Another year has come and gone with 2025 up ahead! The Geography and Map Division and the Library of Congress have robust digital scan labs that are constantly working to make our collections more accessible. As has become tradition (see previous Year in Review posts), to celebrate the end of a year and to ring in the new, I will take a look back at the maps that were digitized last year which are now available online and choose just a few to share with you!
First up is a map we have both recently acquired as well as newly scanned. Below is a portolan chart showing the east coast of North America from the Caribbean to Newfoundland. A portolan chart is a type of nautical navigational map originating in the 13th century. The rhumb lines seen running across the chart are a characteristic feature of this type of map. This chart is attributed to Bartolomeu Velho of Portugal, made about 1560. Discovered in 1961 at the Rye Castle Museum in Sussex, England, the map had been cut up to use for binding later manuscripts with this portion only being a quarter of the original chart. It includes many coastal place names, images of three flags, a bar scale, as well as geographic discoveries made by Jacques Cartier during his voyages to Canada in 1534 to 1536. You can read more about this interesting map in a more detailed blog post, The (Newly Revealed) Wonders of a 16th Century Portolan Chart of the North American Coast.
The atlas has 11 plates depicting the Eastern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, North Africa, Egypt and the Land of al-Sham, East India, and Turkey in Europe and Rome. You can read more about this fascinating atlas in our blog post, Exploring the First Printed Arabic World Atlas.
The third map in our tour of newly scanned maps of 2024 is a map titled Distribution of mounds in the eastern United States. Likely published and removed from the Twelfth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology : to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1890-91 by J.W. Powell, the red dots indicate Native American mounds or mound groups in the eastern United States. These were planned earthen works built by different Native American populations for a variety of reasons over a long period of time. There is still much to be learned about these ancient structures. For more information about digitized primary sources, print bibliographies, and related online resources for the study of Indigenous peoples of North America, take a look at our research guide, Native American Spaces: Cartographic Resources at the Library of Congress.
The last map I want to highlight is the well known “gerrymander” cartoon, which first appeared in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. The artist, Elkanah Tisdale, drew the cartoon to voice opposition to the new Senate district lines drawn for Essex County, Massachusetts. Governor Elbridge Gerry had signed a law the previous month drawing the lines in the county to heavily favor his own party. Tisdale drew out the new districts in a salamander shape, adding the head, wings, and tail, calling the creature a “Gerry-mander”, a term still widely used today.
The Geography and Map Division holds the original wood block carvings used to print the cartoon. Wood blocks were used in early printing. The image would be carved into the wood blocks backwards so when ink was applied and pressed to paper, the image would show the right way. Below you can see both the original blocks and a print created from the wood carvings. You can read more about wood block printing in our blog post, Fabricating the World: Printing with Wood.
With hundreds of maps to choose from, it was difficult to choose only a few to highlight in this post. There are many more such as The travellers map game to Chicago and the Worlds Fair, a panoramic map of Wellsville PA from 1903, our continued scanning of the California title collection maps, and numerous other atlases and map sets. As we are continue to make new scans available, do some exploring and see what you can find at www.loc.gov/maps!
