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dethslayer666 posted:Oregon Country/Columbia District was jointly claimed by Britain and the USA, until the Treaty of Oregon was signed in 1846, establishing a fixed border at 49 degrees, resulting in the world's dumbest border: Now that makes me wonder. One of those small roads to the east (Canada's 66a Street) has this tiny wooden fence blocking the border. How fast would border guards catch you if you were to jump that thing? Speaking of borders, some maps of the Dutch/Belgian twin town of Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog.  The thick black line is the country border, with Netherlands to the North. Each H is a Belgian enclave within the Netherlands.  The town center. Each N is a Dutch enclave within a Belgian enclave within the Netherlands.  A photo of H22.  A photo of a liquor store with a border through the middle. In the store, I think you can choose to which country you want to pay taxes. They made the rule that a house belongs to whichever country that has its front door on its land. There's currently one building where the border goes right through the front door. It has both a Belgian and a Dutch address. Before the European borders were opened, this place was famous for its smugglers. Oh, and even now the Dutch police is checking if people enter the Dutch area carrying things that are illegal in the Netherlands, such as certain kinds of heavy fireworks. Carbon dioxide fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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PrinceRandom posted:Not if Britain got Alaska too No no, it's that acute angle where the continental divide meets the 49th parallel... its painful to even imagine that border, as much as I'd love to be Canadian. And imagine if the Mexican-American war happened the same: that'd make it even worse. EDIT: though if they went with the 42nd and the Mexican-American war DIDN'T happen Alaska would probably go to Mexico, which has a certain appeal. reignonyourparade fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 08:07
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I think the clear answer to this question is American annexation of Canada. And Mexico. And Central America to the Panama Canal. Prettiest, most natural borders you can get without being an island.
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Nov 2, 2013 08:10
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Kavak posted:I think the clear answer to this question is American annexation of Canada. And Mexico. And Central America to the Panama Canal. Prettiest, most natural borders you can get without being an island. This was more or less the plan for about 150 years after the American Revolution.
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Nov 2, 2013 08:16
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Outline history of Russia via maps. History is mainly Wikipedia, maps are from whatever English sources I could find. By the 7th century (Muhammad's conquests began around this time) early Eastern Slavs had become the dominant population of the Volga and Dniepr basin areas. The first Russian state is now known as Kievan Rus'. It offered protection from Norse and Khazar marauders, and introduced a Slavic version of Eastern Orthodoxy, which would become a key pillar of future Russian societies.  In the early 1200s Mongol doomstacks spawned out of nowhere and smashed the Rus'. Most Russians came indirectly under Mongol domination, but the Golden Horde was pretty happy to leave Russian principalities, especially Moscow, as tributary states that could keep control more effectively than steppe armies. The Green blob is Novogrod, a medieval republic best known for being a Hanseatic trade player. (Click for embiggened)  The Mongol Empire spanned from China to Iraq to Eastern Europe, but it wouldn't last long. Through political and military maneuvers, the Grand Duchy of Moscow became the ascendant Russian power. They cooperated with the Mongols and then rebelled - in 1380 a Muscovite army won an important victory over the forces of the "Mongol yoke" and Moscow continued to expand and consolidate for centuries. This map shows growth from a city-state in 1300 (darkest territory) to more and more territory in 1390, 1505, and 1533 (lightest).  Ivan IV ("the Terrible") crowned himself Tsar of All the Russias in 1547. As seen elsewhere in Europe, early modern Russia saw consolidation of state power over social institutions. This Russia could project military power beyond its borders in a way that previous states could not. Ivan IV engaged in some costly and unsuccessful incursions into the Baltic and Lithuania, ultimately finding themselves invaded by a Swedish-Polish coalition. A combination of military defeat, political instability, and lousy harvests mean that 1600s Russia might be best summed up as ☭☭☭ PEOPLE'S WAR ☭☭☭. Well not really; as usual nobles leveraged peasant anger and various wacky political developments to gain political power. Anyway, even after the Romanovs came to power and ended the Time of Troubles (below), there was a lot of instability in the city and the country.  That's not to say the Romanovs didn't change things. Peter the Great took office in 1672 and ruled for 50 years, making Russia into the autocratic empire that everyone came to love. He founded St. Petersburg as a more European capital and established a proper European colonial empire, except this one was over land into Siberia. Today 3/4 of Russia is in Asia (east of the Ural Mountains) but under a third of Russians live there. This map shows territory gained in the 17th century.  A few narratives are usually mentioned for the history of the empire, 1725-1917: Catherine the Great was a successful and popular leader and probably did a lot of great stuff that can't be mapped easily. Militarily Russia had a good 18th century, scoring a lot of victories against European neighbors and the Turks, culminating in Napoleon's failed 1812 invasion that led to Russia getting most of Poland under a puppet regime. The Industrial Revolution had a hard time in a country where most potential workers were tied to the land through serfdom, which was abolished in 1861 though there was a still a lot preventing the full establishment of contemporary capitalism. Writing in 1882, Marx and Engels wrote: Marx & Engels posted:The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? Political development was slow in the Russian Empire. Liberal ideas didn't, as far as I can tell, really start to matter until the late 19th century, while the reactionary ideology of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality" came to dominate official thinking in tsarist circles. Russia was now a multinational empire with control over Finland, the Baltic, Poland, and influence over much of Persia and central Asia. Even as the Tsars had designs elsewhere (checked by some 500,000 killed in the 1853 Crimean War) the issue of how to integrate all these nationalities into a severely nationalistic state was becoming a real problem. One important symbol of Russian influence was the Trans-Siberian Railway, seen below, though the Russian general staff was disturbed to find that 9,000 km of single-track railroad had some limitations for getting troops to the Japanese front, when war broke out in 1904.  Anyway the 20th century wasn't so hot for the ancien regime. I think it's often overstated that pre-revolutionary Russia wasn't industrialized, as this was actually a period of rapid growth; Moscow quintupled in size 1864-1915 and became the center of a new mass-based politics. Fortunately, Nicholas II managed to suppress the 1905 revolution of workers, peasants, and soldiers and instituted a liberal constitution which fixed all the country's problems. Next time: Nothing of note!
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Nov 2, 2013 08:34
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This map of Russian Empire nationalities is cool too! "Russes Blancs" and "Petits Russes" are Belarusians and Ukrainians. I was really hoping to find any maps of the 1905 Revolution (which brought the country to its knees for a year) but all the online English sources on the topic are pretty poo poo.
Vivian Darkbloom fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 08:42
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Good post. I've always been interested in Russia's expansionist period, but it's hard to find decent books on the matter.
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Nov 2, 2013 12:42
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dethslayer666 posted:In seriousness, the USA does have too many states. Either amalgamate or break up, either way the world only needs one Dakota. Jesus that's a dumb idea. You there's more than 300 million people living there, right? Hell, Mexico has 31 states. Also it's still less confusing than Russia with their 46 Oblasts, 21 Republics, 9 Krais, 4 autonomous okrugs, 1 autonomous Oblast, and 2 federal cities. Sorry that Canada and Australia has a whole lot of nothing.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:17
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LP97S posted:Jesus that's a dumb idea. You there's more than 300 million people living there, right? Hell, Mexico has 31 states. Also it's still less confusing than Russia with their 46 Oblasts, 21 Republics, 9 Krais, 4 autonomous okrugs, 1 autonomous Oblast, and 2 federal cities. Sorry that Canada and Australia has a whole lot of nothing. Also, it's really only hard to recognize the different states if you're not from the US or just don't care about its geography. This can be applied to anywhere though. Ask me to identify the different states/regions/whatever of most any other countries and I'll give you a big ol shrug. I don't really care that people from other countries don't know our states cause I don't expect them to know them. I just think it's funny to see them try and label them.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:59
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LP97S posted:Jesus that's a dumb idea. You there's more than 300 million people living there, right? Hell, Mexico has 31 states. Also it's still less confusing than Russia with their 46 Oblasts, 21 Republics, 9 Krais, 4 autonomous okrugs, 1 autonomous Oblast, and 2 federal cities. Sorry that Canada and Australia has a whole lot of nothing. The US has got some pretty impressive tracts of nothing too, it's just arbitrarily carved into states based on historical circumstance and then you get states like Wyoming, where barely more than half a million people get two whole senators to call their own and a ridiculously outsized influence on the presidential election thanks to the rules about how electoral college electors are distributed.
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Nov 2, 2013 17:22
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arhra posted:The US has got some pretty impressive tracts of nothing too, it's just arbitrarily carved into states based on historical circumstance and then you get states like Wyoming, where barely more than half a million people get two whole senators to call their own and a ridiculously outsized influence on the presidential election thanks to the rules about how electoral college electors are distributed. The only issue with that system is that the average representative represents more people than the population of Wyoming. Just up the number of Reps to 1000 (the number of Reps is not set in the constitution) and the problem disappears. reminder:  (the last census that added people was 1910 or 1920).
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Nov 2, 2013 17:26
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You wouldn't even need to go up to 1000 representatives, if you did it via the Wyoming rule (smallest district by population as the unit) you would only need to increase the house from the current 435 to 547, with data from the 2010 census. Of course there's the cost of offices, elections, and the nightmare of redistricting since it's up to states on how to do that. Hell, do that and get rid of the electoral college and your set since the idea of merging states or redrawing state lines for 'balance' is the single dumbest argument I've ever read in this thread and other sites. I can't think of any subdivision that has ever merged in recent history. Canada actually created a new territory out of an old one back in 99.
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Nov 2, 2013 17:55
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Kavak posted:I think the clear answer to this question is American annexation of Canada. And Mexico. And Central America to the Panama Canal. Prettiest, most natural borders you can get without being an island. "Are we not the Combined Syndicates of all the Americas?"  I can't be mad about huge states since falling in love with Montana, even though it alone is like half as big again as my native United Kingdom. Gallatin County, where my fiancee lives, at 6,817 km2 is about half the size of Northern Ireland (13,843 km2) where I grew up. It's difficult to wrap my head around it all; the mind boggles.  That said I fetishize Balkanization so more states for all! Superior, Jefferson, West Florida, let's run up the stars until the flag looks like Pointillist art.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:05
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Well, the current national government here in Holland has been planning to merge the 12 provinces into 4 or 5 regions or something, in order to reduce provincial government costs. They wanted to start slowly by merging 3 provinces (Utrecht, Flevoland and Noord-Holland) into one. The provincial governments and many others are firmly opposed to this, as this probably creates more troubles than it's worth. One other thing is the provinces they chose. Why merge Utrecht with Noord-Holland? Noord-Holland has historically and culturally a much closer relation to Zuid-Holland. Anyway, there's so much opposition that I don't think this will happen any time soon. Then again, they have been merging municipalities here since decades. Originally, nearly each village was its own municipality. Most of them have merged into municipalities that contains a bunch of villages and one (sometimes two) towns or a city. This of course caused some troubles for the citizens. For example, it's gotten somewhat harder to reach the municipal office. And if your tiny-population village is added to a city municipality, the political climate can suddenly change completely.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:18
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:This map of Russian Empire nationalities is cool too! "Russes Blancs" and "Petits Russes" are Belarusians and Ukrainians. I was really hoping to find any maps of the 1905 Revolution (which brought the country to its knees for a year) but all the online English sources on the topic are pretty poo poo. The thing I really love about this map is how Ukrainians are called "Little Russians" and what I'm assuming are just Russians "Grand Russians". Has this actually been common terminology back in the day before Ukraine really was a thing or what?
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Nov 2, 2013 18:51
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:Outline history of Russia via maps. History is mainly Wikipedia, maps are from whatever English sources I could find. Kievan Rus' wasn't a Russian state. It was a state made up of proto Ukranian, proto Byelorussian and proto Russian tribes under the leadership of Norse/Viking invaders who conquered and pacified the native inhabitants. It also was not a state like they're known today. It was more of a loose federation of tribes with a feudal organization and a common culture in the form of a common religion and a common law code. It also had the habit of having a civil war every time the ruler died, some of which lasted for decades. The first Rus' were the Ukrainians who were known as Ruthenus in Latin which was later translated into Ruthenian. Also I don't know why you think the Khazars were maruaders, they really maintained a very stable territory that allowed for them to maximize profit from controlling the major trade routes through the steppe. After the Kievan Rus' destroyed them the entire steppe region became considerably less stable.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:15
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LP97S posted:You wouldn't even need to go up to 1000 representatives, if you did it via the Wyoming rule (smallest district by population as the unit) you would only need to increase the house from the current 435 to 547, with data from the 2010 census. Of course there's the cost of offices, elections, and the nightmare of redistricting since it's up to states on how to do that. The Wyoming rule is bad because you still have wide variations in population per district. The best way is to make the districts so that multiple ones will be in every state.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:15
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Skeleton Jelly posted:The thing I really love about this map is how Ukrainians are called "Little Russians" and what I'm assuming are just Russians "Grand Russians". Has this actually been common terminology back in the day before Ukraine really was a thing or what? This was, in fact, the common terminology of the 19th/early 20th century (though Ukrainians and Belarussians tended to prefer the rather vague term "Ruthenian" over Little Russian and White Russian). Well into the USSR days, and even somewhat to this day, the proper term for ethnic Russians was "Great Russians," not as a statement that they were great, necessarily, but as a distinguishing term to separate themselves from Little Russians and White Russians. Today, calling a Ukrainian a Little Russian will likely get you punched.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:16
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 The Know Nothing Party was a short lived "Natural American Party", but my favorite thing about the map is all of the borders in the western half of the country.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:41
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Why does Kievan Rus' have an apostrophe on it? Is it pronounced differently than Rus?
