We’re discussing civics/world history and I’d like to display how the borders/names of countries have changed over the years. Any recommendations?
Europe specifically? Or the whole world?
Not a website but a video:
The History of Europe: Every Year
History of the World: Every Year
Actually, that’s a good point. Would the whole world be too confusing or too much?
OTOH, if you want to simplify things, just use a map of Poland for the last 500 years
I saw this on Twitter and thought it demonstrates it pretty well. Dating when a globe was made to within months by looking at the boundaries and names of the countries:
Well, it depends on how you want to frame the discussion.
The shifting borders of Poland have unfortunately mostly been a case of non-Poles carving up and pushing Poland around.
Lviv in modern/current Ukraine was a major Polish city for most of the 500 years prior to WW2, during which time what is now Gdansk in Poland was predominantly ethnically German (Danzig); and getting into the hows and whys of that within-living-memory transformation of borders could get kind of messy.
Maybe start with why “France” is named after a “Frankish” kingdom?
Or the pre-1848 borders of the US, Mexico, and the “Indian Territories” of the American West, such that there are generations of “Mexicans” in California, New Mexico, etc., resident there since before the area’s incorporation into the US? (Like, how all the demographic data showing how many self-identifying ethnic Mexicans there are in the Southwest do not only reflect immigration, much less “illegal” immigration, but also people who were there all along?)
Just show them a timelapse of a Crusader Kings 3 playthrough!
YT also has some videos showing the movement of the Eastern Front in WWII, back and forth. Such as this one.
Lest ye believe this to be an obscure topic not worthy of study, remember that the Germany vs. USSR struggle pretty much was WWII, in terms of numbers of soldiers and civilians involved, and deaths. The numbers are so staggeringly large it puts the Allies’ effort in the west into an entirely new perspective.
And to stay entirely on topic, note that “Eastern Prussia” which was the jump-off point for the invasion of Poland and the later invasion of USSR by Germany, ceased to exist after WWII, after the Red Army rolled across it on its way to Berlin. And Poland’s borders were once again redrawn.
That’s rather an odd map. Most of the world’s shown as entirely blank until the 1500’s or later; as if there weren’t anybody anywhere until someone in Europe or the Mediterranean had hung a name on the place, maybe?
I really don’t think it’s a good idea to use that with students unless that issue’s going to be discussed.
Yeah, the impression I got is that the map creators were taking the term “history” very literally. I.e., only places for which there’s some kind of textual historical record get colored in.
I might be inclined to narrow things down a bit, and do Africa since 1950, or Southeast Asia since 1920. Old atlases or National Geographic maps are cheap and easy to come by, and students might find it intriguing to make the comparisons on their own. I sense that one of the points you’re trying to make with them is that political borders are not things that have “just always been,” but get moved by deliberate human action. That seems more real when passing around a map their grandmother might have had gotten in a magazine as current.
I can see narrowing it down, but I’d personally pick a place they might be more familiar with. I suspect that, even as kids, they’d be more familiar with, say, Europe.
I know that, as a kid, I thought the borders of Europe had been fixed for a lot longer, as I’d only ever seen the different borders in, say, Africa.
World History Maps & Timelines | GeaCron
How about this?
Kind of the same problem: nothing there anywhere till Europeans hung a name on it.
Yeah, there were just barbarians everywhere.
By the definition “people who don’t talk like us”?
Well they have red symbols on their flags and only get tech if someone else does it first.
Yep; I learned that usage from Cecil way back when.