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Strange Maps

A special series by Frank Jacobs.

Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."


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The Albanians are descendants of the Illyrians, an ancient Balkan people who preceded the Slavic populations surrounding their native territories. They presently have an independent nation – Albania, in their […]
So you’re a map nerd and you think you know about every cartographic anomaly in the world, from the bizarre Belgian enclave of Baarle-Hertog in the south of the Netherlands […]
Texas is a special state within the US – not only the biggest of the contiguous 48 states, but also culturally distinct. Furthermore, it was at one time an independent […]