The year was 1920. World War I had just ended, and the theory that history is written by the winners was proving true in The Treaty of Trianon.

 

The Kingdom of Hungary was on the losing side of the war, and the treaty redefined Hungary’s borders. The delegates used census data and maps to try to decide the boundaries of countries like the Kingdom of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Retired map librarian Paul Stout lists some of the things Hungarians lost in the Treaty of Trianon.

 

“The Hungarians were not allowed to have much of an army,” Stout said. “They had no navy. They lost their seaports. They lost two-thirds of their territory. They lost two-thirds of their population. And a lot of Hungarians were put into other countries.”

 

Stout has spent his life collecting maps from around the world. One of those maps has traveled about 4,200 miles and nearly a century to now be stored in the Ball State University Library Archives in Muncie, Indiana.

 

“I argue that it’s plausible that this was at the peace conference,” he said.

 

The map itself is dotted with multicolored circles denoting different groups within the area before its borders were decided.

 

“This map was an ethnic map of the Hungarian Kingdom within the Austria-Hungarian empire, and it showed from the latest census what ethnic group each people belonged to,” Stout said. “And then theoretically they should draw the boundary lines after the war so each people could be in their own national area.”

 

President Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the theory of self-determination or the principle that people should decide what country they belong to. Stout said the result was more political than Wilson would have liked.

 

“It ended up that the treaty did not give self-determination like the Americans wanted, but done for other reasons, and they were really kind of bad for the side that was defeated,” Stout said.

 

Stout was originally a cartographer for the Air Force, but his love of maps grew into a career of being a map librarian. He volunteered during summers at the Library of Congress. He was allowed to take some maps that were no longer used. It was here that he found the map that was most likely used in the Treaty of Trianon.

 

“As far as we know, there is only two other copies of this map in existence,” he said. “One is in London, and one is in Milwaukee.”

 

Although retired, Stout continues to collect maps and learn more about the world.

 

“When I found out I could do professionally what I was doing as a hobby, I thought, 'I want to do that,'” Stout said. “If you can do as a job what you do for fun, that’s great.”