100 Years Later: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 25, 1911

The map (partial view) indicates the names and ages of all the known Triangle Fire victims.  It was created for the project CHALK, based on the list provided by David von Drehle in "Triangle: The Fire that Changed America," and updated based on the original research of Michael Hirsch and comments by family members. The fire symbol represents the location of the fire in the Asch Building. On the CHALK project website, the map is clickable on each person symbol for name, age, and address.  Many of the victims were teenagers.   

Plan of the 9^th floor - The floor plan of the Asch Building’s 9th floor, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Greenwich Village, NYC, shows the layout of eight, long tables in relation to the cloak room, windows, fire escape, elevators, and stairs.  High ceilings included in the space-per-person calculations, allowed owners to employ 240 people in a relatively-small area resulting in the rapid transmission of illness among workers and leaving little space for moving safely through the room.  Artist unknown, ca. 1911, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection. 

            March 25, 2011, is the 100^th Anniversary of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in lower Manhattan.  This totally preventable tragedy took the lives of some 146 people, mainly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, some hardly more than children, who died of smoke inhalation, burned to death, or jumped to their deaths from the 9^th floor factory windows.  Despite the fact that the Asch Building was considered a new modern building with “fireproof” construction, there were many safety violations, illegal conditions, and construction shortcuts which decreased protections.  The women workers were locked into their floors – all exits were always locked during working hours so no one could leave without notifying the supervisors, a tactic designed to prevent stealing, and many of the windows were barred.  

            (NOTE: I’m posting this a month in advance of the actual anniversary so that readers can have the opportunity to see the exhibit about the Fire at New York University’s Grey Galleries, and also to watch the PBS special “Triangle Fire,” which will be broadcast on Monday February 28^th.) 

Model of the 9^th Floor, showing fire hazards, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.

1.) Locked door to the stair well.

2.) Rusty fire escape that collapsed.

3.) Cluttered work spaces.

4.) Short ladders only reached 6th floor.

5.) Not enough water pressure.

6.) Long wooden tables became obstacles.

7.) Wicker baskets full of scraps.

8.) Oily floors spread the fire quickly.

9.) Fire nets failed to catch jumpers.

10.) No sprinkler system, only pails of water.

11.) Flammable barrel of oil.

12.) Boxes crowding the exit.

13.) Lack of a required third staircase.

 The fire and consequent deaths were emblematic of the deep disregard business owners typically had for working people, especially working women, and how the pursuit of the profit motive dictated extremely unsafe working conditions in order to save money.  The fire did result in some good, however:  a number of important reform bills were passed to safeguard workers health and safety rights in New York State, and many of these building code and labor law reforms were later picked up on a national level under FDR’s New Deal legislation.  Garment workers unions (and unions in general) were also strengthened in the aftermath of the fire, and the general populace was extremely sympathetic to their aims.  The Fire was a watershed moment in labor history and progressive politics.  It literally transformed American political culture, and had a profound influence on the rest of the 20^th century.  “Many of the people who made modern America - political leaders like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Fiorello Laguardia, and Robert Wagner; social activists like Frances Perkins; and tradeunionists like Rose Schneiderman and Dave Dubinsky, were all directly or indirectly inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire,” (The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911: Tragedy and Meaning in Sweatshop New York, by Robert W. Whalen, 2001) http://www.gothamcenter.org/festival/2001/confpapers/whalen.pdf

Photo of the too-short ladders - Fire fighters arrived at the Asch Building soon after the alarm was sounded but ladders only reached the sixth floor and the high pressure pumps of the day could not raise the water pressure needed to extinguish the flames on the highest floors of the ten-story building. In this fireproof factory, 146 young men, women, and children lost their lives, and many others were seriously injured.  Fire escapes on the building were inadequate and flimsy, and collapsed under the weight of so many people trying to escape.  In any event, the fire escapes were not built to reach the ground, but stopped about 30 feet short of the street.  Photographer: unknown, March 25, 1911, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.

Editorial Cartoon - In an editorial cartoon, a man wearing clothing made of money leans against the factory door which is locked with a dollar sign key, while women die in smoke and flames on the other side of the door.  Artist name illegible, 1911, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.

