WHAT-IF CARTOGRAPHY

A web site I recently found

http://www.megophone.com/neuyork.html

contains a map project that used a 1937 map of New York City and changed all the toponyms to German to create a germanized and Nazified "Neu-York." The idea is to conjecture cartographically what NYC would have become if the Nazis had won WW II.

The map printed only 20 copies (plus proofs) and were being sold for $2,500 and possibly more as they are sold (few were remaining).

Here are my comments to the cartographer:

Wonderful project, Melissa. You have turned what-if history into what-if geography and what-if cartography.

You might recall that American writer Philip Roth wrote the what-if novel The Plot Against America (2004) and has Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940 election and plotting an isolationist course during the war. The novel depicts the beginnings of Jewish persecution in America at that juncture. Roth, in the dust jacket, poses before an old map of Newark, New jersey, where the novel unfolds.

I think you must arrange mass printing of the map for its pedagogical value. Students would be able to better understand historical contingencies and how they might play out literally on the ground.