When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/1524040709862576131

by yread • 4 years ago

385 169 4 years ago

twitter.com

spicyusername• 4 years ago

In a way it would be surprising if we didn't see trends like this.

Reminds me of this quote:

Everything is what it is because it got that way. - D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form

enasterosophes• 4 years ago

I had the same thought. What, do people think the politics of a region gets routinely shuffled without any influence from geographical or historical context?

Ozzie_osman• 4 years ago

Great... Now do the Middle East. That one should be fun.

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's.. the seljuk turks

dijit• 4 years ago

That's really cool.

I take exception with it being regarded as a pet-peeve. I think people who are broadly similar should be effectively represented, and sometimes that means having a seperate government.

To make the point clear (but not to say anything specific about socio-economics): it is fairer for socialists to have a socialist government, and hardcore capitalists to have a capitalist government- and not have to end up fighting constantly.

So, I'm happy that the people pictured are able to be represented independent of each other.

unmole• 4 years ago

The author seems to be a French speaker living in Paris. His usage was probably unintentional.

cheeseface• 4 years ago

In the end, culture and values change surprisingly slowly.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

True, but they do change; if e.g. an empire hangs around for long enough, the original culture will be lost or assimilated. See for example Christianity throughout Europe, plenty of examples of erased or merged cultures to the point where nobody knows what happened before. Or the lasting influence of colonization throughout the world. Or the change of culture and language that the US has throughout the Hollywood media-consuming world; listen to random people in western Europe and count how many Anglicisms they use in their native language.

mkotowski3• 4 years ago

Some more examples: - apparently ancient Egyptians had this problem with their own past, but I don’t remember where I read this. If anyone has a source, I would be thankful. - pre-indoeuropean language families in Europe, only Basque remained that we know of

tormeh• 4 years ago

The fascinating thing about the Poland example is that the Germans living in modern fay west-Poland were moved out and into what's now Germany. So the culture and people are gone. What you see are the political effects of better infrastructure.

m0llusk2• 4 years ago

Sort of, but it is more like echoes. In the first and possibly most well known case the previously Prussian areas of Poland had all of the ethnic Germans forcibly removed. Because of this abrupt and extreme change there must be something else going on since the culture and values in fact changed quite suddenly and yet differentiation endures.

SergeGilette• 4 years ago

The work is just awesome. i'm not a fan of twitter, but i just subscribed. It's very interesting to see with evidence that history even centurys old weights a lot. Having the feeling it does is one thing, seing proof is another.

thinkingemote• 4 years ago

Peeve: To cause to be annoyed or resentful. synonym: annoy.

These are not pet peeves at all, they are the persons pet loves. All examples are a type of "look at this great example, designed not to annoy or cause resentment at all, just the opposite! Aren't they cool and amazing?"

300bps• 4 years ago

I studied French for four years and I'm sure there are all kinds of things that I say in that language that would confuse native French speakers as much as François Valentin confused us with an errant use of "pet peeve".

I think he probably meant to say, "pet projects".

not2b2• 4 years ago

My favorite is when a French colleague wanted to send some "demands" to a customer. He meant "questions", "demander" = "to ask", he didn't realize that "demand" has a very different implication in English. Fortunately this was caught before he sent that email.

zen_of_prog• 4 years ago

My theory is that he misinterpreted https://xkcd.com/1138/

jccalhoun• 4 years ago

I was very confused by that thread. I kept scrolling to find where he explained why it was a pet peeve of his.

robbomacrae• 4 years ago

Same. Lets not tell any SEO/journalists this technique for keeping us reading an article we might have otherwise dismissed!

test1235• 4 years ago

Author admits his mistake:

François Valentin @Valen10Francois · 16h I realize that I've used that word completely incorrectly for ages!

https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/15241607219023544...

irrational2• 4 years ago

Thank you for the link. I too was confused how this could possibly be a pet peeve. I wonder what term he actually meant? Pet project?

vehemenz2• 4 years ago

Thank you. The overlays are enlightening, and I was confused by the title and the lack of negative commentary accompanying these maps.

Mordisquitos• 4 years ago

Another more serious mistake is that further down the thread he refers to the DDR as a "former Soviet Republic", which it absolutely was not.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

You can see this more locally in the US with places that had redlining.

Research published in September 2020 overlaid maps of the highly affected COVID-19 areas with the HOLC maps, showing that those areas marked “risky” to lenders because they contained minority residents were the same neighborhoods most ravaged by COVID-19.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

jhgb• 4 years ago

I thought that "political maps" simply meant sovereign state borders (as it does in Czech, German, and possibly other languages as well), and that this would be about unchanging borders. For example Bohemia has had some pretty stable natural borders. But in this case "political map" means a map of election results? Is that a common usage in English?

smcl• 4 years ago

In English it has in my experience just referred to maps that emphasise human layers more than geological ones. Like you would see national borders, state or county borders, settlements marked on the map, rather than contours, terrain etc. I guess this does make it suitable for looking at electoral results but I think the “political” here refers to this - administrative divisions, not election or polling

gbear605• 4 years ago

As a native English speaker “political map” means to me both specifically “sovereign state borders” and generally “a map that relates to politics”. If I’m on Google Maps and there’s a button that says “show political map”, I would expect country borders, but if someone tells me “here are some political maps” then I’m expecting anything that has to do with politics.

t-32• 4 years ago

To clarify what was said by the other respondents, "political maps" referring to sovereign state borders is a term composed of two words (and is probably one word in some other languages?), while "political maps" referring to maps of politics is two terms composed to express a modification of the idea of a map (which is almost always a political map in the first sense unless otherwise stated).

weeksie• 4 years ago

Whenever I see this kind of persistence, it underscores how important path dependency is when trying to understand how things got to be the way they are.

From legacy software to political systems, when there's cruft or weird behavior there's almost always some environmental factor that shaped the decision to build it that way, even (especially) if the people who made the decision weren't conscious of why.

lordleft• 4 years ago

From Tristram Shandy:

"Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it."

rjbwork• 4 years ago

Chesterton's fence.

I admit that when I was younger I was much more eager to just tear it all down and start anew...but with experience I have come to see things are never quite so easy. Things are the way they are for a reason, and it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.

api• 4 years ago

it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.

People misinterpret Chesterton's fence as an argument against changing things, but it's actually just about what I quoted above. It has no verdict on whether or not something should be changed. It just argues that you should make a strong effort to figure out why it is how it is before attempting to do so.

I'd argue that if you don't at least do the exercise your attempts to change things will probably fail, since whatever you try to do will likely fail to capture something necessary in the old system.

Keep in mind though that it doesn't always work. Sometimes the reason for the fence is forgotten. Sometimes the reason is deeply perverse and there never was a good reason. Sometimes the reason is obsolete.

tshaddox4• 4 years ago

The problem with a naive interpretation of Chesterton's fence is that it encourages stasis in cases where we don't have the knowledge or resources necessary to "fully" understand the reasons (or whether any even exist) for the current state of affairs. And in fact, there's no way to guarantee that we "fully" understand all reasons for the current state of affairs. Thus Chesterton's fence essentially deteriorates into the precautionary principle, which is bad epistemology. This quote from Wikipedia's section on criticism of the precautionary principle applies just as well to Chesterton's fence:

"of the two available interpretations of the principle, neither are plausible: weak formulations (which hold that precaution in the face of uncertain harms is permissible) are trivial, while strong formulations (which hold that precaution in the face of uncertain harms is required) are incoherent." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#The_pr...

pstuart• 4 years ago

Brings to mind the 5 monkeys experiment: https://www.proserveit.com/blog/five-monkeys-experiment-less...

b112• 4 years ago

Sadly, all that will come from this article, is that a PHB who knows nothing about our field, will read a random tech ad (which is written as a blog/review/article), and proclaim that product X is perfect, whatdayamean it's not usable for us, it's not even helpful?!, just deploy it or you're fired, you stupid monkeys.

philwelch4• 4 years ago

This experiment is one of my pet peeves, at least in terms of how it's usually used as a parable. Yes, in this particular situation, the monkeys are being irrational. But they are only being irrational because they are in a completely artificial environment that was deliberately constructed for the purpose of gaslighting them.

derbOac2• 4 years ago

One thing that's become very interesting to me is whether there's a way to formalize the presence of these kinds of path dependencies in models (sociological, psychological, epidemiological, system, whatever) so they don't become these kind of implicit ghost (butterfly?) effects that are mismodeled and misinterpreted. How do we avoid overlooking them? Seems like it's something that happens a lot.

falling_• 4 years ago

Isn’t that the point of version control? Just make a list of (encountered problem) -> (enacted solution) mappings to keep track.

philosopher1234• 4 years ago

You’d love Freud

mkotowski3• 4 years ago

Quite funny, when I read the title before checking the link, I first thought exactly about Poland voting preferences.

For anyone interested: the difference in voting exists, because the east part of Poland is less developed and more rural in general. I remember that it is so in part because of how the Russian occupation was mostly of “steal as much as we can” variety, especially compared to Germans. It is also one of the reasons that the west side has much denser railway network.