Typical Working Conditions in a Sweatshop - Hand sewing was done by men and women facing a narrow bench, while men operated sewing machines at a long row of paired work stations. [The men standing around in the back watching the workers and doing nothing are supervisors.]  Some unethical subcontractors took advantage of newly-arrived immigrants forcing them to work long hours for the right to keep their job.  A standard 56-hour week might stretch to 70 hours without overtime pay.  Workers were often forced to supply their own needles and thread, and had to pay for the electricity used to run the sewing machines, and rent the chairs they sat in to work from the factory owners, (or have these charges deducted from their pay) thus assuring the owners of even more profits.  Pressing the clothes, usually by men, was done with irons powered by a tangle of gas lines, and since smoking was prevalent amongst the pressers, danger from fire was rampant. Both men and women workers suffered from working conditions, with eyestrain and backaches heading the list, as well as respiratory problems from breathing in fine textile fibers in unventilated spaces.  Photographer: Lewis Hine, ca. 1910, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations Kheel Center collection.

What’s a “shirtwaist”? – A shirtwaist was a ladies’ blouse popular in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, modeled after mens’ shirts – it buttoned down the front and was roomier and allowed for more movement than the typical tight restrictive bodices of previous styles.  They were simple and “proper,” and women could even wear them without a jacket.  Shirtwaists became popular with working women and women bicyclists (which was a new invention at that time!), and denoted the increase in women’s freedom, independence, and mobility that had occurred.  It was ironic that the women and children fabricating these garments had in their own lives so little freedom.  Advertisement for Priscilla Company, 1906, via Library of Congress.

Unfortunately, the Triangle Company owners’ negligence was rewarded by the collection of a large windfall of fire insurance money, and an acquittal at their criminal trial for manslaughter.  They only had to pay out $75 for funeral costs for each of the victims whose families sued in a civil court action (and only 23 families of victims sued).  And as a sad coda to the whole story, in 1991, 25 workers in a chicken plant in North Carolina died when a fire broke out and they had been locked in the plant by their employers.  Walmart also is said to lock in their night-shift workers to prevent theft. And much of the clothing we wear is still made in sweatshop conditions, often by women and children who work in unsafe environments, both here in the US and abroad.  And if any of you are wondering what all the recent collective bargaining fuss is all about, it is a good idea to do a little research on the history of the labor movement, to see all the "ordinary" rights and protections that many workers (people) now have (both union and non-union workers, by the way) - that they only have because of unions. No, they're not perfect, and they do not cover everyone, but I hesitate to think where we would be without them.

Map of Asch Building location, from: Leon Stein's "The Triangle Fire" (Cornell Univ. Press, 1962)

NOTE:  On February 28^th (this Monday) PBS is broadcasting Triangle Fire as part of their American Experience series. 

And every year, there is a "chalk tour" of the Lower East Side on the anniversary of the Fire, stopping at each one of the known victim's houses and writing her name and age in a triangle on the sidewalk in front.  If you would like to participate in this unusual mapping project, you can sign up at this website: http://streetpictures.org/chalk/

Ruth Sergel, an East Village artist, organized volunteers, including descendants of the victims, to spread out across the city to inscribe the names of the dead outside their former homes.
"As a New Yorker you grow up with this story," she said, "but to see it this way, connected to space, it's a hidden geography of the city."

 Photos from the Chalk Project from previous years.  Photos by Anthony Giacchino, one of the Chalk Project participants, who chalked the names of the victims from East Harlem. Flyers are also posted on the buildings that are "chalked" to notify current occupants what it is all about.  Giacchino has started a new Triangle Fire-related project called "Dead Letters," which involves mailing letters to each of the victims at the last known address to see what 146 returned letters looks like.

http://campaignoutsider.com/2011/02/16/dead-letter-artifice-the-triangle-waist-company-fire/

Interactive Map of victims' addresses, from the Chalk Project site:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=108354938849920426215.0004618dcebe620f9aa60&ll=40.7561,-73.963394&spn=0.104026,0.137329&z=11&source=embed

