West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

Abstract

comets, deluges, and so on. The book under review reuses Hapgood’s changing glaciation, fluctuating sea levels, and the lithosphere of Earth slipping about. No archeological sites, no relics, no documentation, no evidence whatsoever of the existence of this imagined and imaginary civilization, except the maps. The book is a large paperbound softcover, 8.5 × 0.5 × 11 inches. The first half of the book (1–93) is the text. The second half of the book (107 pages) are color print-outs of lowresolution images of old maps found on the Internet. Given the scale of the maps, the small size of the images, their inadequate resolution, and the unnecessarily wide margins of the pages further shrinking the images, they are of little-to-no value in supporting the thesis and arguments of the book. Their purpose is further obscured and usefulness obliterated by the absence of URLs to guide the interested reader to legible, zoomable images. Most of what the text of the book draws our attention to in these images is imperceptible, and the book has no index. Most of this malarkey was done earlier and, in some ways, better, by Charles H. Hapgood, the Godfather of the Fringe Historians of Cartography. This reviewer cannot recommend Ancient Explorers and Their Amazing Maps to our journal’s readership except, rather wholeheartedly, as yet another of the seemingly never-ending examples of pseudo-historians beginning their quest with a preconceived theory to prove, then seeking factoids to support it, stringing together coincidental but unconnected pieces of data, cavalierly obfuscating their case with both formal and informal fallacies, and ending with a flimsy edifice of fallacy, falsity, and sophistry.