Historical maps, their meaning and their uses

Last night's round table on the War of 1812 attracted an audience of 35, not bad for a rainy Friday night opposite a hockey game.  We had faculty, students and people from town, and they were interested enough to stick around right up to 10 pm.

One of the most interesting discussions concerned the role of Natives in the war and diplomacy of the time, and whether that role has been ignored or misrepresented, and still is.  One point at  issue was the map above, which was being used to display basic geography.  The priority of the maker was clearly to emphasize American expansion.  Notice how solid  the American states and territories look, and the lack of provincial boundaries in British territory.  Even  more remarkable is the absence of any Native settlements or territories.  This led one participant to state that the map was "false."

Yes and no, say I.  What practical meaning did the boundaries of the Mississippi Territory have in  1812?  Weren't the Creek Indian settlements attacked by Andrew Jackson a lot realer?  On the other hand the state boundaries established in the 1810s are real and practical today.

This  returns me to a point I made to my Crusade and Jihad students in our first class meeting, when I was showing them various maps depicting Christian and Muslim expansion in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  The maps "lied" (= "were false"), I said.

It is more accurate to say that ANY map, historical or otherwise, is very much an oversimplification for analytical or propagandistic purposes.

Thus I say that the appropriate response of a historian to a historical map is not to draw a quick conclusion but to ask more questions.

Which is pretty much what we  were doing with this map last night.

Europe?

Over at the New York Times blog site, Frank Jacobs has a long article on "Where is Europe?"

This nifty map is the least of it:

Football fans of London

I know people who will enjoy this map of London showing what districts support which teams.  Click on the map for a better view, and comment away!

Oh, MAN! More stumbling

...over marvelous online resources.

Namely, the Digital South Asia Library, which contains a complete version of the extraordinary A Historical Atlas of South Asia; and just when I had a use for this.

Carnivalesque returns, and brings us Antioch

Carnivalesque, the carnival of early history blogs, is back -- over at Cranky Professor. And the first of its links takes us to Zenobia: Empress of the East, whose author Judith Weingarten, a fan of all things associated with the Eastern Empire, left in May to travel to Hatay (or Antakya), the city that now arises from the spot where the ancient Antioch once stood. To let us abandoned readers share in some of the fun she looks at an interesting Turkish initiative to reconstruct the old city. It is some challenge, because the current incarnation of the settlement is entirely modern -- if you stretch the idea of modern just a little bit. Certainly there is nothing there to suggest a city that once thought of itself as Rome's rival.

Apparently that has not stopped the Turkish scholar, Dr Kayhan Kaplan of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Mustafa Kemal University in Hatay, who at this site has posted reconstruction of what the old city may have looked like, from four different angles. It looks like the site is entirely in Turkish, but you don't have to read Turkish to enjoy this.

As Judith Weingarten points out, there are limits to this kind of reconstruction, but it gives people something to argue about, and progress is possible:

Needless to say, archaeologists and historians are going to argue about his recreations for a good many years. In fact, Antiochepedia has already thrown down the gauntlet on nine points of topography (e.g., were the river branches narrower? should the island's southern tip be more pointed? that kind of stuff). For the rest of us, it is simply stunning and gives us a real "feel" of ancient Antioch.

I agree entirely with Antiochepedia: "In the good old days, Dr Kaplan might have been cheered along the Colonnaded Street for this job!"

There is more good stuff at Zenobia, and at Cranky Professor for that matter.

Image: Antioch as depicted on the Peutinger map, a medieval copy of a Roman original.

Foreign forces in Afghanistan

Here's a map from the BBC that would be far more useful if it didn't divide foreign troops into only two groups -- US and NATO -- which means for instance that we can't see where Canadians are or were (they've been reassigned). Even so, it is good to have.