Some good websites for more information about the Triangle Fire and worker’s rights:

Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations website about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire:

http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/story/introduction.html

For the upcoming events to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the fire, and NYU exhibit about the fire (the Triangle building site is now owned by NYU):

http://rememberthetrianglefire.org/category/events/upcoming/

Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire:

NYU Grey Art Gallery Exhibition Jan 11-Mar 26, Art/Memory/Place: Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Short documentary about the Fire, with survivor recollections. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vus4b8FRTKM

PBS film about the Triangle Fire:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/player/

Interactive map of the Triangle Fire and important associated locations:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/map-widget/triangle/  

“Murder and Nothing Else but Murder,” account published in The New York Call, (a Socialist newspaper) March 27, 1911 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/history/usa/workers/triangle-fire/ch01.htm

East Harlem Preservation – interesting accounts of some of the records on the girls from East Harlem.

http://www.eastharlempreservation.org/docs/trianglefactory.htm

“Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” David von Drehle, 2004, Grove Press.

I dedicate this posting to all the needlewomen, past and present, and especially to Maggie Barnacle, 1872-1973, my great-grandmother, who, as a child, sewed buttonholes on trousers in the sweatshops of New York City’s Lower East Side, and well into her 90’s could still sing old songs from the 1890’s like nobody’s business! (including remembering all the lyrics from all the many stanzas of “The Sidewalks of New York” and “The Bowery,” etc.).  East side, west side, all around the town…….

See follow-up post Remember the Triangle! at http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/03/remember-triangle.html

Bursting with Pride: U.S. Geography Textbooks, 1814-1948 (Part 1)

 
Map of the Distribution of the Races of Men, from Niles, 1889, The Complete Geography: Mathematical, Physical, Political.

It was common-place to divide the human species not only into racial groups, but also by degrees of civilization, for instance, as here: Savage, Barbarous, Half-Civilized, and Civilized. According to the textbooks, the Caucasian race was the apogee of humanity, and the most “civilized.” Drawing from Warren, 1869, The Common-School Geography: An Elementary Treatise on Mathematical, Physical, and Political Geography.
Bear in mind that this was the great age of classification - everything in the animal and plant kingdoms was being categorized, as well as biomes, climatic zones, landscape morphology. Typologies were the new rage.  Darwin's theory of evolution was also in the forefront of advances in scientific thought.  Both scientific classification methods and the theory of evolution lent themselves to the categorization and the hierarchization of human groups, too, which probably seemed very progressive and "modern" to people at that time. 

The new “science” of racial typology was used as a justification for racial slavery.  Some naturalists, like the renowned and well-respected Louis Agassiz, considered the races to be separate species, and many scientists in the mid-19^th century were very actively engaged in research to “prove” polygenism, the idea that races came from separate origins (specifically separate creations), and were produced in different climatic zones and geographies.  Although this theory went against a literal interpretation of the Bible, which states that all people descended from a single origin, polygenism was quite popular with many of the otherwise-religious slaveowners in the southern U.S., for the obvious reasons of giving "scientific" credence to their rights to subjugate another "species."   

Bursting with Pride: U.S. Geography Textbooks, 1814-1948 (Part 1)

Bursting with pride, as well as with jingoism, racism, ignorance, misinformation, chauvinism, nationalism, and all the other -isms!  As promised (see my blog posting of February 1, 2011, "One month with the geographer-at-large: It's been fun!") I am writing about the evolution of Geography textbooks in the U.S.

Geography textbooks, perforce, reflect the times in which they were written.  They reflect not only the geographers’ worldviews, but those views which the authors desired to impose upon the children and young people reading the book and who presumably would be accepting the information as gospel fact.  It is impossible to separate the “geography” from the surrounding times. 

