Pierre Charles L’Enfant did not design Washington in a vacuum. A unique city within American urban planning history, Washington was both informed by its predecessors—mostly European capitals—and an inspiration for its successors, both domestic and foreign. This blog post traces D.C.’s influences from London to Brasilia, using the Library of Congress’s diverse collection of globe-spanning maps to place L’Enfant’s Washington, D.C., within a longer history of city and town planning.
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.
The Geography & Map Division recently digitized an important set of maps of Austria-Hungary. In this post, we explore these 19th- and early 20th-century maps and the layers of history and language that they contain.
