The city of Alexandria, Virginia traces its roots to the establishment of a tobacco inspection warehouse at the foot of current day Oronoco Street in Old Town Alexandria. The purpose of the inspection warehouse was to provide quality control over tobacco exported from the colonies to England. Instrumental to the early mapping of Alexandria was …
The city of Lviv, in what is now western Ukraine, was greatly impacted by the Second World War and the Holocaust. Prior to the outbreak of fighting, it was part of Poland and known as Lwów. It was then a diverse, multi-ethnic city, and its inhabitants included large communities of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and others. …
225 years ago this month, on October 13, 1792, the cornerstone of what we now call the White House was laid. The term “White House,” although not its official name, was commonly used to refer to the President’s House or Executive Mansion. President Theodore Roosevelt formally adopted the term “White House” in 1901. So how …
The oldest set of federally placed monuments in the United States are strewn along busy streets, hidden in dense forests, lying unassumingly in residential front yards and church parking lots. Many are fortified by small iron fences, and one resides in the sea wall of a Potomac River lighthouse. Lining the current and former boundaries …
The 2016 Summer Olympics kicks off next week with over 10,000 athletes and many more tourists and attendees from around the world descending on the host city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is a sprawling metropolis with a population of 6 million people, situated along the Atlantic Ocean. But like the saying …
It is almost a cliché to say, but today, in 2016, maps are everywhere. The barriers to geographic information have come down so that anyone with internet access or a smart phone can see maps of the world in incredible detail. But the wide availability of maps to people of all walks of life is …
Architect and urban planner Julio César Pérez-Hernández will discuss the history of Cuba through cartography on May 13, 2016 at the Library of Congress. “Islands in the Stream: Cuban Maps from the Past to the Future” will take place from noon to 1 p.m. on Friday, May 13 in the Mumford Room on the sixth …
In honor of Women’s History Month this March, Worlds Revealed is featuring weekly posts about the history of women in geography and cartography. You can click on the “Women’s History Month” category see all related posts. Anna van Westerstee Beek (also spelled “Beeck”) was born in 1657 in The Hague, a coastal city in the …
The North Korean capital city Pyongyang has both a storied and troubled history. Among the reasons it fascinates, plain curiosity rises to the top of list, because the North Korean government has largely closed off the country from the rest of world since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Correspondingly, accurate maps of …