Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: War
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” – Mark Twain
It is true, isn’t it? Two years ago, how many of you had heard of Kherson or Melitopol? Back then I thought It was Nikoliav, not Mykolaiv. Before October 7, who knew where Wadi as-Salqua was?
Don’t be too chagrined. I learned where Khe Sanh, Hue, and Pleiku were courtesy of the Vietnam War. My parents picked up all sorts of geography lessons during World War II. Few Americans knew where Guadalcanal, Kwajalein, and Saipan were. And my grandparents had only a shadowy idea of where the Argonne was prior to World War I.
I am a geography nut. Many years ago, I worked Mission Control as a Shuttle navigator. We had a ground track map up (a paper one, back then). During night shifts at the Nav Console we would amuse ourselves (and keep ourselves awake) by calling out an obscure spot on the map and having the other person find it. I learned where the Kerguelen Islands, the Spratleys, the Andamans, and other weird and wonderful places were. Still, even I tend to pick up new geographic knowledge via current wars.
Perhaps geographic ignorance is an indicator of peace. I suspect a lot of us will be learning more geography in the next few years, though.
Published in Group Writing
Have you played Geoguesser? It is great fun. You are dropped at a location in street view and you need to figure out where you are. https://www.geoguessr.com/
I will have to try it.
I binged it for a while a little over ten years ago. That’s how I learned that Russia, like the U.S. but unlike most of the rest of Europe, makes a lot of use of billboards for advertising. Reading the road signs helps, too. If I don’t land in a country that uses a latin or cyrillic alphabet, I’m in trouble.
Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Greek are unique indicators. The hardest places are in Latin America because it’s almost all Spanish.
Several months ago I was reading David Anthony’s 2010 book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Before the Russia-Ukraine war I would have had a lot more trouble following it without a lot more frequent reference to maps than I needed this time.
Alas.
I don’t know any Spanish, but I was able to zero in pretty closely to the right positions a lot of the time in Latin America. I do use Google search when I’m playing. I don’t know if it’s considered cheating when I do that, but that’s how I used it to learn a lot of geography.
A decade or so back I read the Twain “books” in order and collect many volumes of good notes. At some point since then I listened to his autobiography and found it interesting how the older Twain poked very hard at TR…and I agreed with just about all of it. I am now reading Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race (found it at Half Price Books for something like $5.99!!)…more good quotes on the way.
One English-speaking country that was difficult was Australia. I usually had a lot of patience traveling up and down the roads to find a road sign that would give me a clue, but in some places in Australia such signs are so far apart that I ran out of patience. Even northern Canada was not as hard as that.
Canada! Yes, I resisted buying a GPS until I drove in Canada. Even around a big town like Edmunton the signs were more sparse than I was used to. And then I spied a Bass Pro shop along the highway! I took the exit and bought my first Garmin GPS.
A lot of this was happening in the United States in the 1830s. I’ve spent time in various newspaper archives to learn what the locals were learning about the Black Hawk war while it was going on in 1832. There weren’t many newspapers in my part of the world back then, and I unfortunately haven’t picked up much useful information about local involvement in the Black Hawk war that way.
However, it was interesting to see the way people must have been learning about places like Greece and Poland back then, because the newspapers did the best they could to cover what was happening with national wars of liberation (so-called) in those countries. The small-town newspapers on the frontier got most of their news from other newspapers further east, but it seems there was a high demand for information on the latest battles and political changes. This was a time when Americans still saw their country as leading the way for republican freedom for the rest of the world, apparently.
In the old Northwest Territory states, there are a fair number of Spanish named towns, since it was being settled and developed at the time of the Texas Rebellion, the Mexican-American war, and the Bolivaran revolutions in South America. I grew up 12 miles from ‘Peru’.
Which direction from Peru? Do you go through Mexico or Denver to get to your old home? That’s the way I go when I’m riding home from Peru. (Not the Peru in Illinois. I’ve done day rides from there, too.)
Last week I rode through Mexico on my way back to Tiffin, Ohio. (It’s a different Mexico than the one in Indiana.)