For instance, when the Reverend Jedidiah Morse’s “Compendious” Geography textbook was originally published in 1812, the United States was a small, new, and rather insignificant country, experiencing increasing and lingering tensions with Great Britain, which erupted into the War of 1812; and when the book was revised and reissued in 1814 (the edition I have) the U.S. was struggling to recover from that war, which had just ended in 1814. (The Treaty of Ghent, which marked the official cease of hostilities between the two countries, wasn’t signed until 1815.)  The U.S. certainly did not stretch from “sea to shining sea” at that time, and “manifest destiny” had not even been invented yet as an excuse to plunder the western part of the continent.  We were still a handful of former colonies, huddled mainly along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with the addition of some sparsely settled territories west of the Appalachian Mountain range and the then-as-yet-unmapped vastness of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.  Prior to earlier versions of Morse's Geography books which were first published in the 1780's, American school children had to depend on textbooks from the Mother Country.  This would not do, after Independence.  One small measure that could be taken to show a fledgling nation's independence from the old ways, the "despotism" of European monarchy, was to create an entirely new way to teach Geography, from a uniquely American perspective, by downplaying European (and especially English) ascendancy and by boosting pride in America. That is what Morse's textbooks aspired to do.  

During the more isolationist periods of U.S. history, the geography books focus on minutiae about each individual US state, rather than devote correspondingly large amounts of space to entire continents, nations, and people outside our narrow purview.  This translates into the division of space in a typical book (Pratt, 1882) being the descriptions of the various parts of the U.S. taking up about 85 pages; South America, about 20 pages; Europe (including sections on individual countries), about 50 pages; Africa, 6 pages; Asia, (including what we would call the Middle East) about 12 pages; and the Pacific Islands and Australia, only 2 pages.

A British geography textbook, published during the U.S. Civil War, treats the split of the nation matter-of-factly, discusses the the United States of America, and the Confederate States of America as if they were two completely separate countries that had never been one nation, and gives equal space and legitimacy to the section on the Confederate States.  The British authors had totally naturalized the “fact” of disunion (even though there was still a war being waged over it, and the CSA was not a recognized state by any European nation).  While officially neutral, there were strong geopolitical and economic reasons for Great Britain to keep up these appearances, since they did not want their supply of King Cotton from the southern Confederate States to be interrupted, among many other considerations. 

And in the period of American expansionism and acquisition of overseas territories, geography textbooks reveled in the new information about these "exotic" places.  A geography text book was reissued in 1898 for the express purpose of highlighting (and gloating about) the American Empire’s new properties acquired after the Spanish-American War of 1898, and indeed, the book leads off with descriptions of Hawai’i, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, in very prideful language (Redway and Hinman, 1898).  This information was inserted as an update called a “Geographical Bulletin,” at the very front of the book’s new edition. 

Map of the British Empire, from Whitbeck, 1922, Figure 324. Mercator strikes again!

            A book published in 1922 divided the world into regions in an unconventional way.  Rather than by nation or continent, as was usually done, the authors focused on four uber-regions: Latin America, Continental Europe, China and Japan, and the British Empire.  The fact that the British Empire at that time covered so much of the rest of the world meant that very few places were omitted, after all (think India, Australia, Canada, large swaths of Africa, for instance, as part of the Empire. See map above).  And the U.S. was covered in the first section of the book by being used as the examples for all the physical geographical terms and descriptions.  The extended treatment of China and Japan was somewhat of a departure, also, but this was at the time of Japanese aggression against China (which was an international affair that had been going on for decades, with the fight for dominion over China involving France, Great Britain, Germany, the U.S., and Russia, as well as Japan), and the possibility of China becoming communist, and so this part of the world had become more visible and important to the U.S.  Not coincidentally, Bertrand Russell wrote his influential book “The Problem of China” at around this time, which was also published in 1922.  So it is perhaps not surprising that China and Japan should feature so prominently in a book from this time (Whitbeck, 1922). 

A North Pole-centered map best shows relationships in an aeronautical world.  Map from Renner, 1942, Figure 19.  Human Geography in the Air Age (A Text for High School Students)

            The idea of Geography textbooks being reflections of their times holds up even into the 20^th century (and into the present, as well, of course).  In a very interesting volume published in 1942, geographic concepts are presented through the lens of aviation, clearly reflecting the preoccupation with air power during WWII, and how aviation changed the world and how we see things, as well as the implications of the decreasing “distance” between places (Renner, 1942). 

