Found a 1950s map that showed Alaska as a separate country from the US

I was digging through some old boxes at a garage sale in Portland and came across a 1953 world map that still had Alaska colored in as its own independent nation. It even had a little flag for it like it was Canada or something. How did maps this wrong even make it to print back then?

2 comments

2 Comments

troy_owens1mo ago

That line about "maps this wrong" really hit me. It's not that the map was wrong, it's that the world itself was different back then. Alaska wasn't even a state until 1959, so a 1953 map showing it as a separate territory is actually pretty accurate for its time. You gotta remember, for a long time Alaska was just this big chunk of land the US bought from Russia, and it wasn't automatically part of the country like Oregon or California. It had its own government and everything. So finding that map is like finding a snapshot of how people saw the world before things got finalized. It's a cool piece of history, not a mistake.

rosew371mo ago

@troy_owens makes a solid point about historical context. My granddad had a globe from the late 40s that showed Palestine as British Mandate territory, which confused me as a kid until someone explained it. Maps back then were basically drawn with whatever info was available (or whatever the mapmaker felt like guessing at, honestly). So yeah, finding that Alaska map isn't really a mistake, it's more like catching a moment in time before things got settled.