Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 24, 2021

Rhodesia is nice this time of year…

I have a globe with the USSR on it. Don’t want to visit, though.

My map said that there’s a bridge here. glub, glub…

Yeah, now there’s a fine Frazzian thought. I prefer to read a historical fiction when I want to visit Prussia…

Somehow I always wind up where there be Tigers.

So it’s a school Atlas all right.

Then again, one could live on a road not shown in the atlas. Snow plows take a long time coming.

you know you can still get the Rand McNally’s Motor Carriers atlas or other wise know as the truckers map and they are updated yearly

There’s an XKCD cartoon with a flow chart on how to tell the age of a map by the names on it. First question: Istanbul or Constantinople? Search for XKCD map age

Lots of new names depend on the egos of the conquerors. And they last about as long as those who claim conquest.

Caulfield has opened the golden door to knowledge beyond his own world. He gets it.

We traced our family tree, and I’m a Pomeranian.

I’ve been to the USSR… in January.

Once in a while I wish I had kept the globe I received as a child, probably 70 years ago, just to look at the many name changes.

I hate to point this out, but historical maps are a lot easier to find on the internet.

I always wanted to visit the Carolingian Empire but only for as long as the TP I bring holds out.

Where geography meets history. In high school we were encouraged to take one or the other. Too bad, they are so complementary.

On old maps, you can find communities and home sites that all long forgotten. You can find things out hanging out in the map sections of libraries. One of my favorite books, PrairyErth, by William Least Heat-Moon, is a Deep Map!

Don’t kid yourself, kid* — internet maps aren’t updated instantly, either.

*Well, OK, since you’re a legitimate kid, I guess you’re qualified.

there were 17 independent countries in Africa in the 1960s; now there are 54, and Russia has broken up into i5. if we just relied on paper maps they would have to be updated too often which would mean too many trees would be wasted.

There’s so much landfill in and around New York City (the Dutch were past masters at it, don’tcha know) that you’d best be careful where you stand before going back in time—or at least wear a SCUBA suit.

One advantage of old maps is that they provide insight into quirks of modern roads. Queens Road in Charlotte, NC started out as a circumferential boulevard around the 1200 acre Myers Park development, to accommodate street car trolleys. As Charlotte developed around Myers Park, other major roads crossed Queens Road, often at curves, creating numerous intersections of “Queens Road and Queens Road”, to the continued consternation of many visitors.

That’s one of the things that I like as a historical geographer. Everyone is used to the usual 2 dimensions of maps; heck, with topographic maps, one can even get a sense of a third dimension. But with old maps, one gets to see the application of the fourth dimension, especially when doing a side-by-side comparison with a more recent map.

Prussia? Where you might last ten minutes.

How about Indo-China or Ceylon?

Maps of pre-WW1 Europe fascinate me.

There is always Nyasaland and Siam to see.

The Ottoman Empire’s foremost map publisher!

Pre-internet, it was standard for mapmakers to protect their copyright by taking one small street and bollixing it so they could catch anyone copying their work. Which is how, when we moved across the country and were supposed to meet up with relatives here in the mid-80’s, we spent forty-five very frustrated minutes with hungry small children in the back seat going up and down in a small neighborhood that clearly had nothing to do with what we were looking for, going, but the signs SAY and the map SAYS and it’s NOT!!! (Grrrr.) We were supposed to be on the other side of the highway, but you couldn’t know that from the bollixed map. We compared, and other maps showed clearly where that street really was. That experience left me grateful that the internet made such things obsolete. If we pay for a map, don’t lie to us.

Grab a map of a couple of years ago and visit a world without corona.