Articles in Historical Geography
The Tragic Saga of the Volga Germans
When I was a college student in Russia, one of my classmates was a Volga German from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. At the time, her identity made no sense to me as Germany, the Volga River, and Uzbekistan are thousands of miles apart. Who are the Volga Germans? How did they come to live in Central Russia, and later in Central Asia? This post examines the twisted history of yet another group victimized by Stalin’s deportations.
The Russian-Finnish Borderlands: Territorial Changes, Population Transfers, and Linguistic Changes
An earlier GeoCurrents post mentioned Finns among the nationalities deported by the Soviets before and during World War II. As it turns out, the situation in the Finnish borderlands is rather more complicated than that. The territory between St. Petersburg and Helsinki is home to a number of ethnic groups whose histories range from cultural and linguistic assimilation to population transfer to outright ethnic cleansing.
French speakers in California, Past and Present
When it comes to people who speak French at home, California has only the third largest population of all U.S. states. California’s francophone population shrank by about 4% between 2000 and 2005. But historically, the situation was quite different, as French used to be an important and widely spoken tongue in the state.
The Khazarian Hypothesis and the Nature of Yiddish
The Khazarian hypothesis, namely that Ashkenazi Jewry derives from the Khazars, has recently been revived by Eran Elhaik, a geneticist at John Hopkins University. According to the abstract of his recently published article, Elhaik “applied a wide range of population genetic analyses” and found evidence to support the Khazarian hypothesis. But in addition to numerous errors in historical geography, Elhaik also relies on bad linguistics to support his claims.
Intense Regionalism in the South Korean Presidential Election of 2012
South Korea is usually considered to be one of the world’s most homogenous countries. Regional differences in dialect are relatively minor, with only that of Jeju island being distinctive enough to merit designation as a separate language by linguistic splitters. A pronounced sense of Korean nationalism, moreover, is found across the country. But despite these commonalities, South Korea is still …
When Did Roma Leave India?—New Discovery or Corroboration of Old Theories?
According to a short article by Sindya N. Bhanoo in the New York Times, titled “Genomic Study Traces Roma to Northern India”, a research article recently published in Current Biology “appears to confirm that the Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago”. In actuality, the article in Current Biology makes no such claims.
Is It English or Engelsk?—part 2
In the previous post, we concluded that preposition stranding (that is putting a preposition at the end of the sentence, as in Who did you talk to?) is not a Scandinavian contribution to English, but a natural development of a structure that was already present in Old English. Let’s now consider the more fundamental change from the Object-Verb (OV) to the Verb-Object (VO) pattern that characterized the transition from Old English to Middle English. It too cannot be attributed wholly to the Vikings for several reasons.
Australia’s Empty Countryside—and the Melbourne/Sydney Rivalry
Australia is well known for its low population density. With roughly 23 million people living in 2.9 million sq mi (7.7 million sq km) of land, it ranks sixth from bottom in this regard, following Mongolia, Namibia, Iceland, Suriname, and Mauritania. Australia is also known for its high degree of urbanization, although its 89.2 percent official urbanization figure places only …
Maps as an Instrument of Propaganda, Part 1
Maps are ideally supposed to be objective depictions of reality, but they can also be used as an instrument of propaganda, portraying the world not as it is but as it is imagined by the cartographer. A recent post on the Russian historical website Diletant.ru includes a collection of such maps (posted also on the Propaganda History website), referred to as “symbolic maps”.
Porcelain Atlas of the Dutch Provinces at the Het Loo Palace, the Netherlands
As our readers know, we at the GeoCurrents team always keep an eye open for innovative, useful, and elegant maps. Naturally, I was mesmerized on my recent trip to the Netherlands to see a set of detailed maps done on… porcelain plates!
Ideological Agendas and Indo-European Origins: Master Race, Bloodthirsty Kurgans, or Proto-Hippies?
This final contribution to the Indo-European series turns once again to the potential ideological agendas lurking behind theories of IE origin and expansion. As was noted previously, no other issue in human prehistory has been so ideologically fraught; the original IE speakers have been recruited to serve a variety of fantasies, ranging in temper from naively benign to unimaginably vile. For …
Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections
Dear Readers,
As we wrap up our series on Indo-European origins and spread (one more post coming up on this issue), we thought it timely to repost Martin W. Lewis’s video lectures on the “History and Geography of U.S. Presidential Elections”, a Stanford Continuing Studies course from the Fall 2008.
Lecture 1: the basic principle of political geography; the “red and blue” …
The Different Modes of Language Spread
In this second-to-last post on Indo-European origins and expansion, we turn once again to language diffusion, a cornerstone of the model employed by Bouckaert et al. A previous post asked whether languages actually spread by diffusion, arguing that the much more rapid process of advection is often more important. As was then pointed out, physical geographical factors, such as impassible …
How Large Was the Area in Which Proto-Indo-European Was Spoken?
As the current series on the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages nears its completion, only a few remaining issues need to be discussed. Today’s post examines once again the mapping by Bouckaert et al. of the area likely occupied by the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The focus here, however, is not on the location of this ancestral linguistic …
The Consistently Incorrect Mapping of Language Differentiation in Bouckaert et al.
As mentioned in previous GeoCurrents posts, the animated map that accompanies the Science article of Bouckaert et al. depicts their model in action, showing the expansion and differentiation of the Indo-European languages in time and space. Earlier posts criticized the map’s contour shadings, which indicate high probabilities of IE languages being spoken in given areas at given times. Today’s post …
Terranova: The Black Petaltail - A Novel
Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (5th Edition)
Globalization and Diversity: Geography of a Changing World (3rd Edition)
