Geography changes all the time. There are many fields within the discipline of geography, physical geography, human geography, cultural geography, economic geography, military geography, historical geography, medical geography, religious geography, political geography, demographics, marketing, transportation geography. This list is not exhaustive but my fingers got tired of typing all that.

Toponym is the technical term for, “place name.” Most every country on the planet has an office or agency which manages place names internal to its own political boundaries. In the United States, for example, we have the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. The BGN was established in 1890 and codified into law in 1947 and has the express purpose of managing toponyms for the areas directly under control of the United States.

On January 20th, 2025, the new president signed an Executive Order requesting name changes to two places. The first place is in Alaska, and requests the renaming of Denali, the highest peak in North America, to Mt. McKinley. A little bit of history; William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States. The naming of places can be quite a political quagmire; the state of Alaska refers to the mountain as “Denali” and has for generations, as that is the name given to the mountain by the local Koyukon people. If Koyukon sounds familiar, this is where the name “Yukon Territories” derives. In 2015, President Obama used an EO to rename Mt. McKinley to Denali to bring the state name and federal name into congruence.

The second place name has been plastered all of the news, so when I mention the January 20, 2025 Executive Order directs the BGN to rename the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America,” this should come as no surprise. A portion of the EO is provided below. Click the image below to read the complete text.

The Executive Order requests the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and then directs all U.S. federal government agencies, contracts, and other documents to reflect the name change. A name change can only affect domains for which a country has sovereignty over, up to and including the internationally recognized continental shelf boundaries. Beyond the international boundary, the name change has no effect. In other words, Mexico, Canada, Jamaica, Belize, Germany, etc., are under no obligation to identify the Gulf of Mexico as anything other than the Gulf of Mexico. There is also the internationally recognized convention, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The UNCLOS is an organization which helps manage disagreements around international boundaries and names which occur in “the sea,” basically maritime issues.

This leads to another interesting discussion. If you inspect any political map these days, you might notice some odd name details. For example, why is Germany referred to as Deutschland, or was is Spain referred to as Espana, or why is Japan called Nippon? These country names are termed, endonyms, as these are the names of countries, or places, as the local residents refer to them. Exonyms exist, too, which are names given by outside countries to other places. For instance, we call Espana, “Spain,” so people in the U.S. and some other places use an exonym for Espana. In this course, we refer to the Danube River in Europe; however, in Germany, the Danube is called, “Donau,’ in Hungary, “Duna,” and in Slovakia, “Dunaj.” In formal settings, treaties and such, often a mutually satisfactory name will be used; or, the treaty documents or agreement documents will specifically enumerate each place name in order to be explicit and attempt to avoid confusion or create loop-holes.

I watch China activities often. The Chinese government loves to rename places which causes a great amount of friction with neighboring countries. China recently renamed 30 territories which are sovereign to India (meaning, these are part of India and not China). The Chinese government loves to assign new names to places the government believes are part of China. One place we are probably familiar with is Tibet. Tibet is a forbidden word in China, who refer to the mountainous territory as Xizang. Tibet was never legally recognized as a sovereign country. You may have heard of the term, “de facto,” meaning “in fact,” or “of fact,” which simply means “accepted as fact.” The problem is Tibet was never a country “de jure,’ meaning, “of the law,” or “recognized by law.”

If you want to read about some place name controversies, the banner above links to a VOA article. Renaming places within a country’s border is never really viewed as an aggressive gesture by foreign governments. Now, changing the toponym might be seen as aggressive by interests within a country. For instance, the indigenous peoples of Alaska might take issue with renaming Denali. When a government seeks to change the place of an internationally recognized place, like the Gulf of Mexico, that action can be taken (and has been taken) as a form of aggression and I’m already seeing concerns about a new Imperialism / Colonialism from Mexico who shares the Gulf of Mexico with the United States and Cuba.

If you are curious about what the current international boundaries are, NOAA has an interactive map available which depicts the delineation of different boundaries. The image below should link to the map site.