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Posted by: Julie Stoner
The first post of this series explored the baseball stadiums of Chicago. In this post we can enjoy the maps of another city rich in baseball history: New York City! Home to two iconic baseball teams, New York City today hosts the New York Yankees (American League) and the New York Mets ( National League). …
Posted in: City Histories
Posted by: Julie Stoner
We are excited to announce the launch of two new Library of Congress Story Maps! At the beginning of May, the Library of Congress launched Story Maps, interactive and immersive web applications that tell the incredible stories of the Library’s collections. Created within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based software platform created by Esri, Story Maps …
Posted in: Exploration, Geography and Map Division
Posted by: Julie Stoner
I love watching the Olympic Games, both summer and winter! So with the Winter Olympics starting this week in P’yongch’ang, I decided to dive into our collections to learn more about historic maps of Korea, encompassing what is now North and South Korea. As I began browsing our digitized collections, I was first struck by …
Posted in: Asian History, Manuscripts
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In Part 1 of this post, we discussed the Amazon River in South America as a contender for the title of the longest river on Earth. While arguments have been made by some cartographers that the Amazon should be given this distinction, it is traditionally held by most that the longest river in the world …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
The Amazon or the Nile? The debate over which deserves the title of longest river is centuries old. Determining the world’s longest river is not a simple matter of using a measuring tape to find the distance! In this new post in our Extremities of the Earth series, we will explore these two mighty waterways …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In the previous post of this series, the military installation of Alert in Nunavut, Canada was named the northernmost permanently inhabited point. While this is indeed true, it is only accessible to assigned military personnel. For the adventurers out there, we will have to content ourselves with visiting or living on the island of Spitsbergen, …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
Located in a shifting sea of ice, the North Pole sits at the center of the Arctic Ocean, the literal top of the world. The shifting of the ice makes it impossible to establish a permanent base at the pole, though drifting stations have been created through the decades that are manned for several weeks …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
While many of the over six million maps in the Geography and Map Division are of a serious nature, there are also those meant to amuse the viewer. There is one such atlas in the collection titled Geographical fun : being humourous outlines of various countries, with an introduction and descriptive lines. Published in 1868, …
Posted in: Borders
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In the previous post of this blog series, Extremities of the Earth, we explored the depths of the lowest natural point on earth. We will now travel in the opposite direction, to the heights of Mount Everest, the highest point on earth from sea level at 29,029 feet (8,848 m) above sea level. The peak …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth