Mid-Afternoon Map: In Search of the Enigmatic Spaniard

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