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When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

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Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#151

Post by fsckboy »

diordiderot wrote: post #128
odiroot wrote: post #86

Ironically, the first map with Poland although very popular (it comes up on Reddit on a weekly basis) doesn't explain much. It's the part not shown there that matters. The Russian partition (and to a lesser extent Austrian one) was the cause of the area in blue being poor and underdeveloped. There was nothing particularly great in being under Prussian (German) occupation. It's that Russian occupation was so much wors…

It seems you make a claim in the first paragraph... Then provide reasoning to dispute it in the second?

makes a claim in the first paragraph (eastern half is the way it is because russian occupied) and provides clarifying context in the second (and not because there was anything good about german occupation in west)

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#152

Post by tshaddox »

Spellman wrote: post #83
api wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things. People misinterpret Chesterton's fence as an argument against changing things, but it's actually just about what I quoted above. It has no verdict on whether or not something should be changed. It just argues that you should make a strong effort to figure out why it is how it is before attempting to do so. I'd argue that if you d…

Yup. I've often seen Chesterson's Fence trotted out as an argument to never change anything. Or at least place onerous burden of proof on the new change to prove itself. However, some times the circumstances that gave rise to the fence are gone! You still need to do the work to show that this is true, or at least some best effort. But if after a cursory check there is no compelling reason, retorting "ah but there may…

Okay but then what is your version of Chesterton’s fence actually saying? It just sounds like “don’t do something unless you think it’s okay to do.”

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#153

Post by dhosek »

I was kind of hoping for some maps showing the influence of the Soviet Union’s westward displacement through Central Europe after WWII. They took bits of the Eastern frontiers of Poland and Czechoslovakia and then gave those countries chunks of German as compensation. The mass displacement of people because of these border shifts was unprecedented. Pretty much anyone of German ethnicity anywhere in Central Europe that wasn’t Germany or Austria had to move to Germany or Austria. The Eastern border of Poland was always kind of fluid so I don’t think there was that much westward movement there (beyond the anti-Communists who fled Eastern Europe in general in the 1945–8 period). I don’t know about what happened with the people who lived in the parts of Slovakia that became part of Ukraine. Czechoslovakia was always kind of oddly agglomerated country, so I don’t think many, if any of them would have traveled to the new Czech lands in the West and after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993, thanks to the westward expansion of the USSR they ended up with less territory since the internal boundary between Slovakia and the Czech Republic remained the same through all of this.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#154

Post by bryanrasmussen »

whycombinetor wrote: post #115
daveslash wrote: post #39

Something similar that I find both fascinating and heart-breakingly tragic: The "Black Belt" in the U.S. Deep South. The Black Belt is both a geological term used to refer to the rich & dark soil [0] and a geopolitical term to refer to the high percentage of African Americans [1]. During the Cretaceous period, the shore-line at the time ran through the middle of Alabama and Mississippi, depositing rich organic deposi…

What's heartbreakingly tragic about this? Your statements reads as if a county having a high percentage of African American residents is negative.

>depositing rich organic deposits, which in turn allowed for plantations to thrive in those parts of the deep south.

that is to say, the rich organic deposits of the black belt allowed slavery in the plantation model, creating the black belt as a racial profile.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#156

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tshaddox wrote: post #152
Spellman wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I've often seen Chesterson's Fence trotted out as an argument to never change anything. Or at least place onerous burden of proof on the new change to prove itself. However, some times the circumstances that gave rise to the fence are gone! You still need to do the work to show that this is true, or at least some best effort. But if after a cursory check there is no compelling reason, retorting "ah but there may…

Okay but then what is your version of Chesterton’s fence actually saying? It just sounds like “don’t do something unless you think it’s okay to do.”

some years ago I had to take a break from my startup to consult, partner had a consultant come in to do some stuff, consultant wanted to redo a bunch of things to their liking - one of things he redid was to redo how products were found to be based on navigating by brand - without evidently taking time to consider that many sources of data we had, had a very poor understanding of what constituted a brand and that a brand might very well be some escaped xml and unreadable unicode glyphs, the letter A, the exact same text as the product name, the word Shirt, or a number of other things, including in some instances the actual brand.

