Hungary

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/regions

Exploring this interactive map of nation boundaries across the years.

I think I already had the general idea about the extent of border movements quite right. Stuff like the how big the Empire of Japan or Ottoman Empire got, and how many, many times the borders of European nations were redrawn. So I’ll only list some new things I learned from playing with the website:

• In ~1916 the European map is surprisingly simple, there are like 15 separate nations in the continential Europe (that are big enough to see). Austria-Hungary is huge. The World War I supposedly started in some connection to the assassination of the heir of this nation, but I never realized it was such a big nation at the time. Such assassination having implications kind of makes more sense now.
• I knew about the 1918 split-up of Austria-Hungary but it sure looks brutal on the map.
• On 1918 I see these countries appear for the first time: Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia
• Japan captured “Manchuria” in 1932, before German Reich started in 1933.
• I didn’t know the Nazis occupied Norway
• I think going one year at a time somewhat trivializes the whole matter of the terrible second world war. It’s less than dozen steps to go through the whole war.
• Just looking at the map changes, it seems difficult to take at face value statement like “Ukraine gained independence in 1991”. A huge country just seemingly appears out of nowhere. I’ll say now I don’t know anything about the topic — maybe they have history similar to Finland’s, whose changes on the map appear just as extreme.
• Yugoslavia’s split also looks quite painful. As a kid when I heard adults mention Yugoslavia I definitely did not fully comprehend that it was a country that no longer existed. That country boundaries could change, new countries be born and some die, that must have been to weird to grasp.