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Posted by: Julie Stoner
While working as a Junior Fellow this summer, Champ Turner worked with a collection of maps of Brazil. In this blog post, he tells the story, through maps, of an expedition taken by Teddy Roosevelt and Cândido Rondon in 1913 down the River of Doubt in the Brazilian Amazon.
Posted in: 20th century cartography, Exploration, Guest Posts, South American History
Posted by: Julie Stoner
A post about Alexander Mackenzie and the first known trans continental crossing of North America.
Posted in: 18th century cartography, Exploration
Posted by: Julie Stoner
This is a guest post by Kelly Bilz, Librarian-in-Residence in the Geography and Map Division. Beneath the surface of west-central Kentucky winds a complex system of rivers and grottos known as Mammoth Cave. Named “mammoth” for its size, the cave doesn’t have much to do with the creature—although mammoths and mastodons did live in Kentucky near Big …
Posted in: Exploration, Guest Posts, National Parks
Posted by: Julie Stoner
If you were asked the location of the furthest point from the center of the Earth, you would likely be inclined to state the summit of Mount Everest as an obvious choice. Looking at the 1862 pictorial map below would seem to confirm that it would be in the Himalayan Mountains of Asia. Fascinatingly, due …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
Spewing lava and gas from deep within the earth, volcanoes are one of nature’s most explosive natural features. Thousands of volcanoes dot the planet but only about 1,500 are considered active, meaning they have erupted at some point in the last 10,000 years. The largest of these active volcanoes in both mass and volume is …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In Part 1 of this post, we discussed the Amazon River in South America as a contender for the title of the longest river on Earth. While arguments have been made by some cartographers that the Amazon should be given this distinction, it is traditionally held by most that the longest river in the world …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
The Amazon or the Nile? The debate over which deserves the title of longest river is centuries old. Determining the world’s longest river is not a simple matter of using a measuring tape to find the distance! In this new post in our Extremities of the Earth series, we will explore these two mighty waterways …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
In the previous post of this series, the military installation of Alert in Nunavut, Canada was named the northernmost permanently inhabited point. While this is indeed true, it is only accessible to assigned military personnel. For the adventurers out there, we will have to content ourselves with visiting or living on the island of Spitsbergen, …
Posted in: Exploration, Physical Geography, Series: Extremities of the Earth
Posted by: Julie Stoner
We are excited to announce the launch of two new Library of Congress Story Maps! At the beginning of May, the Library of Congress launched Story Maps, interactive and immersive web applications that tell the incredible stories of the Library’s collections. Created within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based software platform created by Esri, Story Maps …
Posted in: Exploration, Geography and Map Division