Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one. argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing.. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Amer­i­cans have nev­er like the word “empire,” hav­ing seced­ed from the British Empire to osten­si­bly found a free nation. The founders blamed slav­ery on the British, nam­ing the king as the respon­si­ble par­ty. Three of the most dis­tin­guished Vir­ginia slave­hold­ers denounced the prac­tice as a “hideous blot,” “repug­nant,” and “evil.” But they made no effort to end it. Like­wise, accord­ing to the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, the British were respon­si­ble for excit­ing “domes­tic insur­rec­tions among us,” and endeav­our­ing “to  bring on the inhab­i­tants of our fron­tiers, the mer­ci­less Indi­an Sav­ages.”

These denun­ci­a­tions aside, the new coun­try nonethe­less began a course iden­ti­cal to every oth­er Euro­pean world pow­er, wag­ing per­pet­u­al war­fare, seiz­ing ter­ri­to­ry and vast­ly expand­ing its con­trol over more and more land and resources in the decades after Inde­pen­dence.

U.S. impe­r­i­al pow­er was assert­ed not only by force of arms and coin but also through an ide­o­log­i­cal view that made its appear­ance and growth an act of both divine and sec­u­lar prov­i­dence. We see this view reflect­ed espe­cial­ly in the mak­ing of maps and ear­ly his­tor­i­cal info­graph­ics.

In 1851, three years after war with Mex­i­co had halved that coun­try and expand­ed U.S. ter­ri­to­ry into what would become sev­er­al new states, Emma Willard, the nation’s first female map­mak­er, cre­at­ed the “Chrono­g­ra­ph­er of Ancient His­to­ry” above, a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion to “teach stu­dents about the shape of his­tor­i­cal time,” writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate. The Chrono­g­ra­ph­er is a “more spe­cial­ized off­shoot of Willard’s mas­ter Tem­ple of Time, which tack­led all of history”—or all six thou­sand years of it, any­way, since “Cre­ation BC 4004.”

Willard made sev­er­al such maps, illus­trat­ing an idea pop­u­lar among 18th and 19th cen­tu­ry his­to­ri­ans, and illus­trat­ed in many sim­i­lar ways by oth­er artists: cast­ing his­to­ry as a suc­ces­sion of great empires, one tak­ing over for anoth­er. View­ers of the map stand out­side the temple’s sta­ble fram­ing, assured they are the inher­i­tors of its his­tor­i­cal largesse. Oth­er visu­al metaphors told this sto­ry, too. Willard, as Ted Wid­mer points out at The Paris Review. Willard was an “inven­tive visu­al thinker,” if also a very con­ven­tion­al his­tor­i­cal one.

In an ear­li­er map, from 1836, Willard visu­al­ized time as a series of branch­ing impe­r­i­al streams, flow­ing down­ward from “Cre­ation.” Curi­ous­ly, she sit­u­ates Amer­i­can Inde­pen­dence on the periph­ery, end­ing with the “Empire of Napoleon” at the cen­ter. The U.S. was both some­thing new in the world and, in oth­er maps of hers, the fruition of a seed plant­ed cen­turies ear­li­er. Willard’s map­mak­ing began as an effort to sup­ple­ment her mate­ri­als as “a pio­neer­ing edu­ca­tor,” founder of the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and a “ver­sa­tile writer, pub­lish­er and yes, map­mak­er,” who “used every tool avail­able to teach young read­ers (and espe­cial­ly young women) how to see his­to­ry in cre­ative new ways.”

In anoth­er “chrono­g­ra­ph­er” text­book illus­tra­tion, she shows the “His­to­ry of the U. States or Repub­lic of Amer­i­ca” as a tree which had been grow­ing since 1492, though no such place as the Unit­ed States exist­ed for most of this his­to­ry. Maps, writes Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscu­ra, “have the pow­er to shape his­to­ry” as well as to record it. Willard’s maps told grand, uni­ver­sal stories—imperial stories—about how the U.S. came to be. In 1828, when she was 41, “only slight­ly old­er than the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca itself,” Willard pub­lished a series of maps in her His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, or Repub­lic of Amer­i­ca.

This was “the first book of its kind—the first atlas to present the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­ca.” Willard’s maps show the move­ment of Indige­nous nations in plates like “Loca­tions and Wan­der­ings of The Abo­rig­i­nal Tribes… The Direc­tion of their Wan­der­ings,” below—these were part of “a sto­ry about the tri­umph of Anglo set­tlers in this part of the world. She helped solid­i­fy, for both her peers and her stu­dents, a nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­can des­tiny and inevitabil­i­ty, writes Uni­ver­si­ty of Den­ver his­to­ri­an Susan Schul­ten. Willard was “an exu­ber­ant nation­al­ist,” who gen­er­al­ly “accept­ed the removal of these tribes to the west as inevitable.”

Willard was a pio­neer in many respects, includ­ing, per­haps, in her adop­ta­tion of Euro­pean neo­clas­si­cal ideas about his­to­ry and time in the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of a new Amer­i­can empire. Her snap­shots of time col­lapse “cen­turies into a sin­gle image,” Schul­ten explains, as a way of map­ping time “in a dif­fer­ent way as a pre­lude to what comes to next.” See many more of Willard’s maps from The His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States, or Repub­lic of Amer­i­ca, the first his­tor­i­cal atlas of the Unit­ed States, at Boston Rare Maps.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Ani­mat­ed Maps Show the Expan­sion of the U.S. from the Dif­fer­ent Per­spec­tives of Set­tlers & Native Peo­ples

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visu­al­ized in Two Min­utes: 10 Mil­lion Lives, 20,000 Voy­ages, Over 315 Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness