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Category: 20th century cartography

Map of the United States with illustrations all over it showing different groups of people.

Louise E. Jefferson – A Hidden African American Cartographer

Posted by: Julie Stoner

This is a guest post by Iris Taylor, a senior cataloging specialist in the Geography and Map Division. It is a common belief that you can acquire inspiration from a variety of people, places, or things. Seanna Tsung, a Library of Congress staff member, recently uncovered a unique collection of maps in the Geography and …

Visualizing Injustice: Early NAACP Cartographers and Racial Inequality in America

Posted by: John Hessler

No good result can come from any investigation which refuses to consider the facts. A conclusion that is based upon a presumption, instead of the best evidence, is unworthy of a moments consideration.                       –Ida B. Wells, 1901 The use of cartography to highlight economic and …

View of First Avenue. Power lines hang across the road, where a street car is driving down the road. Pedestrians fill the sidewalk.

Walking Seattle’s Streets A Hundred Years Ago

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 …

Route map showing the lines and stops of the Gospel Temperance Railraod

Fast-Track to Destruction City Aboard the Gospel Temperance Railroad

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. …

1881 topographic map of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, and its environs.

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Posted by: Mike Klein

Evening settled over the Bohemian community of Lidice on June 9, 1942, probably as it had for centuries, that is, without incident. So insignificant was the village, at least from our point of view, that one could hardly distinguish it from hundreds of others in its general vicinity, if the large-scale map from the late …

Black and white photo of New York City, above the clouds.

1920s New York City from the Sky

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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. …