There’s been a great deal of discussion about the decline of Western civilization over the past few centuries. I suppose at some point it’s inevitable, but after hundreds of years of crying wolf, it’s increasingly difficult to get alarmed. Periods of intense civilizational self-confidence have consistently been followed by periods of agonizing self-doubt before the confidence returns restored and redoubled. You get a decade of Dada, then, a little later, D-Day. Since we seem to be going through a low spell right now, I thought it would help to look back at some maps that, to my mind, epitomize a
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