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Nov 2, 2013 19:59
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Mister Adequate posted:"Are we not the Combined Syndicates of all the Americas?" Montana is actually bigger than the UK. 381,154 km2 to 243,610 km2. Indiana is almost the same size as England, 94 thousand to 130 thousand km2. Anytime this kind of thing gets brought up I remember the saying "In America 200 years is a long time and in Europe 200 miles is a long way."
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Nov 2, 2013 20:01
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Peanut President posted:Montana is actually bigger than the UK. He said Montana was bigger than the UK, half as big again means 1.5x the size.
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Nov 2, 2013 20:20
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Also, Indiana is the smallest continental state west of the Appalachians. 
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Nov 2, 2013 20:29
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I'd never heard of the expression 'half as big again'. This thread is even teaching me linguistics.
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Nov 2, 2013 20:30
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Badger of Basra posted:Why does Kievan Rus' have an apostrophe on it? Is it pronounced differently than Rus? It represents the soft sign in Russian (ь), i.e. the s is palatalized, i.e. there's a sort of a slight y/j sound at the end. Y as in "yes". J as in "Jürgen".
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Nov 2, 2013 20:46
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Soviet Commubot posted:He said Montana was bigger than the UK, half as big again means 1.5x the size. I thought I pressed 1 for American 
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Nov 2, 2013 20:49
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texaholic posted:
Whats happened with South Carolina?
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Nov 2, 2013 22:03
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khwarezm posted:Whats happened with South Carolina? If I had to guess, I'd say he didn't get on the ballot. Ballot access for third parties is a weird legal issue that can vary wildly by state.
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Nov 2, 2013 22:07
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khwarezm posted:Whats happened with South Carolina? South Carolina's electors were chosen by their legislature until 1860 or so.
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Nov 2, 2013 22:15
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khwarezm posted:Whats happened with South Carolina? South Carolina didn't have elections for president until after the Civil War, their electors were chosen by the state legislature. Pretty much everywhere used that system until the 1820s, but S. Carolina stuck with it.
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Nov 2, 2013 22:38
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tk posted:South Carolina's electors were chosen by their legislature until 1860 or so. Goddamn, the aristocracy really hated the idea of the commoners voting for things didn't they?
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Nov 2, 2013 22:41
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texaholic posted:
Nooo, California, what are you doing  
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Nov 2, 2013 22:42
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VitalSigns posted:Goddamn, the aristocracy really hated the idea of the commoners voting for things didn't they? Fear of ochlocracy brought you endless whining about the electoral college.
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Nov 2, 2013 23:02
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Patter Song posted:South Carolina didn't have elections for president until after the Civil War, their electors were chosen by the state legislature. Pretty much everywhere used that system until the 1820s, but S. Carolina stuck with it. Who wants to bet that the Tea Party/ALEC will start making noise about returning to this style of presidential balloting? They've already advocated for doing the same thing with Senate seats by trying to repeal the 17th amendment. This style of voting sounds like it's right up their alley.
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Nov 3, 2013 00:23
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Hahaha, are you serious? ALEC tried pushing repealing the 17th amendment? I knew they were poo poo, but god drat.
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Nov 3, 2013 00:53
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Hahaha, are you serious? ALEC tried pushing repealing the 17th amendment? I knew they were poo poo, but god drat. You know I was listening to my teabagger mom bitch about the election of senators and just blew her off about it thinking about it too hard. Now though this is pretty bad. 
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Nov 3, 2013 01:48
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I've also read about people wanting Obama to rule without congress or any checks and balances. They're both dumb.
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Nov 3, 2013 18:01
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Riso posted:I've also read about people wanting Obama to rule without congress or any checks and balances. Oh no, he'd implement moderately right wing things with no oversight.
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Nov 4, 2013 05:10
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Carbon dioxide posted:Then again, they have been merging municipalities here since decades. Originally, nearly each village was its own municipality. Most of them have merged into municipalities that contains a bunch of villages and one (sometimes two) towns or a city. This of course caused some troubles for the citizens. For example, it's gotten somewhat harder to reach the municipal office. And if your tiny-population village is added to a city municipality, the political climate can suddenly change completely. I attended a lecture once on merging municipalities. The lecturer found in his research that it didn't reduce bureaucracy or costs. The municipalities would retain some semblance of their old separate administrations while another layer of bureaucracy was added for the new merged administration.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:12
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Merging towns and villages to create new municipalities does make a lot of sense in densely populated regions such as the Low Countries, but of course you're not supposed to allow them to retain separate administrations of any kind or it defeats the point. I also think the Netherlands went a bit overboard in some cases. This is the municipality of Súdwest-Fryslân: I doubt the area has much sociological cohesion. The other extreme can be found in France or Spain, where you have isolated and (therefore) administratively separate villages of maybe ten people.
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Nov 4, 2013 12:27
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