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. *** Sitting down just minutes ago to write about evolving conceptions of political sovereignty as reflected in the visual vocabulary of European atlases, I’ve watched with alarm while, over the course of a single drawn-out sentence, my subject has inexorably shifted to historical hog maps. It’s a daunting subject precisely because
