Afternoon Map

Midafternoon Map has returned as a biweekly newsletter with War on the Rocks. We're excited to be bringing readers more maps and more cartographic commentary. Check out our first installment here...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2022/11/midafternoon-map-returns.html

Somehow in the midst of looking at maps, I managed to write a book. If you're interested in how Turkey became a democracy and a NATO ally, not to mention beekeeping, Fatih, mid-century print cult...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2021/06/the-remaking-of-republican-turkey.html

One of the best parts of this blog is having people occasionally send me amazing maps that they've found or made. Today's contribution is a bit of both. It comes from Ben Lee , who holds the ...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2020/05/mega-mideast-map-collage.html

Courtesy of Ross Perlin at the New Inquiry : "As the intellectual historian Svetlana Boym reminds us: “Curiously, intellectuals and poets from different national traditions began to claim tha...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2018/03/suadade.html

Just some (mostly) middle east cityscapes from the British Library's amazing Flickr page . I don't know where most of these are, but they're amazing.

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2018/03/middle-east-city-scapes.html

"The Cupboard of the Yesterdays," a short story written by H. H. Munro a few years before he was killed on the Western Front in 1916, offers a striking early 20th century British perspective o...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2018/02/sakis-cupboard-of-yesterdays.html

In responding to the rise of ISIL, many observers focused on the most obvious causes for alarm: sadistic violence, high-profile terror attacks and the destabilization of the Middle East. But ...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2017/11/westphalia-to-communicate.html

  Venizelos and Ataturk: conflicting territorial ambitions, similar taste in (cartographic depictions of) women...  

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2017/10/conflicting-ambitions-shared-cartography.html

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2017/08/know-your-sultans.html

This piece originally appeared in Foreign Affairs on February 8, 2017 Anyone in Washington trying to understand the relationship between religion and politics in Turkey today could do worse ...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2017/02/power-piety-and-smithsonians-newest.html

There's been a lot discussion about Turkey's National Pact borders recently, and a lot of random irredentist maps floating around purporting to show what they'd look like. As best as I can t...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/10/turkeys-national-pact-borders.html

Many Afternoon Map readers already contributed to improving the maps which appeared in this recent Washington Post piece . Now I'd be eager to hear their thoughts on the piece itself, which tr...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/10/continuity-and-chaos-in-20th-century.html

Today's guest map is courtesy of Peter Hill , Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford A map printed as frontispiece to Rev. William Jowett’s Christian Researches in t...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/10/christian-researches.html

Why do maps always show north as being up? It seems so obvious we hardly think about it anymore: “Because Europeans made the maps, of course, and they wanted to be on top.” We all probabl...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/08/why-north-is-up.html

We are excited today to be posting a new map and a new article related to the the nationalization of Ottoman history in Modern Turkey. As discussed in the article "A History of the Ottoman Em...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/06/a-history-of-ottoman-empire-from-1923.html

The news that actor Leonardo DiCaprio would be playing Rumi in an upcoming biopic about the 13th century mystic's life has, not surprisingly, provoked some criticism. Using the hashtag #rumiwasn...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/06/wait-was-rumi-white.html

My vote for the most and least likely alternative to the Anglo-French division of the Middle East respectively:   German Arabia and the New Assyria .

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/05/sykes-picot-more-alternatives.html

With the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement coming up on May 16th, I've put together a brief roundup of Afternoon Map's coverage of the issue. Following the centenary, I look forward...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/05/sykes-picot-roundup.html

In conjunction with this week's Ottoman History Podcast on Bulent Ecevit, we are republishing a particularly timely article of his from the 1950s, translated by Sarah-Neel Smith. For more on a...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/04/bulent-ecevit.html

In his first trip abroad as president, Barack Obama brought up the Armenian genocide in an address to Turkish parliament. Sort of. Instead of actually mentioning the genocide, he noted that Ame...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/04/democracy-and-original-sin-in-turkey.html

In generations past, Orientalists would retire to their studies to peruse lavishly illustrated volumes from their multi-lingual collections of The Arabian Nights. My own collection takes up h...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/02/mapping-arabian-nights-collaborative.html

Thanks go to Chris Trapani for alerting me to the great descriptions that appear on this mid-eighteenth century map prepared "according to the newest and most exact observations by H. Moll, Geo...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/02/the-turkish-empire-in-europe-asia-and.html

European Territorial Claims on Turkey from Europe at Turkey's Door, The Geographical Review , 1916 As the French and British were hammering out the Sykes Picot agreement in the spring of 1...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/02/century-old-us-map-envisions-united.html

Part of a portolan chart from the 1547 Vallard Atlas, which can be seen in its entirety here . It shows Europe and the Mediterranean during that strange period where North appeared prominent...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/01/up-and-down-again.html

The map above features offensive quotes about the world's diverse people and places compiled from the various James Bond books. The article below originally appeared in Al Jazeera on Nov 22, 20...

http://www.midafternoonmap.com/2016/01/bonds-world.html