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Posted by: Meagan Snow
Learn about the early history of the Women's Bureau, including the maps they produced to make the case for establishing standards for women in the workplace.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History, Women's History
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Explore the fertile history of America's soil survey maps, which evolved alongside soil science over the course of the 20th century.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
This post explores the history of a large spherical globe with only latitude and longitude lines in the collections of the Geography & Map Division.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History
Posted by: Meagan Snow
This blog post describes William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's attempt to irrigate Wyoming's Big Horn Basin through maps which detail the area.
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography, American History, Physical Geography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
This blog posts provides an introduction to some early maps produced from images captured by ERTS-1 (later known as Landsat I), the world's first earth-observing satellite.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, Big Data and Visualization, Geographic Information Science
Posted by: Meagan Snow
When Prohibition became law across the United States in 1920, legitimate businesses were no longer allowed to serve alcohol, paving the way for illegal speakeasies and related underground businesses. In Chicago, this meant that criminals like Al Capone and Johnny Torrio fought for control of illegal alcohol distribution within the city, sparking an infamous decade …
Posted in: 20th century cartography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
In the early 20th century, most of America’s rural roads were constructed of gravel or dirt, causing slow travel and muddy roads. As new modes of transportation blossomed in cities – cars, bicycles, trolleys, and paved streets – a political movement called the Good Roads Movement aimed to connect rural areas with local cities via …
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Let’s journey back a hundred years in time to the downtown streets of Seattle, Washington. On a clear day, you can see the Olympic Mountains from the fish markets along Railroad Avenue. Eddie Carlson, who will one day bring the 1962 World’s Fair – and the Space Needle – to Seattle, is now just a …
Posted in: 20th century cartography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Though much of the history of cartography involves map-makers striving to capture the world in increasingly accurate scientific detail, sometimes the domain of the map-maker is to capture the plane of imagined, metaphorical, allegorical, or even spiritual. Such is the journey you’ll take on the “Gospel Temperance Railroad,” a 1908 map creation by George E. …
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History