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Posted by: Amelia Raines
In 1764, Le petit atlas maritime – “the little maritime atlas” – was published in Paris. Consisting of 5 volumes, each about 14 inches tall and containing 581 maps in total, Le petit atlas maritime is not particularly little. Its subject matter, in fact, is expansive: individual volumes are dedicated to maps of North America and the …
Posted in: 18th century cartography, African History, American History, European History, Exploration
Posted by: Amelia Raines
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History, Imaginary maps, Military History
Posted by: Amelia Raines
When Ohio became a state in 1803, breaking off from the Northwest Territory, parts of the border remained ambiguous. Three decades later, this ambiguity led to a conflict between Ohioans and Michiganders which became known as the Toledo War. In the state’s enabling act, the northern boundary of Ohio was defined as “an east and …
Posted in: 18th century cartography, 19th century cartography, American History, Borders
Posted by: Amelia Raines
The dramatic eruption of Krakatoa (or Krakatau in Indonesian) in 1883 was, as our sister blog Headlines and Heroes describes it, “one of the first global catastrophes.” By its very destruction, this small Indonesian island was thrust onto the world stage, its name becoming almost shorthand for volcanic disaster. Geologist Rogier Verbeek, who had briefly …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, Asian History, Oceania, Physical Geography
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Recently I came across an interesting map of Florida in our collections. Dated 1823, the map was made only four years after the territory of Florida was ceded to the United States by Spain, and 22 years before it became a state in its own right. The map, authored by surveyor Charles Vignoles and engraved …
Posted in: 16th century cartography, 18th century cartography, 19th century cartography, 21st century cartography, American History, Hispanic American History, National Parks
Posted by: Amelia Raines
Take a look at this monsoon chart, paying special attention to the western Indian Ocean between the east coast of Africa and the west coast of India, and you might notice a pattern: The left chart depicts the prevailing winds in the Indian Ocean in February; the right, in August. In winter, a sea of …
Posted in: 16th century cartography, 17th century cartography, 19th century cartography, African History, Asian History, Exploration
Posted by: Amelia Raines
With possibly as many as 7,000 languages used around the world, it was only a matter of time before some of them would make it onto a map. Language maps, linguistic maps, or – if the map shows ethnic information as well – ethnolinguistic maps are a type of thematic map: a map which displays …
Posted in: 18th century cartography, 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography