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9:18am on Tuesday, 1st July, 2014:

Europe, 1869

Anecdote

I bought another map of Europe from 1869 recently. They don't appear on eBay as often as they used to do, and when they do they're usually ones I already have.

Here's the one that arrived this morning:



It's an American map (along the top it gives the longitude east from Washington), coming from a school textbook published by S. Augustus Mitchell Jr. Well, that's what the seller told me. There's no publisher's name on the map itself, nor on the text on the back (descriptions of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and "Chili"). It does have that gorgeous hand-colouring that Mitchell's maps of the period feature, though (better than the ones published by Alvin J. Johnson), so I'm inclined to believe it.

Looking at the political borders of the period: Italy isn't fully unified; Germany isn't at all unified (but still gets a name); Poland, Finland and the Baltic states are parts of Russia; Turkey and Austra own the Balkans between them; Norway is part of Sweden; the UK looks as ununified as Germany and is called Great Britain (although it included the whole of Ireland at the time).

There are some interesting name differences, too. You don't hear much nowadays about Christiania (Oslo), Dantzig (Gdansk), Koniigsberg (Kalingrad), Revel (Tallinn), Pressburg (Bratislava), Candia (Heraklion), Fiume (Rijeka) — to pick just a few that have changed their names or been superseded. There are also some spelling differences from modern usage: Cartagena is Carthagena, Ankara is Angora, Gothenburg is Gottenburg, Vilnius is Wilna, Sevastopol is Sebastopol, Stuttgart is Stuttgard. Also, the Alps extend into the Balkans.

It's a great-looking map. I just wish I hadn't creased a corner scanning it for you.




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