Oxford Cartographers World History Timeline Map

I wrote about this map in my book and I often use it as a teaching tool in my classrooms. It is hanging in my office and today I was meditating on it as I did yoga, thinking about the inevitability of change. I am always fascinated by the sheer size of the Roman Empire (the height represents the geographic territory it covered and the width represents the years of its existence). When I look at this I always imagine what it must have been like to be alive in the year that it collapsed. And then I look at the USA, a little purple rectangle in the lower right hand corner of the map. How small our history and influence is in comparison. And I wonder if we too will just end one day like so many other empires in human history. Having spent most of my adult life studying the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the late 20th century, this seems more like a real possibility to me than to most other Americans who too often take our nation and its institutions for granted.

The full World History Timeline from Oxford Cartographers hanging on my office wall

A detail of the Roman Empire, the large orange shape that dominates the whole map. It existed for centuries and then it just fell.

Here in the lower right had corner is a little purple rectangle for the USA. On this map it seems so insignificant.

And the French will translate it, too...

I am thrilled to announce that my book, Why Woman Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, has just been acquired for its tenth translation (and its eleventh foreign edition). On the one had, this is really amazing news because it is the first time that any of my books have been able to reach such a wide non-English-speaking audience. On the other hand, I am a little sad that it is my least academic book with the silliest title (which I really didn’t want). I suppose that this isn’t surprising (those people in marketing know how to produce attractive clickbait), but if I had guessed that this book was going to be read beyond the intended American audience, I certainly would have done a few things differently.

For the record, the entire book was written between December 2017 and March 2018, and I was basically building on the original New York Times Op-Ed and on the content of my class, Sex and Socialism, some version of which I have been teaching since 2003. I meant it to be an introduction to socialist feminist ideas for younger American women, and did not intend it to be some sort of global manifesto. This was my eighth book, and the previous seven had only ever found a limited academic audience, so I had no way of imagining that this one would find its way out into the wider world. This was my naiveté, I suppose, and the least I can hope is that readers will find their way to my more serious academic work if they are interested in learning more about the topics I discuss. So far, the Polish publisher is the only one that has changed the title. I’m crossing my fingers that the French will, too.