Cultural & Historical Regions

Anatolia

Asia Minor, the peninsula that has always carried the traffic of continents

Benelux

The Low Countries, and the small union that rehearsed the EU

Central Europe

A region whose membership has always been a political argument

Indochina

The mainland Southeast Asian peninsula, and a name under review

Latin America

A region defined by language, not by latitude

Mesoamerica

The cultural hearth where the Americas invented the city

Mesopotamia

The land between the rivers, where the city was invented

Scandinavia

Three kingdoms bound by language, and a name that keeps expanding

Sub-Saharan Africa

The African world that begins where the Sahara ends

The African Great Lakes

The rift lakes and the crowded, contested states around them

The Arab World

Twenty-two states bound by a language rather than a border

The Balkans

Europe's most contested peninsula, where even the boundary is argued

The Baltic States

Three small nations on Europe's most closely watched frontier

The Caucasus

A mountain isthmus where Europe and Asia refuse to settle the line

The Fertile Crescent

The arc of first farming, from the Nile to the Gulf

The Horn of Africa

The African peninsula that juts toward Arabia

The Indian Subcontinent

South Asia, walled off by mountains and thrown out to sea

The Levant

The eastern Mediterranean shore and the land behind it

The Maghreb

Northwest Africa, the island between the sea and the sand

The Middle East

A region named from somewhere else, and still argued over

The Nordic Countries

Five states, three autonomous territories, and one stubborn social model

The Southern Cone

The temperate tail of South America, and the argument over who is in it