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Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.In the 19th century, Americans simultaneously knew quite a bit and very little about the Middle East. The region’s Biblical geography gave it a unique importance, inscribed on the American landscape in place names ranging from Palmyra, Pennsylvania to Moab, Utah. American merchants and missionaries were also becoming increasingly active in the Levant, selling manufactured goods and setting up schools like the American University of Beirut. Tourism and pilgrimages, too, had become popular for those who could afford them. For example, Ulysses S. Grant, ready for a vacation after serving two terms as president and winning a civil war, visited the Holy Land in 1877 as part of a world tour. George Cram’s Birds-Eye-View of the Holy Land, published in 1891, manages to evoke both the familiarity and the distance. Like similar views of U.S. cities from the period, it conveys a certain comfort, complete with miniature steamships and sailing craft crisscrossing the foreground. In contrast to Cram’s 1901 map of New Guinea, details abound. Small cities and religious sites are sketched out with a nod toward architectural accuracy. The mountains, with their muted colors and immersive texture, look all too natural. And yet the hundreds of place names shown in the index are largely Biblical, with the region’s contemporary geography relegated to an afterthought. Above it all, a soaring sky conveys majesty and grandeur with just a few dots of ink. George F. Cram, Birds Eye View of the Holy Land, 1891Cram’s map also seems like the perfect setting for a strange story