Pierre Charles L’Enfant did not design Washington in a vacuum. A unique city within American urban planning history, Washington was both informed by its predecessors—mostly European capitals—and an inspiration for its successors, both domestic and foreign. This blog post traces D.C.’s influences from London to Brasilia, using the Library of Congress’s diverse collection of globe-spanning maps to place L’Enfant’s Washington, D.C., within a longer history of city and town planning.
At the dawn of the 20th century, hundreds of U.S. citizens dreamed of starting a new life—and a new U.S. territory—on Cuba’s Isle of Pines at what would be known as the McKinley Colonies. A newly cataloged collection of promotional plat maps for this short-lived project shows just how big the founders’ ambitions were, and the role maps played in selling the idea.
This is a guest post written by G&M summer intern, Elizabeth Dorokhina. This post explores maps of the Trans-Siberian Railway, especially, how cartography shows more than just a limited geographical area, but political, social and economic issues across the world.
This blog post discusses the project done this summer during a Junior Fellowship at the Geography and Map Division. The post highlights Marie Tharp’s 1957 Physiographic Diagram of the Atlantic Ocean, other physiographic diagrams from the G&M collections, and why Tharp chose this kind of map in particular to depict the ocean floor.
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.
The Geography & Map Division recently acquired a rare collection of maps showing the locations of television and movie filming locations in Los Angeles, California from the 1980s. This blog post explores the cartographic and cultural value of these exceedingly unique and eminently practical maps of Los Angeles.
This blog post is an interview with Robert Morris, G&M’s recently retired acquisitions specialist. Robert worked in the division for almost 40 years, building the division’s collections and shaping its collection development policies through the decades.
Miller Jaquet, Junior Fellow in the Geography and Map Division, explores the cartography of West Africa and what maps reveal about power, politics, and how we got HERE.
