The following post is adapted from an essay written by Richard W. Stephenson, former Specialist in American Cartographic History at the Library of Congress, in “Land Ownership Maps: A Checklist of Nineteenth Century Unites States County Maps in the Library of Congress.” The essay has been edited and updated by Ed Redmond, a cartographic reference …
Called the “father of temperature mapping,” the renowned German naturalist and climatologist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) devised the concept of the isotherm, which he described in 1816 as a “curve drawn through points on a globe which receive an equal quantity of heat.” Humboldt’s initial diagram map of average temperatures appeared in 1817 in an …
The former capital of Pakistan, Karachi is the most populous city in the country and the third most populous in the world. Before it was Karachi, the place was called Kolachi, a small village on the Arabian Sea. Kolachi was the surname of the founding fisher-woman, Lady Kolachi, according to local lore. The transformation from …