Sanborn Map Company fire insurance surveyors successfully mapped many thousands of cities and towns across North America, but they were often viewed with suspicion by locals and they were not granted access to every building they sought to map. This post describes what happened when they were refused, and the creative ways they could sometimes get around property owners’ reservations about their work.
Using materials from the Geography & Map Division's Frederick Doyle Papers, this post explores the role NASA’s Apollo Transforming Printer played in creating maps of the moon from panoramic photographs.
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.
At the dawn of the 20th century, hundreds of U.S. citizens dreamed of starting a new life—and a new U.S. territory—on Cuba’s Isle of Pines at what would be known as the McKinley Colonies. A newly cataloged collection of promotional plat maps for this short-lived project shows just how big the founders’ ambitions were, and the role maps played in selling the idea.
The Harlem Hellfighters, an African-American regiment of the US Army, recently received the Congressional Gold Medal to honor their service during World War I. Explore their story through these maps from the Geography & Map Division.
This is a guest post written by G&M summer intern, Elizabeth Dorokhina. This post explores maps of the Trans-Siberian Railway, especially, how cartography shows more than just a limited geographical area, but political, social and economic issues across the world.
The Library of Congress holds an extensive collection of maps that have been printed, drawn and embroidered on cloth. This post features a few examples of textile maps held in the Geography and Map Division.
North of the Snake River in southeast Washington State sits the Palouse: a region of rolling hills, (somewhat mythical) giant earthworms, and fertile loess soils. This post discusses the unique geology of this region using maps found in the Geography & Map Division.
Interview with Dr. Shouraseni Sen Roy, the Geography and Map Division's latest Phillip Lee Phillips Society Fellow, who has just finished her 8-week stint here at the Library of Congress to conduct research on her topic of historical analysis of transformations in the Sundarbans Delta.
