A few years ago a colleague of mine in the map division wrote a blog about maps of North Korea’s enigmatic capital of Pyongang. One of the maps, published by the Japanese Tourist Bureau in the 1920s, extols the city, renamed by the Japanese as Heijo, as a model of modernization and economic prosperity. At …
With the first liftoff of Orville and Wilbur Wright into the sky in 1903, the world dramatically changed in an instant, and it did not take long for the implications of flight to be applied to the world of cartography. The value of aerial mapping became readily apparent with the advent of World War I. …
Today it’s easy to check the weather without even leaving the house: hourly predictions for rain, wind, temperature, and humidity are available to most of us through our phones at the touch of a button. Warnings for severe weather flash across our screens to help keep us safe – but how did we get here? …
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 …
At 5:12 a.m. on a typical Wednesday morning, most San Franciscans are probably sleeping. Perhaps they are just brewing their first cup of coffee, or gearing up for a jog. Maybe they are just stepping foot out the door on their way to work. Nothing out of the ordinary. But 115 years ago at 5:12 …
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 …
While browsing through our digital map collections, I came across a map that forced me to stop and take a closer look. Titled Fire chart of the Borough of Manhattan, N.Y…, it was published in 1915 and shows the number of reported fires in Manhattan, block by block, for the years 1910, 1911, and 1912. …
There aren’t many official maps of the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine. In fact, we would not expect to find any at all, for the country arrived into this world on the morning of March 15, 1939, and passed into history that very evening, a fatality of the common maladies afflicting vulnerable, neo-natal states, i.e. poor timing, …
The former capital of Pakistan, Karachi is the most populous city in the country and the third most populous in the world. Before it was Karachi, the place was called Kolachi, a small village on the Arabian Sea. Kolachi was the surname of the founding fisher-woman, Lady Kolachi, according to local lore. The transformation from …