This blog promotes the upcoming virtual orientation on Tuesday, June 9, 2026 at 3:00pm (ET) to discover some of our many collection materials related to the 250th anniversary of the United States. In celebration of this milestone, learn about our A250-themed partnership with the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS).
This blog series explores the extremes of the planet. This post discusses the places with the coldest temperatures on Earth, both the uninhabited areas of Antarctica and the coldest inhabited places in Russia.
Fire insurance maps reveal a lot about the industrial history of cities and towns of any size. Sanborn fire insurance maps of a particular Mississippi Delta town in 1925 reveal an economy based around the harvesting, refining, and transportation of cotton. These maps also hint at the life and work of the Black community in the Delta that made this economy possible, as well as some of the many achievements of that town’s community over the 20th century.
The Philip Lee Phillips Society Fellowship is open to applicants for the 2027 term. Learn more about this unique fellowship opportunity as well as our 2026 Fellows, Dr. Edward Blum and Dr. Laurent Dubois.
It took centuries for European maps to accurately portray the route of Africa's third-longest river. Does its delta lie in Egypt, Senegal, or Nigeria - or could there even be two?
John Ross, a British naval officer led three Arctic expeditions. In 1818 and 1829, he led expeditions to find the Northwest Passage. In 1850, he led a rescue mission to find survivors from Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. This post features maps related to John Ross's Arctic explorations.
The 1970 Census was the first United States decennial census to be released in machine-readable format, allowing cartographers sudden access to large amounts of aggregated demographic data about the entire United States. This blog post explores early computer cartography mapping techniques that took advantage of the new census format, including SYMAP and SYMVU, as demonstrated in an atlas held by the Geography & Map Division titled “The Puget Sound Region: A Portfolio of Thematic Computer Maps.”