I don’t think this crew needs me to point out the location of of the QOTD Signup sheet, but here it is anyway.
I don’t doubt that many Americans aren’t very knowledgeable about world geography, but are people from other countries necessarily better at it?
I’d bet not, but they probably think they are. I’d bet your average Palestinian or Israeli is no more likely to know where Kerguelen is than the average American.
I have driven through Mexico after passing through Peru. I’d be very interested to find out if you made it as far south as Moscow. Instead of the terrible winters, it’s the boiling-hot, humid summers you have to fear there.
I don’t know. Let’s bomb ’em and find out.
No, I didn’t even know about that Moscow but I looked it up just now. I did ride in the same county, once, on a ride from Anderson to Carthage back in 2011. But Moscow is toward the southwest corner of the county and Carthage is in the northwest. I am not very familiar with that part of Indiana.
I’m a little more familiar with Franklin County to the east, which shares a bit of border with Rush County. I rode through there last year on a ride to Louisville KY, following as close as I could to the Twelve-Mile treaty line. My German Lutheran hillbilly ancestors lived in Franklin County for a short time after they got off the boat in Cincinnati, and before they moved to Fort Wayne and then to St Paul MN. I was hoping to go through there again this October, on a reverse trip along the Greenville Treaty line. But covid put an end to that. The disease was very short and mild, but the lingering aftereffects put an end to any big plans for October.
But since it sounds as though you’ve been to Moscow IN, maybe on one of your trips to the Michigan border you’d want to check out Moscow MI. It’s along US-12 in Hillsdale County, east of Hillsdale. I sometimes go there for the Black Hawk war history. It used to have more of a “sleepy hollow” atmosphere, but the old Greek Revival store has burned down and has been replaced by a more modern convenience store further back from the road. And US-12 has been widened just a bit and is in better shape nowdays, and traffic is heavier. It no longer evokes thoughts of the days when Black Hawk used to go through there on his way to Fort Malden.
I was there again last fall on the first leg of the ride around the Great Lakes shorelines of the lower peninsula, which concluded with that ride to Louisville. While taking a break in Moscow I ended up talking with a township officer who filled me in on what had happened to some of the people I had met back in 1999, on one of my early visits. The township office is an old railroad depot, just across the stream from where a hotel/tavern was being built when Michigan militia soldiers came through in 1832, on their way west to fight Black Hawk. A descendant of one of the militia officers had introduced me to a descendant of the man who had built the hotel. Those two swapped World War II stories while the wife filled me in on the genealogy and gave me a transcript of an unpublished travel diary her husband’s ancestor had kept when his family moved to the Michigan frontier in the late 1820s. Later, my host who had been showing me around told me what really happened to cause his ancestor to move to Texas after the Black Hawk war and start a new family there with a new wife (after abandoning the first one and their children in Michigan). Without his help I would never have found the grave in Texas, in a family cemetery between Houston and College Station, or learned as much of the story as I did.
Love it. True stories of travel, unlocking the secrets.
I like to joke that if Americans don’t know where your country is things must be going OK.
I won’t second-guess the Almighty but I will second-guess Twain, and answer: no, it isn’t true. In the course of a war, much information about geography may be communicated, but its core fact – Most places are far away – is ignored or waved aside. War really doesn’t make the planet smaller, even if diplomats and editorialists want it to. To an American, the most important feature of Khe Sanh and Kherson should be “They’re not here.”
What makes you think those places are not here?
There are parts of San Francisco today that are beginning to resemble Hue in 1968.
I still didn’t know where Wadi as-Salqua was – and I live 80km away !
David Nivin, the British actor, told of when he was interviewed for a spot in a public school in Great Britain, that is to say high school. As part of the interview applicants were presented with a world map with no labels and were expected to put pins in the map to locate places like…
Singapore
Hong Kong
Jerusalem
London
Paris
Moscow
Johannesburg, South Africa
Nairobi
Bombay
New York City
Sidney, Australia
…among others.
Because the British Empire was all over the world.