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

The territory that today is western poland was part of Germany pre-1939. It wasn't an occupation, it was just that territory of that country. Afaik, most of what was eastern Poland pre-1939 and was occupied by the Russians, nowadays is no longer Polish territory. The boundaries migrated west.

adrian_b• 4 years ago

Yes indeed.

The Poland of after WWII has a similar area with the Poland of before WWII, but it has moved a lot towards West.

So the winners have been the Russians and the losers have been the Germans.

Poland was lucky because its large territorial losses to the Russian invaders have been somewhat compensated with territories taken from Germany.

The other Western neighbors of Russia have been much less lucky. The larger neighbors (Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania) have lost large territories stolen by Russia without any compensation, while the smaller neighbors (the 3 lesser Baltic countries) have been incorporated completely in the Soviet Union.

I have written "the 3 lesser Baltic countries" because prior to WWII Finland was counted as the 4th Baltic country, since all 4 countries occupy the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, and they all form an enclave between Germanic-speaking people to the West and Slavic-speaking people to the East (the main languages in Finland and Estonia are Uralic, while the main languages in Lithuania and Latvia belong to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages).

For example, in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact from 1939, the Russians have written explicitly their intentions to occupy all the 4 Baltic countries (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) and also Romania, and the Germans agreed with this, while the Russians agreed that the countries of Western Europe should belong to Germany.

mkotowski3• 4 years ago

Part of it was, yes. But going by the image from the tweet, there are many regions recovered, that belonged to the Second Polish Republic and still contained quite sizeable Polish-speaking population. [0]

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages1931_Po...

em-bee• 4 years ago

well, it depends on how far back you look in history. poland was split up between prussia, austria and russia in the 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#/media/File:Rzeczpospol...

fguerraz• 4 years ago

This seems to be complete BS to me: all I see in these maps is a lot of confirmation bias, the author really sees what he wants to see.

Some maps do overlap very well but in that case it only looks interesting because we want to see a causation link where there is correlation.

So sorry for the harsh words but I actually find this upsetting.

kllvql2• 4 years ago

I completely understand your point. Misinterpreting correlation with causation is something that frequently bothers me in writings and discussions. In this case, however, I did find the correlations the author pointed out interesting. I did not interpret this as causal (the author may have made that claim, but I was more interested in the maps).

I still found it really cool to see how much an impact geography and path dependence has on our current state. I may be over generous, but when they show maps like the Alabama one where an ancient sediment deposit is correlated with farm size, racial makeup, and election results I think they are giving an example of how there can be common causes tied to geographies over long periods of time.

You're completely correct that simply overlaying the Austrian Empire's borders on a map of Romania's election results does not prove a causal link. It is much more likely that there is an underlying common cause (geographic feature, ethnic makeup, etc.). Pointing out these correlations is fun to me, as I'm able to speculate on the possible common causes.

yolo69420• 4 years ago

I don't quite think you understand. The data presented here absolutely does not allow for the conclusions you make particularly in your second paragraph. In fact the reality could be exactly the opposite way (i.e. geography has no influence on things like modern election results whatsoever) and you wouldn't know it based on this data.

Think about the countless numbers of ways you could overlay any sort of historical map over some map representing any kind of relevant statistic. A smaller but still countless number of them will have strong correlations by pure chance alone. This is a simple fact of statistics.

The author here is filtering out exactly those that happen to have those kinds of correlations backed by some preconceived ideas the author has about how the causality is supposed to work and uses them to fuel his hypotheses, while ignoring the uncountable number of map overlays that don't show these correlations.

This is bog standard selection bias.

vehemenz2• 4 years ago

Just because the author used only confirmatory evidence doesn't mean that there isn't a correlation or a causal factor at play. The author didn't posit a theory; he merely pointed out that the maps are interesting. Which they are.

Sure, you could probably pick arbitrary political boundaries from different times and create maps that show the opposite trend. However, I would be surprised if there weren't correlative or causal factors, given that historical people reproduced and, in the case of many agrarian peoples, didn't migrate. It's possible that our collective ignorance of history makes this appear to be a novel fact, when we shouldn't be too surprised.

AshamedCaptain• 4 years ago

In academic language this is called "the many labels you can put to a population density chart".

codefreeordie• 4 years ago

Is this actually different from when Matt Parker discovered ancient alien wisdom by plotting the lines between Woolworths stores?

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwEYamjXpA&t=2461s)

Some of these maps are for time period not that distant from each other where the correlation is pretty straightforward, and those are probably telling at-least-partly-true narratives. For others, it's less clear. How many different modern and ancient maps are there which could conceivably have interesting (spurious) correlations?

