45 Years is Enough!
While the world watched the events in Berlin, another Soviet ally in East-Central Europe suddenly collapsed: On November 9-10, after three-and-a-half decades in power, Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov was unceremoniously dumped. This poster - a map of the Bulgarian gulag - was circulated by the opposition Union of Democratic Forces during the spring 1990 election campaign.
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A History of the World in 100 Objects
Abstention Rate in Napoleonic Plebiscites
All regions of France did not support Napoleon equally. His rule aroused most enthusiasm in the east (a prerevolutionary border region crucial in the Napoleonic wars) and the center of the country, least in the west, which had long provided a home to royalist counterrevolution.
Abstension rate in Napoleonic plebiscites (shaded areas = those where the abstention rate exceeded 80 percent... Read More »
Africae tabula noua
This standard map of Africa came from a popular Atlas in the late sixteenth century. In a dramatic age of exploration, new information poured in from around the world through books and travel accounts that artists and geographers, like Abraham Ortelius, used to craft beautifully detailed maps of far off lands. By compiling the host of detailed descriptions before them and perhaps even their... Read More »
Afriterra, The Cartographic Free Library
Al-Idrisi's World Map
The Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq, most commonly known in the West as the Tabula Rogeriana ("The Book of Roger" in Latin), is a manuscript created by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi that contains a highly detailed, partial-world map and extensive descriptions of the seven climate zones represented on the map. Depicting the Eurasian continent and North Africa, Al-... Read More »
America Invertida (Inverted America)
We generally expect maps to convey the location of oceans and land masses accurately. But why do almost all maps and globes position North at the top and South at the bottom, when there is no up or down orientation of the universe? Furthermore, items located at the top of an image are usually understood to have more importance than those at the bottom, creating a hierarchical ordering of the... Read More »
American Centuries
American Colony in Jerusalem, 1870 to 2006
Analyzing Maps
The modules in Methods present case studies that demonstrate how scholars interpret different kinds of historical evidence in world history. In the video historian Gerald Danzer analyzes maps of the world. In the primary sources menu below, you can examine two world maps two maps of the world. The first, a Mercator projection, probably seems familiar to you because Mercator maps are among the... Read More »