Miller Jaquet, Junior Fellow in the Geography and Map Division, explores the cartography of West Africa and what maps reveal about power, politics, and how we got HERE.
Explore a new search interface for the Sanborn map collection, launched in conjunction with an updated version of the Geography and Map Reading Room website.
1960 was a dramatic year for Africa, in which 17 countries gained their independence from colonial powers. This post charts the events of that watershed year through a series of political maps produced by the CIA.
In 1884-85, a group of European dignitaries met in Berlin and delineated the boundaries of French, British, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and German colonies on the continent of Africa. Lines drawn on the map became administrative reality, and over the next few decades European governments busied themselves with exploring, surveying, and conquering their new territories. One …
With possibly as many as 7,000 languages used around the world, it was only a matter of time before some of them would make it onto a map. Language maps, linguistic maps, or – if the map shows ethnic information as well – ethnolinguistic maps are a type of thematic map: a map which displays …
Growing up in Michigan, I was a lake enthusiast from a young age, and extremely proud that my home state was surrounded by North America’s most important inland bodies of water. These are, of course, the Great Lakes, so called because of their size – according to the 2020 National Geographic Atlas of the World, …