Vinnl• 4 years ago

One interesting takeaway here is that it's somewhat likely that your own political convictions might be pretty different if only you had come to live elsewhere - sometimes not even that far away.

guerrilla• 4 years ago

Probably... But this assumes there's no biological (or other) component that isn't stronger.

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

I don't really get why this annoys the author though?

jmull• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure it doesn't and that the author misused an idiom (and probably is not a native English speaker).

m0llusk2• 4 years ago

It doesn't. He explains in the comments that he had long misunderstood this phrase. This is the first time that his misuse was noticed and corrected.

qsdf381002• 4 years ago

I’m sceptical, it’s too easy to cherry-pick data to make it look supportive of one’s political agenda. Not saying it’s the case here, I just wouldn’t trust too much "obvious" patterns and easy to understand maps from a twitter thread. More often than not, such threads are omitting data that doesn’t support the view of the author. Reality is rarely obvious and simple.

alephxyz• 4 years ago

It's more of a weak indirect correlation between historical map -> economic prosperity -> political preferences. The modern political maps for France, Germany, Portugal and Romania at least are essentially proxies for GDP per capita (not sure about the others).

hammock2• 4 years ago

One might add something to the front of your analysis, as maps don't form out of thin air. In fact, those lines on a map are formally called "political borders."

historical governance -> historical map & economic prosperity -> political preferences

LeanderK• 4 years ago

I totally assumed the examples to be cherry picked but it's still fun to look at. Not every past border is visible on modern maps, but still some are clearly the consequence of those, for example the german maps where the old GDR is the reason for the high rate of atheism or popularity of more extreme parties.

I think that often past borders are the consequence of different demographics, which clearly translate into modern differences.

hammock2• 4 years ago

By definition the examples are cherry-picked. I noticed he didn't pull up old Visigoth ranges, nomadic farmers or Babylonian borders.

That doesn't take away from the insight that certain political histories still resonate today.

Just as you can find examples of geologic features (like mountain ranges or rivers) influencing political divides, so too can you find examples of geologic features not influencing them. Doesn't mean the former is "misleading" or something.

derbOac2• 4 years ago

When I was reading through the examples I sort of wondered why sometimes these geopolitical phenomena persist, and other times not.

For example, at one time long ago in the US, politics were dominated by "frontier-interior" versus "urban-coastal" dynamics, and then as the US grew, and the civil war came about, it established a lot of the geopolitical patterns evident today (although I'd argue the urban-rural distinction is maybe reemerged in a more distributed way today).

To explain cherry-picking versus something else, you'd want a theory for why patterns sometimes change and other times remain the same.

orbital-decay• 4 years ago

Pretty much this. Without deep historical analysis, this doesn't mean anything. It's like amateur etymology that is based on how similar certain words are, which typically gets things laughably wrong.

not2b2• 4 years ago

Oh, come on: he had numerous examples from all over the world where the political implications are quite different. The author's view was simply that old political boundaries have lingering effects, and he demonstrated that very well.

qsdf381002• 4 years ago

As I said, I’m not saying it’s the case here. It’s just collateral damage of the disinformation age we live in. I’m not trusting "trends" in data unless I spend 1 or more hours looking it up myself and hoping I can avoid being mislead.

Here I guess it didn’t help that the first map was trying to convey a link between Macron voters and British inhabitants. Anytime I see suggested links between voters, culture, immigration, etc. I’m prudent. It’s surely interesting in its own, but I can’t resist asking myself "why is the author mentioning this? Did he came across this data and then found interesting correlations? Or was he looking for trends that would bring support to some views he has? It’d be ok-ish if such approach was open, like, "here’s my thesis, and here’s data supporting this thesis." But when there’s no thesis, just "interesting trends", pretending it’s up to the reader to make his own conclusions… More often than not, it’s a dishonest cherry-picking with some more or less forced untold conclusions waiting to be made.

So, I just stay away from such articles, even if I know some of them aren’t dishonest. It’s collateral damage of the disinformation war.

ssnistfajen2• 4 years ago

Absolutely right to be skeptical. The regional demographics in many of these overlapped regions have gone through comprehensive changes over centuries under drastically different regimes. The map about English posessions in 1154 vs. first round of French presidential election is just an absolute straw-grasping joke. ~900 year's worth of cultural, demographic, and economic shifts reduced to basic visual pattern recognition AKA the thing that causes people to see Jesus on a piece of toast.