            In a 2008 review of U.S. Geography textbooks, “Changing Perspectives in High School World Geography: 1950-2005,” the author concludes that “Five significant changes were noted: decline of national orientation and a greater focus on non-Western cultures; greater emphasis upon consumption over production; the accentuation of values clarification; increasing coverage of basic or prevocational skills; and standardization of format and content in textbooks. Many of these changes point towards a new cosmopolitan citizenship model, although some teachers and state social studies standards still see geography from a national perspective.”

According to his findings, geography textbooks are being written with less nationalism and less subjectivity.  But I would reserve judgment on that.  One hundred years from now, our textbooks (and everything else!) will be critiqued by people living in a vastly different world, who will find fault with what we have written, how we thought about the world, and what we deemed significant enough to pass on to the youth (not to mention them judging us by our actual actions or inactions).  I’m sure our feeble attempts at objectivity will be seen as just as lacking as those shown in our look-back of books from the previous two centuries, no matter how hard we have tried to be fair, unbiased, and correct.  It is the nature of things.  We are always judged by those who come after us, by those who have no direct experience of the world in which we have had to negotiate.  I am certainly no relativist, but I think we must not be too harsh when taking a close look at these old books and the messages they impart, and temper some of their excesses with an understanding of their historical milieu. 

            This posting is the first in a series of personal ruminations about Geography Education and Geography Textbooks, with further posts forthcoming over the weeks and months ahead, as time permits.  Themes that I would like to explore in a comparative and longitudinal manner include 1.) “Mathematical Geography,” which is a now-obscure name for the study of map-making, map interpretation, projections, latitude-longitude, scale, and so forth.  Mathematical Geography figures prominently in many of the Geography textbooks of the 19th and early 20th centuries;  2.) The evolution of thematic maps, which appear in the textbooks less commonly than reference maps, but increasing in usage over time;  3.) The changing description and portrayal of “races” and “nations,” as well as the changing definitions of those terms; and  4.) A longitudinal perspective of how two or three separate regions were discussed in these books, possibly focusing on China, Africa and/or Turkey. 

1869 Map of Africa, showing the continent before partition by the European powers at the Conference of Berlin, 1884-1885.  Note how there are few national boundaries delineated here, prior to the carving-up process in Berlin, and the vari-colored areas above depict vague and somewhat amorphous generalizations of African regions.  Much of the African interior was stilll unknown to Europeans at that time, who had only a very fuzzy idea of what and who was where, and, with a few notable exceptions, most European knowledge about Africa was restricted to a thin strip of land along the coast.  Map from Warren, 1869. 

For a very good “Short History of Geography Education,” including the status of geography in the US, the UK, Chinese-speaking countries, Canada, Germany, and Japan, see http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/~spalladi/thesis/Chapter2.html  

For a February, 2011, commentary on the Revival of Geographic Education ("Geographic Illiteracy Slowly Fading in the United States") see http://geography.about.com/od/teachgeography/a/geoedrevival.htm

 For the historical development of Geography as an academic discipline and the evolution of Geography education, see http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/229637/geography/272874/Historical-development-of-geography   HINT: this one is especially useful for Geography doctoral students who feel they don’t have sufficient background in the “paradigms” of Geography, particularly regarding what happened “Between Humboldt and Harvey.”  (kudos to Cindi Katz for coining that phrase in a curriculum committee meeting!)

For Alex Standish’s review of 1950-2005 High School Geography Texts, see Journal of Geography, Volume 107, Numbers 4-5, July 2008 , pp. 121-130.

