In the late-19th century, European politics were troubled by what had come to be called the “Eastern Question,” the fate of the 600-year Ottoman Empire. Once encompassing the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia (present-day Turkey), most of the Arab Middle East, and the Balkan Peninsula, by 1886 the empire had shrunk dramatically as a result of wars with European powers, Russia in particular, and revolts by subject peoples. This 1886 map, published in London, shows the Turkish Empire as comprised mainly of Albania, Thrace, Crete, Anatolia, and parts of the Arab ...

The Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual empire governed by a dual monarchy that exercised Habsburg rule across Europe’s second largest sovereign territory. Although considered a Great Power in the concert of European nations, the empire was internally divided by internecine quarrels among its national minorities and ultimately broke up under the strains of World War I. This 1906 Rand McNally map shows the empire in the decade before its dissolution. William Rand founded the company that became Rand McNally in Chicago in 1856, initially to print guidebooks ...