Below is an image of an embroidered map from the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The name of the embroiderer, Sophia Mason, is stitched at the bottom of the map; the year 1802 is printed beneath her name. From the 18th to the early 19th century, American and British school girls received their …
A few years ago a colleague of mine in the map division wrote a blog about maps of North Korea’s enigmatic capital of Pyongang. One of the maps, published by the Japanese Tourist Bureau in the 1920s, extols the city, renamed by the Japanese as Heijo, as a model of modernization and economic prosperity. At …
Flow maps are characterized by representing direction and amount of movement between an origin and a destination – and Charles Joseph Minard is widely regarded as the first cartographer who mastered the art of the flow map. He is best known for his flow map of Napolean’s 1812 invasion of Russia titled “Carte figurative des …
With the first liftoff of Orville and Wilbur Wright into the sky in 1903, the world dramatically changed in an instant, and it did not take long for the implications of flight to be applied to the world of cartography. The value of aerial mapping became readily apparent with the advent of World War I. …