The map about Charlemagne's empire vs. 6 original members of the future EU is a joke too. The latter was a product of the reality of post-WWII European politics (Iron Curtain, Allied occupation of Germany and Austria, and Spain being a neutral country ruled by de facto dictatorship). It's fun to look at patterns and think they are neat. It is absolutely not fine to pretend these resemblances somehow have a direct & causal relationship without properly navigating the long and complex multi-faceted history behind them.

dec0dedab0de• 4 years ago

I wonder if things are going to change significantly with all of the covid related movement.

perrylaj• 4 years ago

Anecdotally, the movement I've seen largely results in consolidation of 'like-minds', rather than a culture-mixing diaspora that results in a greater balance of varied perspectives. I hope my limited experience isn't the norm, but I suspect it is.

Ancapistani• 4 years ago

I agree, from a US perspective.

Prior to COVID, it seemed like most people who moved long distances did so either for financial opportunity or to “come back home”. During COVID (and up to now) it seems like a lot of people are moving to places they’re more politically/ideologically/socially comfortable.

I think part of that is due to the expanded availability of remote work - but not all. My social circles are predominately conservative, and several of them have left jobs and took a significant cut in pay to move to more rural areas because they wanted to be away from the city. A couple of the more liberal people moved the opposite direction for the opposite reason.

Imnimo2• 4 years ago

Not sure I totally buy the Mexico one. The correspondence just isn't as strong as in some of the other ones, and in some places is confounded by modern state borders.

soared• 4 years ago

I don’t know that these are all cause and effect, but just interesting overlays. The Mexico one is clear to Americans - people who immigrate from Mexico choose to stay nearer to Mexico. Similar cultures, weather, etc. The areas previously being a part of Mexico is just coincidence.

InitialLastName2• 4 years ago

There were a substantial number of people of Spanish-Imperial descent (of a variety of conditions) who didn't just move south when the border moved. Even now you see old families who identify as Mexican with the submotto "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us". Keep in mind that much of that area was under Spanish and/or Mexican control for almost twice as long as it has been in the US (~1550-1846 vs 1846-present).

Imnimo2• 4 years ago

Sure, I just mean that the line is a lot fuzzier than most of the other examples. Like if you showed me just the modern Polish map in the first one, I could clearly draw a pretty accurate approximation of the historical German border. But I don't think you could get nearly as accurate of a historical Mexican border from the modern population map. And in few areas where you can, it's also a modern border (Texas-Louisiana for example).

It's just a less compelling example than the others.

warpech2• 4 years ago

You can see the result of the 123-year partitioning of Poland on many maps, to the extent that it has become a meme:

1. the population of deer and boars: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...

2. the modern railway network: https://ziemianarozdrozu.pl/artykul/2861/mamy-%E2%80%9Enie-p...

3. the percentage of flats without a bathroom: https://www.miesiecznik.znak.com.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

4. the percentage of companies in the real estate sector: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...

5. unmarried couples with children: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...

6. the area of asbestos roofing: https://wbdata.pl/mapa-azbestu-w-polsce/

7. families where kids get gifts for Easter: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...

8. the name for Santa Claus: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/posts/123501...

9. town names starting with the letter A: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...

10. average farm size: https://biqdata.wyborcza.pl/biqdata/7,159116,22094987,polski...

Bayart• 4 years ago

The partitioning of Poland or its « migration » to the West ? Because as far as I'm aware, the split is due to the Western part being formerly German (including its population) rather than the Polish people itself having been split. Polish people are welcome to correct me, I'm not too familiar with history in this region aside from the broad stokes.

krzyk6• 4 years ago

Only parts were strictly German. And the German population was moved out to new borders, and Polish population from east (parts of current Ukraine, Belarussia and Latvia)

warpech2• 4 years ago

You are referring to the idea that some of these phenomena might not be due to the era of partitioning that ended in 1918 [1] but to the territorial changes after WW2 [2], in which people from former Eastern territories were relocated and mixed with the population of the "Regained Lands" in the West.

Interesting observation. It is hard to tell it apart, because it is the same line but different time.

I am no historian, so I shouldn't even try explaining. But for me, the "partitioning" explanation makes more sense, because during the communist time after WW2 there was a strong trend towards the unification of the country. If not for that, we would see even stronger divides at the other sides of the partition lines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_Territories

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

That's pretty dank alright.

daveslash3• 4 years ago

Something similar that I find both fascinating and heart-breakingly tragic: The "Black Belt" in the U.S. Deep South. The Black Belt is both a geological term used to refer to the rich & dark soil [0] and a geopolitical term to refer to the high percentage of African Americans [1]. During the Cretaceous period, the shore-line at the time ran through the middle of Alabama and Mississippi, depositing rich organic deposits, which in turn allowed for plantations to thrive in those parts of the deep south. Even nearly 160 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, those counties still have some of the highest percentages of African American Populations. Overlaying the population demographic map on a a map of the cretaceous shoreline shows a correlation [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(geological_formati... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_Sou... [2] https://politicartoons.livejournal.com/4422659.html

