazilian tribes, notably the Guarani.

It should be remembered that cannibalism probably was over-reported – people in previous centuries being as fascinated by the taboo as we are – and often used as a propaganda tool: cannibalism providing the ultimate yardstick for barbarity, and the ideal excuse to subjugate the peoples accused of it.

Many thanks to Jeremy Schein for providing this map, found here on Wikipedia.

298 – The World As Seen From Paris

In 1989, Swedish author Herman Lindquist published Rapporter från Mittens Rike (‘Reports from the Middle Kingdom’). The title of the book is ambiguous, as it refers to the well-known epithet for China that has come to symbolise its insularity and self-centredness in previous centuries. In this context, the term Middle Kingdom might be interpreted as a reference to France’s continuing tendency to see itself as a major player on the international political, economical and cultural stage, while in fact it is now a medium-sized power at best – as are all other European countries separately.

I haven’t read the book, but Rickard Hansen has. He sent in this map, included in the book. It appears to be a (rare) example of French self-deprecating humour: “The author says that the map was produced originally by a French magazine called Actuel.”

Mr Hansen, a Swede who lives in France, can vouch for the reality of some of the views/prejudices presented on the map: “The majority of French really do think that there is some sort of permanent winter in Scandinavia (…) Being Swedish, I think the French drive like crazy, they in turn think the same about Italians, and apparently it’s a good idea to lock the car there too!”

Some other characteristics of le monde, vu de Paris:

 

• Centre of the world, obviously, is Paris (which once had its own meridian, eventually losing out to the one in Greenwich).
• Paris is linked to the French riviera via the Autoroute du soleil (‘Highway of the Sun’), the south of France is sprinkled with vineyards.
• Further south are ‘Vacation homes’ (in Spain) and ‘Cleaners’ (who apparently all come from Portugal).
• ‘Our princess’ probably refers to Caroline of Monaco, the most flamboyant of republican France’s vicarious royals.
• Corsica features prominently (as it is a French island, and the birthplace of Napoleon; Sardinia and Sicily are not so lucky).
• The Italian mainland evokes one reaction only: ‘Lock the car’.
• Nothing much happens to the north of France: Scandinavia is plagued by an ‘Everlasting winter’, and Britain is simply a ‘Rainy area’.
• Lots of blank space to the east, which begins in earnest behind the Iron Curtain. Only Poland – then in the throes of anti-communist agitation by the likes of the Solidarity trade union – is deserving of a separate mention.
• Further east are only ‘Gulag’ and ‘Indochina’ – a former French colony, to be sure.
• Japan, surprisingly, is only known for its copy machines. Or is this a dig at Japan’s reputation for copying (and perfecting) other people’s inventions?
• New Caledonia, a rather small French dependency in the Pacific, is punching way above its weight on this map, much bigger than Australia (only good for ‘Kangaroos’) and New Zealand (‘Our enemy’, a reference to its stance against French nuclear testing on Mururoa, another French territory in the Pacific).
• Lybia gets a separate mention in North Africa as a ‘Terrorist centre’, while the rest of Africa’s northern half is labelled as ‘Our Arabs (poor)’ and ‘Our Africa’. Large parts of the area were indeed part of the French colonial empire.
• Depicted unfairly small is the rest of Africa, i.e. ‘Black Africa’.
• Beirut, another area with French colonial influence, is labelled as a ‘Gun market’, while their neighbours are ‘Oil Arabs’. Not so poor as ‘our’ Arabs, is the seemingly accusatory implication.
• Réunion, in reality a fairly small French island in the Indian Ocean, is shown hugely inflated – about the size Madagascar usually occupies on more realistic maps.
• Parisians’ view of America is fairly simple: there’s ‘Guyana’ (French Guyana is a small French territory between Suriname and Brazil, best known as the launch site for the European Space Agency’s rockets), Québec (Canada’s French-speaking province), Louisiana (formerly a French colony, now a US state) and, grudgingly, some room for Canada and the United States.

 

Thanks to Rickard Hansen for translating the map’s labels.

 

 

 

297 – The South Shall Snack Again

Mississippi is the fattest state in the Union, with 30.1% of Mississippians being obese. That’s almost one in every three inhabitants. Not that the Magnolia State (in red on this map) should be singled out for its massiveness. It is surrounded by four of the eight other fattest US states (in brown on this map): Tennessee (29.0%), Arkansas (29.3%), Louisiana (29.5%) and Alabama (30.1%). Being overweight clearly is a Southern thing – even if the second-fattest state, West-Virginia (30.6%), broke away from the rebellious South in 1863 to join the North.

The other states in the top obesity bracket are Oklahoma (28.1%), Kentucky (28.4%) and South Carolina (29.2%). The next bracket (26 to 28% of inhabitants obese) is filled out by nine states, three of which are Southern (Texas, Georgia and North Carolina), three adjoin the Great Lakes (Michigan, Indiana and Ohio) and three are clustered in the Midwest (Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri).

