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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
During the early 20th century, the British explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, led expeditions to the South Pole. Roald Amundsen’s polar party was the first to reach the South Pole on December 14th, 1911; five weeks later the polar party led by Robert Falcon Scott was the …
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. …
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 …
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. …
