(Part 3) Top products from r/MapPorn

This is actually really inaccurate according to all archaeological and historical (ancient or modern) data.

For starters the scale is out of whack. The city should not stretch all the way across the peninsula. Here is a map showing how big the Troad peninsula was, Troy only occupied a small portion of it, not this huge metropolis.

Another example showing the rivers and the famed Plain of Troy.

Here it is on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B057'27.0%22N+26%C2%B014'20.0%22E/@39.9575,26.238889,2792m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d39.9575!4d26.238889?hl=en

There is also zero evidence of that inner harbour/lake at Troy VIIh (the "Homeric Troy") or any of the other levels of Troy. The plain was fed by a pair of rivers that converged very near Troy and flowed into the inner bay. They could use and divert those rivers, but never in such a scale. The harbours used were the natural bay where the rivers debouched and a smaller one facing the Aegean. There were also none of those little artificial lakes around Troy.

The city was also very different. For starters there was no castle with a moat around it, the citadel was a complex of palaces and religious houses that looked the same as the lower city houses only were bigger, richer, and more opulent. This is a close up of what the citadel might have looked like (of which there is a lot of excavated ground): http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/images/MiddleEast/Anatolia/Troy_City_VIh_02_full.jpg

OP is correct in saying that the citadel was once believed to be all, but that recently more has been found. However, it's not as expansive as the illustration suggests. This is the boring archaeological diagram of what has been excavated so far, and you can see the outlines of an outer wall (called the Lower City wall). It's significant, and Troy was likely one of the biggest cities in the ancient Near East (with 5,000 to 10,000 people), and the way the city is set up basically proves that the culture was a lot more Hittite than Mycenean Greek or anything else. So a lot has been learned over the past couple of decades.

This is the best and most faithful representation of what Troy VII might have looked like: http://forum.boinaslava.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=26810&d=1413378933

I love that people can be excited about Troy as the real city that it was, not just the legend, and there's a lot to still discover about it, but I think it's important to be cautious about how it's portrayed. Especially in such a historical period where archaeology is so necessary, it's easy to take a little thing, a tiny piece of evidence, and blow it out of proportion; for example seeing any evidence of using river water for crops and jumping to the conclusion that Trojans were master canal builders - there's no solid evidence of the kind. It's easy to mythologize Bronze Age civilizations, especially Troy, but reality is, unfortunately, less glamorous; however, its complexities can still blow you away if you don't expect too much from a civilization that lived 3,500 years ago.

Source: Historian with extensive research knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Near East, including Troy.

EDIT: Well, since I've been gilded (thanks for that, by the way) I'll go the extra mile and give some book rec's for those who want to know more.

Disclaimer: Most of these are very academic-y, can be quite dense; unfortunately when it comes to this topic this is the norm, but I'll spare you guys the real dull ones. I'll start with one of the most accessible.

The Trojan War: A New History by Barry Strauss.

In Search of the Trojan War Paperback by Michael Wood.

The Trojans & Their Neighbours Paperback by Trevor Bryce.

1177 BC: The Year Civlization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline.

Greece in the Bronze Age Paperback by Emily Townsend Vermeule.

Life and Society in the Hittite World Paperback by Trevor Bryce.

In that case, welcome to the art of cartography! Just a few things:

The text placement is the biggest turn off for me on this map. The seemingly random font sizes and placements of the labels is very distracting.

The color scheme and visual hierarchy is very confusing. The Great Lakes are the first thing I notice when I look at this map, which shouldn't be the case unless the map is about the Great Lakes. Do the colors mean anything? If not, you might get your point across better with much fewer colors.

I would move "California" down to one of the lower corners, which would allow you to scoot the entire country up and get rid of the white space between the title and the country.

If you are planning on making more maps in the future and want to make them visually appealing and easy to understand, I would check out this book.

Good luck on your next map!

The entire public isn't going to be educated. I don't know what makes you think that's happening now, but there are multitude examples of people falling through the cracks either way.

Environmental costs start working when there is a real threat. Is that too late? Maybe. But the public resistance to nuclear power is evidence that there's something to the science of potential environmental costs.

If you're legitimately interested in the topic, here's a good starting point: https://www.amazon.com/Environmental-Economics-Introduction-Barry-Field/dp/007351148X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473177074&sr=1-1. We used it as a textbook in college, and it has its flaws, but it does a good job of summarizing the body of work thus far.

My very small company is sending an employee to training for a skill that was economically beneficial for the company to have in-house. This is not uncommon. I went to private school my entire life, so I don't see how that's an untenable situation anyway. Property taxes reflect the cost of education in any given area anyway, and that in turn is priced in to rent costs. A better educated person is more in demand in the workforce, and a lot of parents are willing and happy to pay for that.

The model works. Do people? That's the real question.

There is ample evidence for numbers as high as, and even higher, than fifty million deaths as a result of European colonialism.

I won't get into arguments that see Nazi designs in Eastern Europe as a form of European colonialism/imperialism (but you can find some here, here, and here.)

It's been a while since I've read it, but Mike Davis makes a pretty compelling case for at least 30 million deaths as a result of the combination of el-nino famines and imposed capitalism in India and China in the late 19th century alone - Late Victorian Holocausts. It's a good read.

I can't speak for other professional historians, but I'm a historian modern Europe, and I didn't bat an eye at that number.

It's most likely a bubble based on income, rather than a bubble based on location.

You can get a brand new Android phone, with no contract, for as low as $50, while the cheapest new iPhones are approaching $1000.

