Growing up in the U.S., I learned a pretty limited amount about other countries around the world. A little European history, a tiny mostly negative bit about the countries the U.S. has gone to war with, and not much else.
I decided to do something about that. And as I struggled to keep everything organized just a couple countries in, this site was born. Mostly as a way for me to keep track of what I’m learning, but also to share it with anyone who might be interested.
As this is a self-directed study project, don’t expect my explorations of other countries to be exhaustive or extensive. While I’ll try to get a quick overview of each country and its history, I’m likely to spend most of my effort on the things I’m most interested in – food (especially street food), crafts and folk art, culture, women, music, and dance.
Which countries?
The issue you run into immediately when you decide to learn a bit about every country in the world is that not everyone in the world agrees about which bits of land are a country and which aren’t. So the list of all the countries in the world depends very much on who you ask.
As I start this project in 2020, there are roughly 200 countries in the world. It will be interesting to see over the next few years how that number might change and fluctuate. There are 193 countries that belong to the United Nations. The United States currently recognizes 195 countries.
I’ll try to be as generous as I can about including countries – if there’s a population of people who believe that where they live is an independent country and they’re recognized as such by at least a couple other countries, I’ll include them.
Which order?
I’ve actually given this a lot of thought. My original intention was to learn a bit more about countries in Africa as my knowledge about that continent in particular is lacking. But as I started thinking about it and doing some early research, I realized that my ignorance was much larger.
So now that I’ve set all the countries in the world as my goal – do I go continent by continent? Study countries from oldest to newest, newest to oldest? Once you get past a certain age, does anyone actually know which country is the oldest one? Seems unlikely.
So in the end, I decided to go with the boring old alphabetical order as the countries are named in US English, but I make no promises to stick to that. Some region of the world might catch my fancy and I might stay there for a bit.