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Category: City Histories

View of completed St. Louis Bridge, with steamboats in Mississippi River, surrounded by eight views of stages of bridge construction, based on photographs taken in 1874 by R. Benecke, sections of pier and machinery.

Pictorial St. Louis – The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley

Posted by: Julie Stoner

The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Known also as bird’s-eye views, perspective maps, or aero views, panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. Typically printed on …

Map of Washington DC in various colors indicating the grade of the streets.

Visualizing DC’s Municipal Infrastructure,1890 to 2022

Posted by: Meagan Snow

Maps can tell us all kinds of things about how others have viewed and shaped the world – from the borders of ancient empires to the layout of your neighborhood street grid. Today, spatial data commonly powers the maps and applications we use to access basic information about the places we inhabit: opening an app …

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. …

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

New Fire Insurance Map Research Guide Available

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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 …

A red outline around the streets of San Francisco in the burned portion of the city. The buildings that have been rebuilt two years later are shown as black rectangles.

Shaken to the Core

Posted by: Sonia Kahn

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 …

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

Mapping A World Of Cities

Posted by: Ed Redmond

Sponsored by the Leventhal Map Center of the Boston Public Library and the MacLean Collection Map Library in Chicago, IL, the Library of Congress is pleased to announce its participation entitled Mapping A World of Cities in a joint project with the American Geographical Society (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), the David Rumsey Map Center (Stanford Libraries, California), …