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.Sometimes, maps help make sense of the world. Other times, they capture its hopeless confusion. Today’s map, from William Shepherd’s repeatedly reprinted Historical Atlas, is one of the hopelessly confusing ones.The magic of this map lies in how precisely it conveys the geography of a region called the Wettin Lands without giving the least indication of what the hell they actually were. Pflege Coburg sounds slightly implausible. Lower Lusatia leads you on a futile search for any other Upper ones. Even the categories of place names in play are esoteric. Instead of just counties, there are also marches and landgraviates. Saxony at least sounds recognizable, but it is now divided between Ducal and Palatinate. Meanwhile, the key is of little help. Pink denotes the possessions of Henry the Illustrious, whose very name feels like a rebuke for never having heard of him. And then, as if to make a mockery of the whole endeavor, we learn parenthetically that all these carefully drawn boundaries were uncertain the whole time.William Shepard, Historical Atlas, Fourth Edition. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1924Shepherd’s Atlas provides no written background for this or any of its other maps. Thankfully today, it’s all too easy to find out more with a few internet searches. And yet this raises a bigger question, which is harder to Google. Why was an obscure slice of history — now reduced to a Wikipedia rabbit hole — once deemed worthy of full-color illustration in one of America’s leading historic atlases?Let’s start with the easy part.Untangling