For the full-text of the John Alfred Nietz book “Old Textbooks: spelling, grammar, reading, arithmetic, geography, American history, civil government, physiology, penmanship, art, music, as taught in the common schools from colonial days to 1900,” published in 1961 by University of Pittsburgh Press.  This link is for Chapter 6 “Geographies: An Old Study”

http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=nietz;cc=nietz;rgn=full%20text;idno=00AEP6688M;didno=00AEP6688M;view=image;seq=0207;node=00AEP6688M%3A11

Frontispiece from Adams, 1830, Geography: or, A Description of the World, in Three Parts

Geography Textbooks referenced above (Listed in chronological order of publication date.  All books are out of print and out of copyright.  Notice the grandiose titles of some of them!):

§  A Compendious and Complete System of Modern Geography, or, A View of the Present State of the World: Being a Faithful Abridgement of the American Universal Geography (Edition of 1812) with Corrections and Additions Made from information Since Received, Illustrated by a Representation of the Solar System - Morse, Jedidiah, 1761-1826, published 1814 (709 pages).

§  A Geographical View of the World, Embracing the Manners, Customs, and Pursuits of Every Nation - Phillips, R. (Richard), Sir, 1767-1840, published 1826 (Rev. Goldsmith).

§  Elements of Geography, Ancient and Modern: with an Atlas - Worcester, Joseph Emerson, 1784-1865, published 1828.

§  Geography: or, A Description of the World, in Three Parts: Part I – Geographical Orthography.  Part II – A Grammar of Geography.  Part III – A Description of the Earth, Accompanied by an Atlas, to which is Added, An Easy Method of Constructing Maps, Illustrated by Plates, for the Use of Schools and Academies. - Adams, Daniel, 1773-1864, published 1830.

§  Geography on the Productive System: For Schools, Academies, and Families - Smith, Roswell Chamberlin, 1797-1875, published 1839.

§  The Common-School Geography: An Elementary Treatise on Mathematical, Physical, and Political Geography. - Warren, David M., published 1869.

§  A Complete Course in Geography: Physical, Industrial, and Political: With a Special Geography for Each State. - Swinton, William, 1833-1892, published 1875.

§  The Guyot Geographical Reader and Primer: A Series of Journeys Round the World. - Pratt, Mary Howe Smith, published 1882.

§  The Complete Geography: Mathematical, Physical, Political - Niles, Sanford, published 1889.
§ Natural Advanced Geography - Redway, Jacques, and Hinman, Russell, published 1898.

§  A Complete Geography - Tarr, Ralph S., 1864-1912, published 1902.

§  The High School Course in Geography - Whitbeck, R. H., 1871-1939, published 1922.

§  Human Geography in the Air Age (A Text for High School Students) - Renner, George T., 1900-1955, published 1942.

§  Elements of Geography: Physical and Cultural – Finch, Vernor, and Trewartha, Glenn, published 1948.

Pulse of the Nation: Maps Based on Twitter Activity

U.S. Mood throughout the day, inferred from Twitter

© 2010 Alan Mislove, Sune Lehmann, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, J. Niels Rosenquist. Some rights reserved. Images, poster, and movie are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

More cartograms!  This series of maps is about degrees of happiness and times of the day, based on tweets.  Check out the animated map sequence.  Thanks for sending the link, Gretchen!

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood/  

And in another twitter-related map, Daniel Huffman interpolated the ratio of tweets containing curse words with total number of tweets to produce an isopleth map of cursing activity.  The comments below the map give a lot of detail on his methodology and data in constructing the map.  http://cartastrophe.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/no-swearing-in-utah/   Thanks for sending me this, Andrew M. (nearly a month ago!).  The Map Monkey moves slowly sometimes, but actually it worked out really well to pair it with this other Twitter map! 

Detail of Four Corners Area

WTF is This? Bad Maps!

Here are some maps I dug up recently on the Internet that have earned the WTF IS THIS? Disapproval Rating from the Map Monster (the evil twin of the Map Monkey, or otherwise known as the voice of my conscience!). 

US Population Map by State

First of all, the projection is bad.  And the map-maker has committed the cardinal sin of producing a choropleth-looking map using absolute numbers, instead of ratios or percentages.  And the multi-color ramp is not intuitive, as it would be in a monochrome ramp – here the colors do not suggest an increase or decrease in magnitude.  Aqua is not inherently showing “more” of the variable than purple.  It would be nice to have some commas in the legend to help us read the numbers, too.  Seven or eight digits without commas or spaces just boggles the eyes.  There are no data sources, no scale, and a doofy-looking after thought of a north arrow floating in the white space.  Oh, my, says the Map Monster.  WTF? 