In other words he did something because he thought it was okay to do it, he did it because he didn't like the way it was done, but he did not consider that in this case there might have been a reason why it was done the way it was and not the way he wanted it.

There were many things he could have changed, and improved things, but since he didn't bother finding out why things were they way they were changing things for the better was at best a random outcome.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#157

Post by tatrajim »

Another example of such overlap is readily found in contemporary South Korea. The southwest provinces of North and South Jeolla were the core of the ancient state of Baekje that disappeared in 660 CE, at the hands of its rival to the east, Silla, based in the current Gyeongsang provinces. The border between the two -- the Seomjin River -- still marks a striking linguistic, culinary, and political boundary between the more progressive Jeolla and conservative Gyeongsang.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#158

Post by samvher »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #140
fsckboy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> heart-breakingly tragic African Americans are glad to be living in the US, and they're deeply enmeshed in the fabric of American society. Slavery was a bad part of history (and of the present where it still exists) but it's not more "heart-breakingly tragic" that a large number of African Americans today live on fertile land in the Old South any moreso than a large number of Aficans living on all sorts of land incl…

I encourage people to read about Liberia. It's one of those hilarious episodes of American- African American relations that makes learning about history so interesting (and they will never teach it at school).

Any keywords or a summary to kick off the readings?

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#159

Post by JacobAldridge »

tshaddox wrote: post #152
Spellman wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I've often seen Chesterson's Fence trotted out as an argument to never change anything. Or at least place onerous burden of proof on the new change to prove itself. However, some times the circumstances that gave rise to the fence are gone! You still need to do the work to show that this is true, or at least some best effort. But if after a cursory check there is no compelling reason, retorting "ah but there may…

Okay but then what is your version of Chesterton’s fence actually saying? It just sounds like “don’t do something unless you think it’s okay to do.”

I most commonly apply Chesterton's Fence in the context of new employees / managers. In that instance, it's more about naivety or ego ("I know better"), and less about needing to read the ancient runes to fully understand something.

I've seen so many people jump into a business, want to prove themselves, and start changing things without understanding the context in which that thing was built. (Similarly, though less often, businesses expanding into new products or markets.) "Tell me what will change if you stop doing X" is thus added to "Tell me what will change if you start doing Y".

To be fair, citing Chesterton's Fence just make me sound wise (and/or a little curmudgeonly); the better story for the point I'm making is the hospital bed where someone dies every Thursday morning at 10am ... only for video footage to reveal the cleaner unplugging machinery to plug in their vacuum cleaner every week.

Re: When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps

#160

Post by avodonosov »

coddingtonbear wrote: post #135
thereddaikon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is officially the successor state of the USSR. So legally yes, the USSR is Russia in so far as anyone cares for the purposes of assigning blame.

I don't really want to get involved in this argument, but I think this is a situation where there's just a little bit of missing historical background that might help you two understand one another. What the upstream commenter is referring to is the fact that the land that was historically eastern Poland isn't part of Russia now -- it's part of Ukraine and Belarus. Sure, the USSR (of which Russia is the successor sta…

> the land that was historically eastern Poland isn't part of Russia now -- it's part of Ukraine and Belarus

The Belarussian / Polish border today is almost exactly the border between Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. So "historically eastern Poland" is not right there. Some like to think of the whole Commonwelth as Poland, which really dominated there. But in this case whole Belarus and Ukraine are "eastern Poland".

That's what poles tried to restore when got chance to recreate their state after WWI, as I understand. The full commonwealth. But only got to the borders we know as the pre-1939 Poland.

BTW, Ukraine is mostly the part of the GDL annexed by the Kingdom of Poland during the Union of Lublin. The todays Belarus / Ukraine border goes by this line.

There are overlap maps in wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Co...

Going deeper in history of GDL, Russia and Poland uncovers more.

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