For over one hundred years, the Panama Canal has been a world-renowned marvel of engineering, creating a vital shipping link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But at the turn of the 20th century, if it were not for some eleventh hour political maneuvering, and perhaps a very persuasive postage stamp, perhaps the famous canal …
Join us for GIS Day at the Library of Congress, Tuesday, November 14th, for a full day of talks highlighting GIS technology and its impact on the work of policymakers, researchers, and librarians on Capitol Hill and beyond! The GIS Day morning session will feature a keynote address by Congressman Mark Takano, of California, on …
Last month, the West African nation of Liberia marked 170 years of independence. The country has a unique and complex history, with a pivotal era of its founding as a colony captured in maps. The Geography and Map Division preserves a collection of twenty maps of Liberia produced in the mid-19th century, covering several decades …
Historically, “cartographer” has commonly been a profession wearing many hats: artist, craftsman, communicator, documentarian, entrepreneur, and pioneer (among many others). To celebrate cartographers who embraced these multitudes of roles to achieve success, it is worth remembering their stories. Today, we recognize Grafton Tyler Brown, a trailblazing African American cartographer of the Pacific Northwest. Brown was …
The oldest set of federally placed monuments in the United States are strewn along busy streets, hidden in dense forests, lying unassumingly in residential front yards and church parking lots. Many are fortified by small iron fences, and one resides in the sea wall of a Potomac River lighthouse. Lining the current and former boundaries …