When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

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.***“There is something enigmatical and peculiar in the make-up of the Spaniard.”With these words, Harvard Professor Irving Babbitt began his 5000-word meditation on the “intense idiosyncrasy” of Spain’s “national temperament.” Writing in the August 1898 issue of the Atlantic, Babbitt reflected on how the “strong Moorish and Oriental element” combined “so strangely with European traits” in the Spanish character.Babbitt’s take, written at the height of the Spanish-American war, skewed negative. But it was not atypical of an era when Spain was basically written about as a Middle Eastern country. After parsing the geographic borders of the Middle East in our last installment, it’s also worth asking: When exactly did Spain become accepted as fully European?An 1851 British guidebook, for example, says that Spain “hovers between Europe and Africa, between civilization and barbarism.” In an entire chapter devoted to facial hair — including subsections on the mustache, the beard, and the bigote — the author describes the Spanish spiritual attitude toward shaving as Oriental. The book also describes the Spaniard as Oriental in his “inæsthetic incuriousness,” delight in palaver, “habitual suspicion against prying foreigners,” method of navigating rivers, “abnegation of material enjoyments,” “dislike to be hurried,” “dreaded fascination” of the evil eye, choice of horse feed, “goodness of manner,” avariciousness, earthenware, incuriousness again, cookery, “profound regard for water,” resignation to hardship, attitude toward inn-keeping, use of stools, amplification of anecdotes, “habit of forming caravans,” “prejudices of pollution,” “recklessness of life,” fatalism, hostility toward medical dissection, “treacherous fashion” of stabbing under the fifth rib, “knack at a nickname,” suspicion of mapmaking, “want of love