British sunset

Here's a little toy distributed by the Children’s Encyclopedia in Britain in the early twentieth century showing why the sun never sets on the British Empire.


Here's an excellent XKCD "What-if" post explaining when the sun will set on the British Empire.

And here's an old post from this blog showing different pre-WWII-era propaganda pieces each distorting the size of the British Empire in different ways.

Isolationist two-fer

Today's two-fer is a pair of pre-WWII pieces.  The first one is from Amanda, who sent us yesterday's item and a bunch of others.  This is from 1938 from the famous political cartoonist Herblock who here is making the case against the pre-war isolationism that was quite thoroughly prominent in the U.S. before the war (the hard-to-read caption says "Is this what you mean?")

The second item originally ran in U.S. publications and came from the Nazis in an attempt to support that isolationism.  This illustration was re-published in the book How To Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier as a prime example of propagandistic maps:

Extra points to anybody who can name all those landmasses on the right.