Last month, Anton Howes wrote about historians and our weakness for storytelling. I think many maps have a similar dangerous allure. They smooth over chronology and ignore the reality of overwhelming complexity that confronts anyone who has tried to answer a question by visiting a historical archive.
And then there are the really bad historical maps. Though my title is debatable, I believe that there really are maps — several maps, in fact— which can be pointed to as causal agents in World War I.