The leanest states also tend to cluster: states in the least but one category (22 to 24%) include Maine and New Hampshire; New York and New Jersey; and California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.
Some of the least obese (20.7 to 22%) states are Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Another one, Utah, is adjacent to Colorado, which is by far the leanest state of them all (18.4%).
Overall, the Soutwest and New England are counting calories, while the South and to a lesser extent the Midwest are piling on the pounds.

Obesity, it may be useful to repeat, is not a euphemism for being overweight. It means being so fat that one’s health is affected. You are defined as obese if you have a body mass index of 30 or over (with a bmi of between 25 and 30, you are merely overweight). The US is the most overweight nation in the world, with over a quarter of the total population being obese. Obesity is a global phenomenon, however. It was recently reported that for the first time in history, there are now more overweight than malnourished people in the world.

Thanks to Stannous Flouride for sending in this map, found here at frostfirezoo.com. Original context unclear.

296 – The Dykes of Doggerland

(click on map to enlarge)

 

Word of the day: epeiric. That term describes shallow, salty seas covering part of a continental shelf. Examples include the Sundance, Zechstein and Turgai Seas – all excellently named, but alas all dried up. Epeiric seas still around today include the Hudson Bay and the Persian Gulf. And the North Sea, of which we shall now speak.

Some 10 millennia ago, during the last Ice Age, so much water was stored in huge polar ice caps that sea levels were 120 m lower than today. The North Sea consequently wasn’t a sea, but a land bridge between Britain and Europe. Geologists call this Doggerland, after the Dogger Bank, the shallowest, largest sand bank in the North Sea today. In all probability, this now sunken land land of once undulating prairie was quite densely inhabited by our Stone Age forebears. These must have been their hunting grounds, their prey the mammoths whose bones fishermen sometimes still dredge up from the sea floor.

In the 1930s, there existed at least one wild plan to reclaim this particular piece of sunken real estate from the seas, if maybe only in the pages of the editors of Modern Mechanix, an American magazine (1928-2001) that ran under a variety of titles (the best-known perhaps being Mechanix Illustrated). This map, dated to September 1930, has a slightly unbelievable air to it, and its inspiration probably isn’t Doggerland, but might well be the better-argumented Atlantropa scheme (discussed in #287 of this blog).

Under the title North Sea Drainage Project to Increase Area of Europe, a caption reads: “If the extensive schemes for the drainage of North Sea are carried out according to the plan illustrated above, which was conceived by a group of eminent English scientists, 100,000 square miles will be added to the overcrowded continents of Europe. The reclaimed land will be walled in with enormous dykes, similar to the Netherland dykes, to protect it from the sea, and the various rivers flowing into the North Sea will have their courses diverted to different outlets by means of canals.”

Conspicuously absent are the scientists’ credentials. The logistics of building a 450 mile long dyke connecting Norfolk (England) to Jutland (Denmark), rising 90 feet above the sea level, seem too daunting for this age, let alone for the 1930s. A similar dyke at the North Sea’s south end, barely 150 miles long, would only leave Antwerp and London with direct sea access, depriving the whole of the Netherlands and much of Germany and Denmark of a coastline – which can’t but have ticked them off.

The only element on this map that has become reality, is a fixed link between England and France, although it is a tunnel rather than the bridge imagined on this map. No direct train, then, between London, Berlin, Moscow and the Far East via Harwich (with its abandoned naval base) and passing in between Rotter- and Amsterdam. An inset map at the lower right shows how the map of northwestern Europe might look like, should the North Sea be reclaimed according to this scheme.

Many thanks to Flit for sending me this link to this page at the Modern Mechanix blog. (‘Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today’). And now, just for the fun of it (you never know when it might come in handy), some North Sea trivia:

• The North Sea was probably named by the Frisians, whose homeland lies to the South of it (and to the West of the East, or Baltic Sea; and to the north of what was once called the Zuiderzee, now the partially drained Ijsselmeer). Other names include Mare Frisium (‘Frisian Sea’) and Mare Germanicum (‘German Sea’).
• In 1904 near the Dogger Bank, Russian warships mistook English fishing vessels for Japanese ships and fired on them, creating a grave diplomatic incident.
• Landslides and earthquakes have been known to cause tsunamis in the North Sea; one of the earliest known examples being the Storegga Slides (occurring sometime between 8,150 and 6,000 BC), that caused a 20 m high tsunami that mainly affected the coasts of Scotland and the Faeroes. The most recent big one was the one caused by the 1931 Dogger Bank earthquake, flooding part of the British coast.
• The intriguingly named Silver Pit Crater, south of Doggers Bank, might be the result of an ancient asteroidal impact.
• The ‘Long Fourties’ and ‘Broad Fourteens’ are large areas in the North Sea where it is consistently 40 fathoms (73 m), respectively 14 fathoms (26 m) deep.
• The North Sea used to be home to populations of flamingos, pelicans, gray whales and the fascinating Great Auk (a northern-hemisphere penguin-like bird, hunted to extinction in the mid-19th century).
• Modern storm barriers should help prevent repetition of disastrous storm floods that caused much destruction and death in the past, such as the Julianenflut (‘Juliana Flood’, 1164), the Grote Mandrenke (‘Great Drowning of Men’, 1362) and the Great Flood of 1953.