Elmer Simms Campbell’s pictorial night-club map showing Harlem’s hotspots for entertainment, dining, and drinking appeared as a centerfold in the January 18, 1933, edition of the short-lived weekly Manhattan Magazine. His work was an important contribution to Harlem’s cultural renaissance—it serves as a time capsule—the itinerary and guide of a typical Friday night at the …
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 …
The end of the 19th century saw a rise in the proliferation of data visualizations alongside traditional cartography and thematic mapping. A terrific example of this type of work is Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, which “shows by graphic methods [the states’] present condition and their political, social, and industrial development.” The atlas …
The Panoramic Maps Collection, one of our most popular collections, features more than a thousand beautifully illustrated “bird’s-eye-view” maps of towns and cities across the United States, Canada, and even some internationally. To celebrate this collection, we are excited to launch View from Above: Exploring the Panoramic Map Collection, an interactive map that makes browsing …
In 1764, Le petit atlas maritime – “the little maritime atlas” – was published in Paris. Consisting of 5 volumes, each about 14 inches tall and containing 581 maps in total, Le petit atlas maritime is not particularly little. Its subject matter, in fact, is expansive: individual volumes are dedicated to maps of North America and the …
*The text for this blog post was adapted from the research guide created by former G&M reference specialist, Mike Klein, and from the essay by Jim Flatness, former G&M acquisitions specialist, found in the Library’s publication “Many nations : a Library of Congress resource guide for the study of Indian and Alaska Native Peoples of the …
Today on Halloween children often dress up as witches and wizards with brimmed hats and broom sticks. Many find joy in the celebration of all things spooky by donning a costume and an alternate identity for a single night. Of course 300 plus years ago this innocuous enough tradition was non-existent. No, in fact, quite …
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be …
In mid-19th Century America, an expanding nation had a major transportation need: rail lines that could stretch from coast to coast. Western explorations and survey crews began to sketch out potential railroad routes in the decades before the American Civil War. Lloyd’s American railroad map of the US, seen below, shows three proposed rail routes: …
