Next, Parag Khanna’s Connectography alters the current political boundaries. In 2013 Colin Woodward from Tufts University,created a new map of the continent with 13 cultural nations. Published in 1981, before cheap computing power made crunching census data easy, Garreau uses social and economic issues to reapportion the continent into nine cohesive nations.
The first one comes from The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau, a book I picked up in an airport back when I used to travel a lot. This being a blog about maps, I thought it would be interesting to share a few alternate maps of the US and North America. I don’t really know, but we do seem to like them. Perhaps we only appreciate life by contemplating the bizarreness that results from seemingly minor or even absurd changes. Maybe it serves some deep-seated psychological need. We replay the past correcting the errors to learn from our mistakes. So why do we have this fascination with things that might have been? Perhaps it’s a holdover from of our survival instincts. A decades old Saturday Night Live episode skewered the genre with a skit asking what if Napoleon had a B-52? In addition to nearly endless debates about sporting gaffes and decisions, you can find playful what ifs in our humor. While the genre is strongly rooted in a nerdy sub-culture it’s also found its way into the mainstream. Time-traveling white supremacists bequeath AK-47s to the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia delivering victory to the South. The latter includes Harry Turtledove’s award winning The Guns of the South novel. Change agents range from the repercussions of minor incidents and chance meetings to the ridiculous.
It includes everything from books, to movies, to comics, and everything in between. There’s an entire sub-genre of alternative history entertainment. There seems to be an endless appetite for alternative realities. Whether it’s as mundane as what if Billy Buckner hadn’t booted that ball in the 10th or as complicated (and unlikely) as the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. People have always been fascinated by alternate realities, what ifs, and their hypothetical repercussions.
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