Walmarts and Starbucks per Capita by US State

This map has no legend.  We have no idea what the data ranges are.  Are they even the same data ranges for both maps?  It’s somehow hard to believe that California, Illinois, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado all have far more Starbucks per capita than Walmarts.  I’ll just bet the differences in data ranges might have something to do with this apparent anomaly!

Bad Proportional Symbol Map

You can’t even tell which circle goes with which city!  They need a refresher course in labeling!  Some of the symbols cover the entire state!  And there are mysterious numbers in the legend – 0.1, 0.66, 1.8, etc.  What could this mean in terms of population?

Bad Coast Guard Map

Horribly confusing and overly complicated.  TMI!!!

Bad NOAA Map (Gulf oil spill)

The same problem as with the Coast Guard map.  NOAA usually produces good, clear maps.  Not this one.  (We still love you, NOAA!)

“Fun task: Try telling where the oil is predicted to be on May 3rd on this map. Especially if you are red-green colorblind.  This shows why stacked, partly transparent polygons are a poor choice to show a multi-day event.  Bad stuff.” From Misguided Maps at http://misguidedmaps.com/  

US Population Growth Map

This one is so bad.  We don’t know why the 0% growth states were chosen to be shown in bright red (when all the other states are shades of blue), and the data value classes overlap.  In addition, the legend ranges are given in percentages, while the map text states that the numbers reflect population growth, in thousands.  (I don’t think New York State’s population grew by 10,000 %, for instance!).

Courtesy of Cartastrophe at http://cartastrophe.wordpress.com/  

Apple Ranking Map

We really have no idea what we are looking at here.  What do the numbers in the so-called “Index” refer to?  Apple sales?  Apple quality?  Tons of apples produced?  What are the geographical divisions, the units of data aggregation?  They are not counties!  Maybe some apple market catchment area?  We can’t know!  And they’re not saying! http://smrb.com/web/guest/apple-market-ranker

Weedkiller

OK, I’ll let you guys try to figure out what is wrong with this map!  And the very bad mistakes in labeling call into question the veracity of the rest of the data on this map.  HINT: Things are not necessarily where they should be!

Fox News Makes a Map!  Even Dora the Explorer wouldn't have made THIS mistake! This infamous Fox News map was brought to my attention the other day by Andrew M., Kristen G., and Lesley P.  Another example of labeling gone wrong: when things are not necessarily put in the right place.  It's no wonder that many US kids are geographically illiterate - look how ignorant their elders can be (well at least the elders at Fox News! which hopefully are not TOO many kids' role models!)

The "Too Many Symbols" Map

No legend, first of all.  No title, second of all.  I have no idea whatsoever what this map is supposed to be about.  Especially since many of the symbols appear to be out in the water.  IF the blue bits are water….

Change in Abortion Rate

Kids, don’t try this at home!  The "Exploding States" approach.  Can anybody actually interpret the data in this map?  And why is Alaska sitting directly on top of the Pacific Northwest states?

  

Art Museum Map

This is just a bad map – the resolution of the coastline is very coarse compared to the zoomed-in character of the map.  And the locational points are labeled with text that is way too large.  And what are those flying saucer-like elliptical blips? (photographed from a TV screen by Ms. Kristen Grady, ever on the look-out for strange maps!)

Sara Palin’s Target Map

Nothing cartographically wrong with this, in particular, really not a bad map, just a map in bad taste. 

American Maps Are Bad

It seems that, as far as map-making goes, Americans have had a bad reputation for quite a long while! 

A diagram explaining the source of “Bad Map” problems, from Judith Tyner’s book Introduction to Thematic Cartography.  Take heed of good advice!  Know your data!  Know your audience!  “A clear map IS a beautiful map,” as the Map Monkey always admonishes. 

If any of you have any additional critiques of the above "Bad Maps," or would like to add links to MORE bad maps, please leave a comment.