(A 500-year-old map used by Columbus reveals its secrets.) Putsch’s original map, a somewhat crude woodcut, became known by a variety of titles, including “Europa regina” (“Queen Europe”).

Today’s Europe is, in effect, returning to such a map. The decades of peace and prosperity, from the 1950s to 2009, when the European Union’s debt crisis began, made the political and economic ...

The map of Europe on which we were brought up has passed forever into the limbo of discarded things. It will possess, henceforth, merely an historical or antiquarian interest, like the map of ...