Articles in Europe
Tromsø music festival gathers musicians from the Barents region
Despite its arctic and isolated location, Tromsø is a cosmopolitan cultural center, known as “the Paris of the North”. Numerous international cultural events are held in this city, including festivals, concerts, master-classes, and theatrical performances. Tromsø International Film Festival is an annual event, held during the darkest days in January, which attracts film-makers and film buffs from around the …
Google Translate Tackles Geography
Google as a whole can hardly be accused of geographical illiteracy, as Google Maps and Google Earth have become standard tools for numerous professional geographers and amateur travelers alike. But there does not seem to be a good information flow between Google’s geographical departments and its linguistic tool, Google Translate. Or perhaps too much information is also a bad thing.
Case …
Lines on the Map: the Hajnal Demographic Divide
A little-noted cartographic genre is based on heavy lines, named for the individuals who brought them to notice, that separate broad areas distinguished by specific features. Examples include Wallace’s Line, which separates Eurasian from Australian wildlife regions in eastern Indonesia, and the Barassi Line, which divides Australia into rugby and Australian-rules-football spheres. In Europe, one of the more prominent of …
Scotland Vs. the Shetland and Orkney Islands
The Scottish National Party (SNP) has gained enough power to have arranged for a vote on Scottish independence in 2014. But although the party has made major gains in recent years…
Is the Georgian language related to Basque, another European “outlier”?
[This post is written in collaboration with Martin W. Lewis]
The history of the Georgian language reveals some interesting patterns of cross-cultural interaction. Georgian can be traced back to a ancestral language— Proto-Kartvelian—that it shares with its close relatives: Mingrelian, Svan and Laz. Spoken in the second millennium BCE, Proto-Kartvelian must have interacted closely with Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue to most …
From Sarmatia to Alania to Ossetia: The Land of the Iron People
The Caucasus is often noted as a place of cultural refuge, its steep slopes and hidden valleys preserving traditions and languages that were swept away in the less rugged landscapes to the north and south. Such a depiction generally seems fitting for the Ossetians, the apparent descendents of a nomadic group called the Sarmatians that dominated the grasslands of western …
Mega-Nationalist Fantasy Maps of the Balkans
YouTube videos of “greater countries,” which imagine the glorious expansion of existing states, have a distinct geographical distribution. The vast majority of these hyper-nationalistic fantasies come from the region stretching from Pakistan to Hungary. Although a number of “greater” countries outside of this area have been proposed, few are supported at the popular level by YouTube productions. Greater Morocco, for …
The End of Schengenland?
Over the past several decades, Europe has been dismantling border controls, creating the zone of free movement informally known as Schengenland. Although the Schengen area is scheduled to expand into the southeastern European Union countries of Bulgaria, Romania, and even divided Cyprus, such a development seems increasingly unlikely. Even in the core EU countries, the
Mapping Forms of Government in the 18th Century and Today
As we have seen, maps from the 18th century typically subdivide Europe in a different manner from historical maps produced today, focusing much less on sovereignty. Cartographers typically divided the region into a dozen or so “countries,” some of which were independent kingdoms and others dependent lands, and one of which was a supranational organization
The Simplistic World-View of Thomas L. Friedman
In his April 13, 2011 column in the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman argues that the recent uprisings in the Arab world will probably not lead to the kind of mass democratization that occurred in eastern and central Europe after 1989. Although I must agree with Friedman’s basic thesis, I reject his reasoning, which
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)
