http://www.atlasofworldhistory.com/
also
Demo is up at http://atlastory.com (for now only maps are WWII and Civil War). If anyone's interested in helping out please contact me. (Currently looking for another developer to help with the much more complicated back-end)
You are aware that the union in year 1 was effectively a somewhat brutal dictatorship imposed by force where human life was treated as a toy for an elite caste that ruled from afar, right? There was no 'EU community' then. There was the brutal rule of hierarchical violence and fealty to pay to a foreign emperor.
Regardless of what you think of the EU, the Roman empire is not something to which anyone should reasonably aspire!
There's no "back together" because there has never been a together that wasn't under the sword or the gun in the first place. Peace, cooperation and wide open borders within the EU, great. The EU as the next empire, no thanks.
If anything, the ideal future map of Europe has more borders as communities peacefully regain their autonomy and independence.
E.g. the EU is limited in how much of the power that is vested in EU organizations that can be transferred to the parliament, because much of the power that is elsewhere is there as a side effect of that power nationally being delegated to the sitting cabinets, and so in most countries it will take constitutional changes to hand that power away from the cabinets, that exercise it as part of the EU Council and EU Commission, to the parliament.
This is a "workaround" to problems similar to what the US endured under the Articles of Confederation (where the central government was pretty much powerless to implement many decisions because the states simply could decide to not follow decisions they didn't agree with), and a lot of the work on deeper integration in the EU has focused on how to change this situation to grant the EU parliament more of these powers.
There are plenty of problems with the approach. But there are also plenty of "Europhile's" for whom reforms are simultaneously about tighter integration and democratizing the decision making, and in fact it's hard to find anyone that are happy with the current power split between the EU Commission, Council and Parliament.
As for the copyright, see: http://www.euratlas.com/conditions.html as well as:
> You may use the Euratlas images and maps, as they are available on the websites euratlas.com and euratlas.net, for educational or illustration purposes but you must mention the source in that way: © 2010 Christos Nussli, www euratlas.com No commercial use is allowed.
http://shop.euratlas.com/maps_gis/gis_2000.html
seems reasonable /s
It's a pay-site, but its content is well worth the small price. The commentary is excellent and the attention to detail is high, without being boring. My only issue would be that they use Flash, but I guess I can forgive this site for it.
There are quite a few different historical maps of the same year/region - it is very important to have them side by side, because history is very subjective and historical maps are only a subjective and deficient in data representations of historical presence.
Maps (by century): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Maps_by_century_s...
- Bavaria is shown to be a Austrian possession in 1800, which is incorrect. Consider the implications if Bavaria was a part of Austria for a while - would there be a Southern German nation? Or would be in fact inconsiderable that Austria is a separate state given the overlap with other German states? If you have only this map as a teaching tool you are implicitly giving a false impression of history.
- There are no Ukrainian states or predecessors (the Cossack Sich) after the 14th century on any of these maps. By omitting this state the appearance of Ukraine seems mysterious in 20th century and a key narrative in the histories of Poland, Russia and even Sweden (the winter war) simply disappears.
Can you define 'Islamic state'? Turkey is a secular democratic republic. Admittedly one run by religious nutjobs with delusions of grandeur at the moment, but it is technically a secular republic, not an islamic state, and does not identify as such.
Also, for Turkey to join the EU, the EU would have to provide an incentive that at the moment does not exist. Turkey has good tariffs and trade agreements with many EU states and having it's own currency.
The best thing that the EU could do to harmonise relations, in my opinion, would be to encourage an EU-wide educational system and make that education open to other, non-european states too. Take the harmonising parts of that ancient common religion and try to avoid the the mystical and manipulative hierarchies which caused a lot of bloodshed and which will, in my opinion, eventually bring it down.
I scare-quote "Fall of the Roman Empire" because even though Rome itself was sacked, the Eastern half of the Roman Empire kept going for another millennium, though known to us moderns as the Byzantine Empire (it was known to all contemporaries merely as The Roman Empire).
My critique of the EU is not that it is doing a bad job of ruling people from on high, and that we should reform it to make it better, but rather that the very idea of trying to govern an entire continent is wrongheaded from the get-go.
We are perfectly capable of cooperating and trading and working together without adding another layer of government on top.
Thankfully, it is becoming abundantly clear that the whole project is doomed to failure. I just hope that it falls apart before further forced integration creates a lot of bloodshed, and not after.
Federal systems are meant to be scalable. The US gov't might have its problems, but the land size it governs is not the source of these. If you needed proof of concept, there you go.
The federal government has been a great success for those with the money to control it and bend its power to their will, but has been an absolute disaster for the vast number of ordinary Americans.
