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Category: American History

The cover page of the World's Greatest War.

A Rare Atlas of the First World War

Posted by: Cynthia Smith

  On October 27, 2022, the Library of Congress held an event for members of the Philip Lee Phillips Society, the Washington Map Society, and the Friends of the Library of Congress. The event was named “Explore the Depths of the Geography and Map Division.” Unusual maps and atlases from the collections of the Geography …

A hunter shooting at a large cat crossing a river.

The Exotic Animals of the Americas

Posted by: Cynthia Smith

European colonists were fascinated with the wildlife of the Western Hemisphere. They described fauna native to the Americas in memoirs, travel journals and poetry. Pictures of the unfamiliar animals were often printed on maps. In this post I will discuss four colonial era maps that were decorated with illustrations of animals. The two maps of …

A map, dated 1914, that shows the voting status for women in the United States.

Mapping the Suffragist Years

Posted by: Cynthia Smith

The map above shows the voting status for American women in 1914. Sadly, after of years of fighting for voting rights most American women had only partial suffrage or no suffrage at all. The exhibit Shall Not Be Denied opened June 4, 2019 at the Library of Congress. It explores the struggles that American women …