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Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

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Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#161

Post by pbhjpbhj »

allendoerfer wrote: post #154
adventured wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of people outside the US will know the name or location of more than a few US states? I'd bet it's extraordinarily low. I'd bet less than 1% of the world's adult population can name more than six US states. My experience has been, educated people I know from Europe struggle to do a lot better than that. Point them out on a map? Forget about it beyond the obvious or famous ones like California, Florida…

> US states have the population and economies of European nations. Americans are unfairly criticized for supposedly not being able to name or locate a lot of other countries. Most US states are culturally and historically insignificant. The comparison between European countries with thousand years of history to most of the US states is lacking. There are more US states than European countries, which have an older his…

FYI, I quoted you below, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18742737.

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#162

Post by why_only_15 »

ygra wrote: post #55
petercooper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. The French were having (prolonged) issues with some of their colonies around this time, such as in Morocco and the Great Syrian Revolt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Syrian_Revolt It would be neat to extend this visualization into clicking through to see which headlines/stories influenced the choice.

There is a “show headlines” button.

Where? I can't find it

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#163

Post by adavis32 »

porphyrogene wrote: post #158
giardini wrote: post #145

Far too noisy! A simple line chart (each line labelled with the country) versus year would have been far better.

A line chart would forgo the act of scrolling which would eliminate the narrative feel of the graphic (scrolling through time to see what happened next). Considering that the content of the graphic is somewhat complex I think the "noise" serves to represent the data in the clearest possible way (representing countries by their flags) while establishing visual fields that represent relevant conclusions (the long-term…

I like the infographic, but scrolling is an imprecise and annoying way to select a year to see additional information. There were quite a few years which I couldn't get the scrolling to stop at. Web designers: please don't mimic this technique.

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#164

Post by adavis32 »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #155
sgt101 wrote: post #2

This is interesting more for what picking one country per month hides than what it reveals; the winner takes all approach submerges emerging trends and informative outliers and leads to abrupt phase change like artefacts in the visualisation - suddenly it's all about Russia, suddenly it's all about China....

It would be a cool feature if one could flip to the second or third most mentioned. Perhaps a different visualization of this data would be beneficial.

Another cool feature would be if you could click on a cell in the infographic and see the top headlines for that month. For example, what happened in Nicaragua in Jan of 1928, or in Laos in 1961?

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#165

Post by selimthegrim »

ghaff wrote: post #135
erikbye wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are just the ones that come to mind right now: oakland county, providence, dupage, king, fairfax, essex, norfolk, san bernardino, los angeles, orange, spokane, sedgwick, sonoma, fresno, queens, cook, wayne, almeda, sacramento, san francisco, oklahoma... Don’t ask why these are the ones that come to mind, but I would bet I know 70-80% from books and movies, the rest from news articles.

Knowledge of counties are somewhat of a function of the state. In some states, counties (or their equivalents like Parishes in Louisiana) are fairly powerful. In others, they're almost meaningless. I live in Massachusetts and I could name maybe 3 or 4 counties--and that's because I've lived in two of them.

I don't think MA has much more than that :)

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#166

Post by saagarjha »

School-Cotton wrote: post #82
saagarjha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I could name any provinces in China, but I’m sure many Chinese know about New York and California.

You’ve really never heard of Sichuan, Hunan, or Canton (aka Gaungdong) ?

Depends on how you ask. Yes, I’m aware that those are Chinese provinces, as in, if you had provided me a list of Chinese cities and provinces I could have probably picked those out, or associated them back to China if the task was to match a province to its country. But I don’t think I could produce any of these if I was asked to give the name of a Chinese province.

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#167

Post by Svettie »

bmurray7jhu wrote: post #56
gpvos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would just split and dilute the mentions of the Soviets/Russia during the USSR's existence. While it existed, Russia and the USSR were pretty much synonymous.

I don't think Russian SSR and the USSR were synonymous terms for anything but for informal colloquial usage. The Russian SSR had only 51% of the population and 77% of the land of the Soviet Union.[1] Both the Belyrussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR were United Nations members states and constituent states of the Soviet Union.[2] After the breakup of the Soviet Union, some scholars have referred to Russian Federation as a r…

You're starting with the concept of "Russian SSR" to mean "Russia" and going from there, and this line of reasoning makes sense. But really, "Russian SSR" was the novel concept. Before the USSR, "Russia" meant the "Russian Empire", which comprised of basically the same area as the USSR. So during the time of the USSR, "Russian SSR" had no meaning (to the West), it's only significant now in hindsight after the breakup. To summarize this perspective I'd view it like this: The "Russian Empire" i.e. "Russia", was renamed "USSR" and internally they drew lines to make states, for which "Russia Core" for lack of a better name was simply called "Russian SSR".

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#168

Post by captainperl »

Santosh83 wrote: post #30
blauditore wrote: post #16

Why was Germany not more prominent during WWII (but apparently during WWI)?

Because as I understand it, the US was largely aloof until Germany started pursuing atomic weapons and even then the Manhattan Project was done very secretively. So until Hitler started incarcerating millions of people and threatened all out war on Europe, the US wasn't really bothered all that much. So naturally Germany hits the headlines for the final 2 years of the war, and then Japan for a year because Pearl Harb…

> Because as I understand it, the US was largely aloof until Germany started pursuing atomic weapons ...

No. The USA public was isolationist until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Germany stupidly declared war after Pearl Harbor in sympathy with Japan.

The key things to understand about WW2 are:

1) Germany and Japan declared war on a country they couldn't invade because of geography.

In other words, the USA did not have enough deterrence at the time to prevent WW2. [paraphrasing Victor David Hanson]

The B-29 was the ultimate weapon in WW2, not the atomic bomb (which was dropped from a B-29.) So much so that Russia spent vast resources after WW2 copying it down to the last rivet.

2) The USA was already the "arsenal of democracy" a year before Pearl Harbor. Historians regard Pearl Harbor as more of a trap than a victory for the Japanese, which would have required both sinking all of America's carriers plus a successful land invasion of Oahu to end well.

3) All sides thought that bombing the enemy's cities would break their will to fight. As any chess player knows, people will fight to the bitter end with very few exceptions.

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#169

Post by metaphor »

brownbat wrote: post #8
metaphor wrote: post #6

Why is 1964 empty? JFK was assassinated in November the year before, and LBJ took the con. Was the US simply distracted by its own domestic realignment?

Per footer, there's an issue with the API so there's no data that year or for parts of 1978.

Missed that tidbit. Thanks for pointing to it.

Re: Countries that have preoccupied Americans the most since 1900

#170

Post by airstrike »

zmw wrote: post #151
Thriptic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to regurgitate the locations of countries doesn't mean you are educated; it means you sat down with a map for a few hours and did some memorization... Saying the entire United States population is proudly uneducated is roughly equivalent to saying all of the UK hates Europe and wants to leave the EU, or that all of Germany is racist because of recent violence against migrants, or that Italy is full of lazy…

I'm not sure about geography, but the vast majority of U.S. population is proudly uneducated in mathematics and many hard sciences. Math taught in high schools is pretty laughable and physics isn't even required in many places. Source: Lived in the U.S. for many years.

Strangely, living in the U.S. for many years doesn't qualify you as a credible source, just as someone who's collected a bunch of anecdotes.
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