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Sailing the Early Seas with Portolan Charts
Prunes, Mateus, Chart of the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and the coasts of western Europe and northwest Africa. Mateus Prunes, anno, 1559. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Vellum 7. The...
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Propaganda Maps to Strike Fear, Inform, and Mobilize – A Special Collection...
Filled with heavy topics of war and occupation, War map: pictorial and propaganda map collection 1900-1950 contains maps and messages that frequently are pointed, unapologetic, and echo the anger and...
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May the Best Player Win: Geographical Board Games of the Past
Board games have been played around the world for millennia. One of the oldest board games known to exist, named Senet, appears in an Egyptian hieroglyph from about 5,000 years ago! The late 18th...
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A Rare Russian Plan of Dalian
In 1898 Tsarist Russia wrested from China a long-term lease for Port Arthur (Lushun), its new-found warm-water port on the east coast restricted to use by the Russian navy. Under pressure from Great...
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The Mysterious Island
The title of this post does not refer to the science fiction novel of the same name by Jules Verne. It refers to the phantom island Frisland which was commonly shown on maps of the North Atlantic Ocean...
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Celebrate GIS Day at the Library of Congress on Wednesday, November 13th!
The Library of Congress is proud to celebrate GIS Day on Wednesday, November 13th with a showcase event: In the Shadows of Notre Dame: Geographic Information Science, 3D Mapping and Cultural Heritage...
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Surveying: The Art of Measuring Land, Part One
This is the first of two posts outlining traditional 18th and 19th surveying methods. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, surveying is the art and science of measuring land. More precisely, it is...
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Risky Business
During World War I, the most hazardous place to be, relatively speaking, was not on the battlefield, but inside a German U-boat. Throughout the war, Germany deployed 375 Unterseebooten, i.e. U-boats or...
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Mapping the Suffragist Years
The map above shows the voting status for American women in 1914. Sadly, after of years of fighting for voting rights most American women had only partial suffrage or no suffrage at all. The exhibit...
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Surveying: The Art of Measuring Land, Part Two
As we learned in my previous blog, surveying is the art of measuring land. During the 18th century colonial surveying was relatively crude. A fixed “beginning point” such as a tree or a rock was...
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