This is a guest post by Britt Long, Detailed Reference Librarian in the Geography and Map Division. Since the founding of the United States of America, our country has been in the import and export business. We have bartered and traded goods across land and sea, developing systems of transportation that are both innovative and …
The most heavily used collection in the Geography and Map Division are the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, a collection of large-scale, building level maps, dating from 1867 to the present which depict the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some 12,000 cities and towns in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Sanborn collection includes about …
This is a guest post by Robert Morris, Acquisitions Specialist in the Geography and Map Division. The Geography and Map Division’s (G&M) collection of panoramic maps portray U.S. and Canadian cities and towns as if viewed from a few thousand feet above at an oblique angle. Bird’s-eye views, perspective maps, and aerial views are other …
Celebrated as a state holiday in Utah, Pioneer Day commemorates the first members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints entering the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. Since the foundation of the Church in 1830, Latter-day Saints were faced with persecution and driven out of every community they started in New …
One of my favorite computer games as a child was called The Yukon Trail. Made in 1994, the player became a prospector in the late 19th century Klondike gold rush, navigating the treacherous trail in an attempt to stay alive and strike it rich. What I recently discovered while browsing our map collections is that games related …
Board games have been played around the world for millennia. One of the oldest board games known to exist, named Senet, appears in an Egyptian hieroglyph from about 5,000 years ago! The late 18th century saw a rise in the creation of board games in Europe, many of which were educational, designed to be an …