Frank Jacobs's User Profile - Atlas Obscura

Frank Jacobs

Journalist, writer, blogger, and Big Think's "Strange Maps" columnist.

https://twitter.com/VeryStrangeMaps

2023
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How Did the Chess Pieces Get Their Names?

One player’s pawn is another’s farmer. And at one time, the queen was the virgin, and rather powerless.

Colorado Is Not a Rectangle—It Has 697 Sides

The Centennial State is technically a hexahectaenneacontakaiheptagon.

The Mysterious Underground City Found in a Man’s Basement

How a renovation project in Turkey led to the discovery of a lifetime—a lost city that once housed 20,000 people.

How a Map Mistake Saved a Forest of 300-Year-Old Trees

Minnesota's "Lost Forty" survived the lumberjack's ax thanks to a improperly drawn lake.

How Njoya the Great Put His African Kingdom on the Map

A representation of the Bamum kingdom is a rare example of early-20th-century indigenous African cartography.

Europe’s Oldest Map Shows Tiny Bronze Age Kingdom

Discovered in 1900, the Saint-Bélec slab languished unrecognized in a castle basement for over a century.

‘Cockeyed’ Map Shows Both Glamour and Margins of 1930s Hollywood

Legendary cartoonist John Groth's pictorial map captures L.A.'s film factories in their Golden Age.

The Paratethys Sea Was the Largest Lake in Earth’s History

The Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas are the last surviving fragments of a body of water that stretched from Austria to Turkmenistan.