I like finding out the age of old cards. When there's a globe in someone's house, or when I find an old map in a thrift store, I look for clues: the existence of the Soviet Union, whether Germany is divided into East and West, or whether Nunavut is a separate territory of Canada. . I'm a lot of fun at parties.
Nothing on the internet has given me that same feeling Old maps online, one of the coolest websites I've found in a while. The interface looks simple at first: it's just a world map with a slider you can move to see the borders at different times in history. It's like Google Maps for history: you can set a year and see the boundaries as they were at the time. You can even click on the name of a country or area you don't recognize to read a Wikipedia article about it in the sidebar.
You can just play with this: look at any region of the world and move the slider, just to see how its borders have developed over time, and then click on a country, empire or area where you don't see anything knew about. Things get really interesting when you look at a region you think you know well. Looking through history, you can learn how much boundaries have changed over time and continue to change even today. Europe now looks very different from the early 1990s.
But you're not limited to watching a modern projection of where borders once were. You can also see maps that were created at that time, overlaid on the map you are currently viewing.
This gives you an idea of how people living at that time thought about the borders. There's a surprising abundance of old maps to explore, and you can even set transparency to see the old map in context. Honestly, I could play with this for hours – and I did. There's everything from old nautical charts to tourist guides from the 1950s, and users are adding more and more maps all the time.
You can learn all kinds of things by clicking around this site. For example, did you know that the states of Oregon and Washington in the Pacific Northwest, along with the Canadian province of British Columbia, were jointly governed by the British and American governments for almost thirty years?
Old Maps Online can also provide useful cultural context if you're considering international travel, especially if you click through to articles. For example, I traveled to Croatia last year and I learned a lot before the trip by scrolling back in time looking at a map of the country and clicking on articles.
It's more than a cool website; it is an easy access to learning history. Scroll back to any part of the world and you're sure to notice a few things you didn't know. Then you can go to the library and dig even deeper.
