That old map of Africa from 1914 almost got me in a fight at a bar in Chicago

Last month I was showing off a 1914 atlas at a pub in Lincoln Park. A guy saw the colonial borders and started yelling that I was defending imperialism. I tried explaining it was just an old map with wrong borders, not a political statement. But he wouldn't let it go. Now I only share dated maps with people I know or in online spaces like this. The history nerd crowd gets it, random bar patrons do not. Has anyone else had a map get them into a weird argument?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela_dixon1mo ago

Lincoln Park is exactly the kind of place where that would happen. Did the guy actually point to a specific country on the map and argue about it, or was he just shouting in general? I had a similar thing happen with an old railroad map from the 1880s that showed Indian Territory boundaries. A guy at a diner in Oklahoma got real quiet, then started saying I was "erasing Native peoples." I told him the map was from 1888, which was before Oklahoma became a state, and he called me a liar. People get weird about maps showing things they think are still true today. What was his actual argument, like which border set him off?

faith_thomas1mo agoTop Commenter

My buddy Dave had a run-in at a flea market in Austin once. He's a history nerd and was selling old maps he'd picked up at estate sales. This guy walks up, sees a 1950s highway map of Texas, and loses his mind because it shows a town called "Niggerhead" near Waco. Dave just said, "Yeah, that's the old name, it got changed in the 60s." The guy starts yelling that Dave is lying, that the map is fake, and that he's "trying to rewrite history." Dave got so annoyed he just packed up his table and left. Some people can't handle that maps are just snapshots of what people believed at the time, not eternal truth.