18 Maps From When the World Thought California Was an Island

[jakeXT]

Glen McLaughlin wandered into a London map shop in 1971 and discovered something strange. On a map from 1663 he noticed something he’d never seen before: California was floating like a big green carrot, untethered to the west coast of North America.

He bought the map and hung it in his entryway, where it quickly became a conversation piece. It soon grew into an obsession. McLaughlin began to collect other maps showing California as an island.

“At first we stored them under the bed, but then we were concerned that the cat would pee on them,” he said. Ultimately he bought two cases like the ones architects use to store blueprints, and over the next 40 years filled them up with more than 700 maps, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries. In 2011, he partly sold and partly donated his collection to Stanford University, which has digitized the maps and created an online exhibition.

The old maps represent an epic cartographic blunder, but they also contain a kernel of truth, the writer Rebecca Solnit argued in a recent essay. “An island is anything surrounded by difference,” she wrote. And California has always been different — isolated by high mountains in the east and north, desert in the south, and the ocean to the west, it has a unique climate and ecology. It’s often seemed like a place apart in other ways too, from the Gold Rush, to the hippies, to the tech booms of modern times

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/maps-california-island/

[liberal N proud]

1. I love old maps

I love maps, but old maps are cool.

[Lordquinton]

2. There is a book titled "An Island called California"

that talks about the ecology we have here and how things evolved like they do on islands. Fascinating read, out of print so have to track it down.

[smartphone]

3. Totally fascinating!

Some areas of California still think they are an island, to those people who live there, anything east of the mountains between California and Nevada is foreign soil, not related to America, although there are a few enclaves around DC, Philly, NYC or Boston where they have relatives or brothers and sisters.

Then there are parts of California, where they still think they are in Kansas or Oklahoma or Texas Tennessee. amd there actual parts of Nevada or Arizona and other states that were under the ocean a few tens of millions of years ago.

[TeamPooka]

11. Insulting Californiains by claiming they think the rest of the country is foriegn soil is

just the reversal of a GOP talking point about Californians not being American enough.
You've been here a month and you're insulting Californians in the California Group.
Not the best start.

[mahina]

12. Oh please.

[mahina]

13. Welcome to DU!

[trusty elf]

4. “At first we stored them under the bed, but then we were concerned that the cat would pee on them,”

Interesting! I hadn't realized that Cafilornia was once thought to be an island.

[Marcuse]

5. These actually are future maps...

after The Big One.

[pinto]

6. Neat maps. I can sort of get the take. The Central Valley used to flood, so the west was an island.

[IronLionZion]

7. It could still happen. nt

[Brother Buzz]

8. Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo's novel 'Las Sergas de Esplandián" got it all started

"that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of the Amazons"

I'm waiting for an English translation to fall into my hands so I can learn more about, and fall in love with Queen Calafia; to hell with the consequences.

[jakeXT]

9. So there is only the 13 page article in Atlantic Monthly from 1864 ?

http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=atla;cc=atla;rgn=full%20text;idno=atla0013-3;didno=atla0013-3;view=image;seq=00271;node=atla0013-3%3A1

[Brother Buzz]

10. Cool, that's a tease, and I guess most of the body that references California

I'm going to hit up my reference librarian and see if I can locate a translated copy of the entire novel.

[father founding]

14. flat landers

Some people still think it is an island.

[mackerel]

15. “An island is anything surrounded by difference,”

Yep that's us...lol

[Spitfire of ATJ]

16. That huge desert is also why the fruit inspection works to keep out fruit flies.

[hopemountain]

17. perhaps the island reference

is attributed to Lake Lahontan - a lake extending from what is today known as oregon down the eastern slope of the sierra nevada across the great basin during the pleistocene age.