Interactive_documentary_the_fallen_of_world_war_ii_animates_devastating. Old Maps Online. 40 maps that explain the world. By Max Fisher By Max Fisher August 12, 2013 Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. So when we saw a post sweeping the Web titled "40 maps they didn't teach you in school," one of which happens to be a WorldViews original, I thought we might be able to contribute our own collection. Some of these are pretty nerdy, but I think they're no less fascinating and easily understandable. A majority are original to this blog, with others from a variety of sources.
[Additional read: How Ukraine became Ukraine and 40 more maps that explain the world] Click to enlarge. 40 more maps that explain the world. Maps seemed to be everywhere in 2013, a trend I like to think we encouraged along with August's 40 maps that explain the world. Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. You might consider this, then, a collection of maps meant to inspire your inner map nerd. I've searched far and wide for maps that can reveal and surprise and inform in ways that the daily headlines might not, with a careful eye for sourcing and detail.
I've included a link for more information on just about every one. Enjoy. 1. Data source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, World Bank. Those dots represent people: the brighter the dot, the more people. 2. Click to enlarge. Human beings first left Africa about 60,000 years ago in a series of waves that peopled the globe. 3. (Wikimedia commons) The Mongol conquests are difficult to fathom. 4. Click to enlarge. This map shows the Spanish and Portuguese empires at their height. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Watch 1000 Years of European Borders Change In 3 Minutes. 20 maps that never happened. Maps are a powerful way of illustrating not only the world that is, but worlds that never have been. What follow are not fictional maps — there's no Westeros or Middle Earth — but plans and hypotheticals that never came to pass.
You'll see military plans for invasions that didn't happen or conquests that were hoped-for and never achieved. You'll also find daring infrastructure schemes that would have remapped cities and even whole continents. There are proposals for political reform — some serious and some more fanciful — as well as deeply serious plans for entire independent nation-states that have never been brought to life. Welcome to maps of worlds that don't exist — but might. War Plans War Plan Red: The invasion of CanadaFollowing the 1927 Geneva Naval Conference, the US Army — evidently bored with the peace and prosperity of the 1920s — decided to draw up plans for a hypothetical war between the United States and the British Empire. Fantasy Political Reforms Infrastructure Projects.