Santo Domingo is the largest metropolitan area in the Caribbean islands and the oldest continuously inhabited, European-established city in the Americas. Maps spanning over five hundred years of colonial contestation in the region provide a powerful account of the city’s historical importance for European colonial ambitions in the New World.
For several hundred years, the term "Tartary" - or its Latin version, Tartaria - appeared on European maps, usually floating somewhere between Eastern Europe and China. This post explores the etymology of the place name and the various regions to which it referred.
An armillary sphere is a model of the heavens featuring a central globe with a framework of rings around it that represent celestial bodies and features. This blog post will discuss these astronomical objects, highlighting the division’s oldest globe and armillary sphere, made by Caspar Vopell in 1543.
Learn about the purpose and variety of terrestrial and celestial printed globe gores. Globe gores are strips of paper containing printed maps in the sizes and shapes needed for globe construction.
Applications are now open for Philip Lee Phillips Society Fellowship at the Library of Congress. Scholars of the history of cartography, Geographic Information Science (GIS), digital humanities or related fields are encouraged to apply for this fellowship utilizing the collections of the Geography and Map Division.
Growing up in a Brazilian-American household, I’ve long appreciated the delicious versatility of the Atlantic cod, scientific name Gadus morhua, known to the Portuguese-speaking world as bacalhau in its preferred salted and dried form. It was only when I began working as a map librarian, however, that I saw how powerful cod truly was. Centuries …