333c• 4 years ago

Yep, this is cool, and it's mentioned in the thread!

daveslash3• 4 years ago

Oh! So it is!!! Oops, I didn't scroll down enough on the Twitter Thread to see! My bad - thank you!

fsckboy4• 4 years ago

heart-breakingly tragic

African Americans are glad to be living in the US, and they're deeply enmeshed in the fabric of American society. Slavery was a bad part of history (and of the present where it still exists) but it's not more "heart-breakingly tragic" that a large number of African Americans today live on fertile land in the Old South any moreso than a large number of Aficans living on all sorts of land including not-so-fertile in Africa.

bag_boy3• 4 years ago

I did not know that African Americans got together, had a vote, and decided that they’re happy to live in the US!

EdwardDiego• 4 years ago

Huh, didn't realise that the Voice of African Americans was a member of HN.

MomoXenosaga• 4 years ago

I encourage people to read about Liberia. It's one of those hilarious episodes of American- African American relations that makes learning about history so interesting (and they will never teach it at school).

whycombinetor• 4 years ago

What's heartbreakingly tragic about this? Your statements reads as if a county having a high percentage of African American residents is negative.

bag_boy3• 4 years ago

Most of African Americans who live in the BB are descendants of slaves. They didn’t want to be in the black belt.

tshaddox4• 4 years ago

It's the chattel slavery that's tragic.

mike006322• 4 years ago

I think you're ignoring the mistreatment of Black people in the black belt. For example, recently when Alabama instituted its voter ID laws it closed every DMV in the black belt so that Black people wouldn't have access to get IDs and vote.

dillondoyle2• 4 years ago

The naming irony / play on words. It's tragic because of this fertile 'black belt' slavery was able to exist profitably in that region.

bryanrasmussen2• 4 years ago

depositing rich organic deposits, which in turn allowed for plantations to thrive in those parts of the deep south.

that is to say, the rich organic deposits of the black belt allowed slavery in the plantation model, creating the black belt as a racial profile.

julienreszka• 4 years ago

It's just a misleading graph.

shaftoe444• 4 years ago

English historian Robert Tombs has lots of good examples of this for English history. Typically I can't find a good picture now but English Civil War vs Brexit voting patterns is a good example: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/files/2018/03/Screen-Shot-201....

NeoTar• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what I am supposed to be concluding from this map.

Is the claimed correlation between Parliamentarian or Royalist support and Leave/Remain?

As an example: two Remain areas - Oxford and Brighton - one consistently royalist, the other consistently parliamentarian. Cornwall - supporting leave - consistently royalist, Kent - also supporting leave - consistently parliamentarian.

rootsudo• 4 years ago

So what came first? The people who live there and their opinions or observations and borders?

codeflo• 4 years ago

It looks like several territories that were once ruled by Austria tend to vote more to the right, if I'm reading the maps correctly. Is that a coincidence, or is there anything specific about the history of the Austrian Empire that (seemingly) caused generation-spanning right-wing resentment in its populace?

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

I saw this phenomenon in practice in the Czech Republic... You see, Czechs and Slovaks are almost the same people with almost the same language. The historical difference? The Czech Republic was part of the Holy Roman Empire while Slovakia was part of Hungary for most of the same period.

hk__2• 4 years ago

Some examples, especially the one about the "English" possessions in 1154 vs. elections results in 2022 vs where Brits are living in 2020 look very fishy. You have to try really hard if you want to see (or invent) a correlation between those, because they really don’t match at all.

ssnistfajen2• 4 years ago

England and France in 1154 are practically different nations with very different cultures compared to England and France in 2022, not to mention nine centuries' worth of evolving relations between those two.

Any pattern can resemble each other when they are approximated on large enough scales because then all differences would be wiped out. Geopolitical boundaries do often survive in some forms throughout history, as we can see some resemblances of the divisions in Medieval France vs. modern French departments. However this is the product of mainly geographical divisions (terrain such as rivers, mountains, plateaus, etc.) and in Brittany's case, an ethnic culture historically unique relative to the rest of France.

twic• 4 years ago

At some point i read that the reason the south-west of England is a stronghold for the Liberal Democrat party is due to the soil: i think it was that the soil there is suitable for dairy farming, and something about the economic structure of dairy farming led its well-off population to support the Liberals rather than the Tories, and that has persisted. But i can neither remember the explanation clearly, or find a source for it now. Sorry!

rodelrod2• 4 years ago

In many cases, because both overlap with geographical features: the Carpathians in Romania, the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Ukraine, the green mountainous Portugal north of the Tagus vs the flat "montado" landscape to the south.

thrdbndndn2• 4 years ago

because both overlap

It's easy to see why old empires/countries were divided by geographical features due to military reasons. But why would it affect the current-day political climate directly?

I think the causal relation is more like

    Geo -> old empire -> (more things) -> current day politics

like the original post implied, than

    Geo -> old empire
    Geo -> current day politics

as you implied; unless I missed your point.

Edit: on a second thought, I think a factor that supports your point is that geographical feature would affect corresponding industries in certain area regardless of "historical divisions". Maybe this is what you mean?

rodelrod2• 4 years ago

Putting it in these terms, what I'm trying to say is something like:

  geography → economy → old empire

  geography → economy → current day politics

The biggest caveat to this is that the importance of geography is conditioned by technology, and technology changes over time. So a more detailed model could be something like:

  geography + current tech → agriculture/commerce/industry/military → economy/culture → politics

See how the dominant powers changed with the shift from bronze to iron or with the development of open ocean navigation.

retrac• 4 years ago

If you look at human genetic populations, particularly several haplogroups prevalent among the first peoples to re-settle Europe after the ice age, and the Middle Eastern peoples they came from, as well as a later Y DNA group associated with the Germanic expansion in prehistory, the low prevalence areas today basically still outline the borders of the Roman Empire at its peak.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

Traveling around the Balkans, the old political divisions are absolutely striking.

The longer the rule of the Ottoman empire, the less developed the region tends to be. With the exception of Istanbul proper, of course, it was the main beneficiary of all the plunder.

Edit: I am writing this from a vacation in Slovenia, which is basically a Slavic-speaking Austria, with the exceptions of cities like Koper and Piran, which look like a Slavic-speaking Italy.

odiroot• 4 years ago

Ironically, the first map with Poland although very popular (it comes up on Reddit on a weekly basis) doesn't explain much.

It's the part not shown there that matters. The Russian partition (and to a lesser extent Austrian one) was the cause of the area in blue being poor and underdeveloped.

There was nothing particularly great in being under Prussian (German) occupation. It's that Russian occupation was so much worse, hell bent on robbing Poland on everything of any value.

diordiderot• 4 years ago

It seems you make a claim in the first paragraph... Then provide reasoning to dispute it in the second?

fsckboy4• 4 years ago

makes a claim in the first paragraph (eastern half is the way it is because russian occupied) and provides clarifying context in the second (and not because there was anything good about german occupation in west)

mcdonje• 4 years ago

Geopolitical version of technical debt.

Archelaos• 4 years ago

Those who want to dive deeper into the interrelation between history, geography, sociology and mentalities, I want to point to the Annales school[1], a group of French historians that formed in the late 1920s and had a big impact on historical studies, first in France and later world-wide. They are famous for their interest in what they called the "longue durée"[2], long-term historical processes.

However, one must be very careful not to draw too hasty conclusions from supposedly simple geographical correlations. Two example from the Twitter thread:

"West Germany (1949-1990) was extraordinarily similar to Germania as planned by Caesar Augustus c. 1 AD, to East Francia at the Treaty of Verdun in 843 AD, and to the Confederation of the Rhine in 1808." -- Whether there existed really an elaborated, dedicated plan to extent Roman rule up to the Elbe, is quite controversial among historians. Be that as it may, the Romans where not successful anyway, so hypothetical borders East and North of the limes could not have had any practical impact. -- The borders of the Treaty of Verdun are indeed quite similar to those of West-Germany. But it lasted only 27 years (from 843 to the Treaty of Meerssen in 870), when its Western border moved more Eastwards (and even more in 880 with the Treaty of Ribemont). -- The Confederation of the Rhine was a short-lived alliance of Napolionic client states. It was formed in 1806, its extent in 1808, Mecklenburg and Saxonia, does not really fit the borders of later West-Germany and by 1812 Napoleon incorporated the Netherlands and all of North-West Germany up to the Elbe into France. -- So this similarities are simple coincidences. There are geographical elements (the Rhine, the Elbe, ...) which played a role in defining borders from time to time. But there are really a lot of them during the centuries, with the borders constantly changing.[3] So it is no wonder that one finds something that roughly fits modern borders at some time in the past.

