From NPR and the Washington Post:

Hat tip to Matt MacLean.

Detail of 1880 “Conspectus of the History of (US) Political Parties,” an attempt to represent graphically just over a century of American politics.

Susan Schulten introduces this interesting antique item at Mapping the Nation.

I had never heard of a “conspectus,” which is a nineteenth-century term meaning “a comprehensive mental survey.” And that is exactly the idea. I have only reproduced the image here, and left out the extensive narrative that was designed to be laid out under the chart, which lists political events, Supreme Court decisions, and acts of Congress.

In fact, there’s so much detail that I wonder about the purpose of the chart. Perhaps the point was to collapse the chaos of change into a single view, one where a party’s power could be traced over time. The appeal seems to be to capture an overall state of change, of flux. Notice how much the chart resembles a a river. The metaphor is useful — the wider the river at any spot, the more “powerful” the party at that time. I’m particularly impressed by the representation of the turbulent 1850s, when the Whig Party disintegrated and the Republican Party was founded.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Google’s April 1st contribution.

Hat tip to Ben Slotznick.

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that digging a tunnel from my backyard in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania would take me to China, or maybe Australia. Good thing I never pursued the project. Now that I have a tool to identify where I’d be coming out, I see that I would have wound up all wet and far out to sea in the Indian Ocean.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

click for larger version

As this Politico map again demonstrates, outside a few urban enclaves, this is basically a Republican-voting center right country.

Who realized that Madagascar is as large as Britain?

“Scariest thing you’ve ever seen.” says my wife who sent me the link to this map illustrating the impact of the recession county by county.

Strange Maps:

This map shows Europe dominated by three so-called ‘alcohol belts’, the northernmost one for distilled spirits, a middle one for beer and the southernmost one for wine. Each one’s existence and extension is determined by a mix of culture and agriculture.

It seems oversimplified to me, aquavit and vodka are hardly identical, and surely Scotland is misplaced.

I think a more detailed New World alcohol map would be interesting. You’d have grain alcohol in Canadian Indian Reservation woods, followed by a long Maritime Rum belt. Flavored gins in French-speaking Quebec. Scotch in the BosWash coastal corridor. A swatch of Rye from Pennsylvania down through Maryland. Bourbon in the South. Canadian Whiskey where? Michigan and Upper Canada, possibly. Beer in the Heartland. White Wine in the suburbs.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Displays terrorism events and suspicious activities. link

map

A blog much worth visiting devoted to maps. Today’s lead entry is an 18th century German map of “the Empire of Love.”

Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.