Eastern European history is a difficult subject for Westerners to understand, partly because of the region's political, ethnic, and cultural diversity. The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Eastern Europe, addresses this need. The atlas illustrates key moments in East European history, from the Middle Ages to the present. Students will regard it as a useful reference, and general readers will value it for its clarity and wealth of information.
This atlas is concerned with the part of Europe extending from the Balkan Peninsula in the south to Poland and Lithuania in the north. The authors try to make this truly "eastern Europe" by defining the eastern border of Europe as "the line formed by the combined western border of Belarus, Ukraine, and the Russian Federated Republic." Although no division of the Eurasian land mass is defensible on absolute geographic terms, this is certainly a nonstandard definition, though it does allow the authors to avoid such locutions as "East Central Europe."
The authors, professors at Wilkes University, designed this atlas to supplement material for college classes in east European history. It consists of a series of 50 maps, each with an accompanying page of detailed text. After a series of introductory geographic, cultural, and demographic maps, the history of the region is traced from the division of the Roman Empire in the third century to the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. The maps were drawn using Adobe Illustrator 6.0 and generated on Macintosh Power PCs. They are fairly simple outline maps in black and white, with shades of green, and are primarily concerned with the political history of the region. The accompanying text is an admirable summary of the history of the area, tracing the complex ethnic and cultural interactions of the peoples of Eastern Europe. It also offers an excellent background for the understanding of the current problems experienced in the region.
The detailed index refers to places shown on each map and to most names in the text; some terms (mostly proper names) are highlighted in green in the text, but the significance of this is unclear. The work also includes a bibliography of about 50 books. One small error occurs in a discussion of the fight of King Bela IV of Hungary against "Holy Roman emperor Frederick II Babenberg;" this is a confusion of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen with his contemporary, Duke Frederick II Babenberg of Austria.
Two recent books invite comparison. Paul R. Magocsi's Historical Atlas of East Central Europe [RBB D 15 93] is a more substantial (and expensive) work, offering more elaborate maps and many thematic maps that do not appear here. Richard Crampton and Ben Crampton's Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 1996) offers a much more detailed look at a small portion of the history covered by Hupchick and Cox. The advantages of the present work are its affordable price and its clarity and conciseness in offering an overview covering 18 centuries of the history of a very complex part of the world. Recommended for collections of all types, high-school level and above.