As to the maps of "Catholicism and Nazism" (or rather Protestantism and Nazism): This maps clearly show that the election results from 5 March 1933 of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party) correlate with Protestantism. However, the conclusion that Protestants were on average more responsible in Hitler's coming to power is not compelling. Even though Hitler had already become Reichs-Chancelor on 30 January, the NSDAP received "only" 43.9 % of the votes. What finally established his dictatorship was the "Enabling act" of 24 March 1933. Only the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) voted against it.[4] (The Communists were already been arrested or in hiding.) If you now look at a map of the opposing SPD's election results from 1933, you will see that it is also confessionally correlated, but this time with Protestantism.[5] To understand all this, one has to consider that there existed a dedicated Catholic party, the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (or short: "Das Zentrum"), that had a considerable loyal following of voters. This party played no role in the Protestant parts of Germany. Alas, when it become dangerous to oppose Hitler, this Catholic party sided with Hitler and only the (more "Protestant") SPD resisted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e

[3] Just look at this map from showing the extent of the "Holy Roman Empire" during the early 13th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire#/media/File:...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933#Voting_on...

[5] https://www.wahlen-in-deutschland.de/wuKarteSPD.htm

blfr• 4 years ago

Almost certainly what you see in Poland is not persistence of old but fresh settlement. After WW2, Poland recovered these western lands from Germany but lost others in the east to USSR. A lot of people moved from there.

https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/15240407292108881...

Why these political maps are more likely to be caused by internal migration and not historical holdovers? Because the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO, yellow-orange on the map) received more votes in areas with more (internal) immigration. Not just in the west but also in the cities in the east.

While these aren't unrelated, this is a long-time rooted vs freshly settled divide more than it is historical.

BenoitP• 4 years ago

There's an interesting one linking geology and politics in the north of France, kinda like the Alabama one:

A coal basin [1] predicts low revenues [2] and political votes for far right [3].

I'm no political or demographical historian, but the gist of the story IMHO is that there was a coal boom. People settled there, and not much else was invested in the region. So when coal mines went bust, no other industry could convert the workers; it created low revenue zones and it fed discontent, which can be seen in the votes.

"Au nord, c'était les corons", as the song says. [4]

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassin_minier_du_Nord-Pas-de-C...

[2] https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/francepixels/#map/revenus/Rd...

[3] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/elections/infographies-resultats...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coron_(house)

michaelcampbell• 4 years ago

Much of the recent book "There's Nothing For You Here" by Fiona Hill talks about some of this effect in her northern England upbringing.

rob_c• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing OP

scyzoryk_xyz• 4 years ago

One other way to think about this particular map of Poland/Germany is in context of 19th century industrialization. After WW2 the entire western half of Poland benefitted from remnants of a robust industrial infrastructure - especially rail. Here in Lower Silesia we still benefit from it in many ways.

dillondoyle2• 4 years ago

Those are some cool maps. I love the Paris one.

Shows how relatively static we are in class, location (often driven by class), and geographic connections (family). Not a lot of movement on the whole

refurb• 4 years ago

The issue I have with analyses like this is that it's binary in some instances - if a district votes conservative 50.1% vs. 49.9% it's given the same weight as one that votes 99.9% vs 0.01%. The color coding skews the underlying dynamics.

culi• 4 years ago

In that same vein of thought, try overlaying a map of US slavery use (preferably on the county level) with a modern map of Republicans vs Democrats lol

dhosek• 4 years ago

I was kind of hoping for some maps showing the influence of the Soviet Union’s westward displacement through Central Europe after WWII. They took bits of the Eastern frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and then gave those countries chunks of German as compensation. The mass displacement of people because of these border shifts was unprecedented. Pretty much anyone of German ethnicity anywhere in Central Europe that wasn’t Germany or Austria had to move to Germany or Austria. The Eastern border of Poland was always kind of fluid so I don’t think there was that much westward movement there (beyond the anti-Communists who fled Eastern Europe in general in the 1945–8 period). I don’t know about what happened with the people who lived in the parts of Slovakia that became part of Ukraine. Czechoslovakia was always kind of oddly agglomerated country, so I don’t think many, if any of them would have traveled to the new Czech lands in the West and after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993, thanks to the westward expansion of the USSR they ended up with less territory since the internal boundary between Slovakia and the Czech Republic remained the same through all of this.

planetsprite• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/TerribleMaps/status/1513995608650133506

tatrajim• 4 years ago

Another example of such overlap is readily found in contemporary South Korea. The southwest provinces of North and South Jeolla were the core of the ancient state of Baekje that disappeared in 660 CE, at the hands of its rival to the east, Silla, based in the current Gyeongsang provinces. The border between the two -- the Seomjin River -- still marks a striking linguistic, culinary, and political boundary between the more progressive Jeolla and conservative Gyeongsang.

When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

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