These cheap Androids are not very fast (probably equivalent to an iPhone 5 or lower), and will take terrible quality photos, but they are still smart phones that can for the most part install the same apps as the $1000 devices.

If you are living paycheck to paycheck, like 80% of Americans, or can't afford a $400 surprise expense, like 44% of Americans, then it makes much more sense to have a slow cheap phone, than a fast expensive one.

It is. From what I recall, U-boats suffered the greatest losses in lives percentage-wise. They were called the Iron Coffins, which is also the title of a book.

There are many other good and interesting books on the topic, including the memoirs of Karl Dönitz, admiral who led the U-boat arm.

Fatherland is also good.

Edit: And since this is /r/mapporn, here's a map from the book, and another fan made one.

>The pneumatic tube mail was a postal system operating in New York City from 1897 to 1953 using pneumatic tubes. Following the creation of the first pneumatic mail system in Philadelphia in 1893, New York City's system was begun, initially only between the old General Post Office on Park Row and the Produce Exchange on Bowling Green, a distance of 3,750 feet.
>Eventually the network stretched up both sides of Manhattan Island all the way to Manhattanvilleon the West side and "Triborough" in East Harlem, forming a loop running a few feet below street level. Travel time from the General Post Office to Harlem was 20 minutes. A crosstown line connected the two parallel lines between the new General Post office on the West Side and Grand Central Terminal on the east, and took four minutes for mail to traverse. Utilizing the Brooklyn Bridge a spur line also ran from Church Street in lower Manhattan to the general post office in Brooklyn (now Cadman Plaza) taking four minutes. Operators of the system were referred to as "Rocketeers". Wikipedia

More reading on the Network

From The Works: Anotamy of a City by Kate Ascher

Found in here. Good stuff https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0007131615/ref=mp_s_a_1_23?ie=UTF8&qid=1482509869&sr=1-23&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=the+times+history+of+europe&dpPl=1&dpID=51XX2AY6VFL&ref=plSrch

I highly recommend Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/014311820X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491902409&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=atlas+of+remote+islands

If you want ammunition for your side of the argument, you might want to read Downfall by Richard B. Frank. It pretty thoroughly demolishes the "Japan was on the verge of surrender" thesis.

Robin J. Wilson wrote a book about this: Four Colours Suffice

Here's the blurb:

>A book to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the solution to one of the world's most puzzling mathematical problems. The four-colour theorem states that every map in the world can be coloured with just four colours in such a way that neighbouring countries have different colours. One of the simplest problems to state, one of the hardest to solve, which took a century for mathematicians to prove. This book introduces the mathematicians behind the mathematics, among them a bishop, an astronomer, a botanist, an obsessive golfer and a bridegroom who spend his honeymoon colouring maps.

https://www.amazon.com/States-Versus-Markets-Emergence-Economy/dp/0230521282
States versus Markets. The emergence of global economy.

If you're still struggling to understand the link between the Taliban and 9/11 then you really need to get some research done.

​

I highly recommend Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. It's an excellent readable-but-academic look at the recent history of Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion through to 9/11.

I scanned r/askhistorians for a minute and it seems that many people are recommending The Punic Wars by Adrian Goldsworthy.

In Cadillac Desert (I believe, I read it a while ago and could be mistaken on my source), there was a suggestion that the American west be divided along watersheds. That seems like a geographical feature that is not used very often, but causes quite a few problems between countries.

If you want a depressing read. I just finished reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder covers all this in facinating detail and you realise that the Holocaust was just one part of a 12+ year devastation of the region by the soviets and the germans

It came from all sides. The Ottomans were particularly violent towards Macedonians that had any associations to liberation movements, even tearing down entire villages and killing most men in those villages from simple rumors. This happened to a small village in present day southwestern Macedonia according to one of my grandfathers. This violence peaked right before the First Balkan war when the ottomans were trying very hard to hang onto any territory in the Balkans. My great grandmother from my mother's side is from a Macedonian village in modern day northern Greece. According to her after the second Balkan War the Greek government was very aggressive towards the Slavs in northern Greece. Forcing them to change their names, prohibiting speaking Macedonian, bullying people to move to Serbia or Bulgaria, in order to assimilate the region under a Hellenic Greek Culture to eliminate any further territorial claims from Slavic Bulgaria, Serbia, or a separate Macedonian State. This escalated even more after WW2 (read Children of the Greek Civil War for more firsthand accounts and information regarding forced removals of Slavs from the region). This erasing of the Slavic identity has worked pretty well at this point. If you go to Northern Greece today you can still find older generations that identify as Macedonian and speak the language, but their grandchildren usually dont speak a word and identify themselves as Greek.

EDIT: If anyone wants more detailed information about the forced assimilation of Slavs in the part of Macedonia Greece claimed during the Balkan wars the sources on this Wikipedia page under the history portion are pretty good.

Not sure where to find the specific papers, but the research was done by Paul Collier. It's all in Wars, Guns, and Votes, for a good layman's summary.

>before building a national identity you must stop the tribal/ethnic hostility

You stop tribal and ethnic hostility by building the national identity. You work so that people identify with their national identity before their ethnic one. Look at your average American, that's a very ethnically mixed society, but most regions will have nation -> profession -> ethnicity. Ethnically divided areas like Los Angeles tend to have a different ordering.

Likewise, Kenya and Tanzania aren't much different, but Tanzania made much more of an effort at building a nation than Kenya after independence. As a result, you don't see the ethnic divisions or political violence that plague Kenya.