For a larger version of this image, click here
One of my favorite imagination games to play when I am just being inside my own head is to imagine alternate history scenarios. You know, “What if the South won the Civil War?” or “What if the Crusades never happened?”, that sort of thing. I can spend quite a bit of time as I work through all the different possibilities and try to imagine what the world today would be like if things had turned out differently. There is an entire genre of fiction devoted to similar “alternate timeline” stories, too. Some of the books are more serious than others, some are just straight-up genre fiction written with the required alt-history backdrop to make the story more engaging.
Part of this pastime includes reimagining maps to fit the various changes history would have undergone. I can remember taking a map of the world from a copy of National Geographic when I was 12 or 13 and redrawing all the borders to represent a political map of Earth in some future time. As it turns out, I wasn’t too far off in some cases, creating a “United States of Europe” in Western Europe that fits today’s EU pretty well, and granting independence to many of the border republics of the U.S.S.R.
And then there’s a book that I read in college that’s completely non-fiction but also reimagines North America re-divided into nine different countries based on geography, culture and economic bases, “The Nine Nations of North America” by Joel Garreau. The book’s a little dated, and it would be great if he wrote a new edition, but the conceit is a good one and I often consider his ideas when I play these games in my head.
So I picked up on the map you see here right away when it was posted at Strange Maps recently. It might be a little hard to read in this small image, but if you click on the full-sized map, you’ll get it immediately. It’s North America redone to represent some likely changes to the political map if certain events in American, Canadian, and Mexican history had turned out differently. The original website for the map is here and includes a chronology of events that explain how the author imagined the changes to history and their consequences: for example, an early secession of the New England colonies (minus Vermont) from the United States, which in turn allowed the Confederate states to succeed in the Civil War. A Louisiana Purchase that did not include Louisiana, but eventually saw the French colonial Louisiana to declare independence after the re-establishment of the monarchy in France. Very noticeable are the several Native American nations which manage to keep the white settlers out.
I really enjoyed reading through the website (which appears to be dated to 1997!) and the author’s considerations of the vagaries of history, and comparing them to Garreau’s vision, which really does not take many historical events into consideration. It would be interesting as an exercise to see if one could bring them both together into yet another map.
Related Posts:
