A few weeks ago, I had the wonderful opportunity, thanks to generous funding from the Philip Lee Phillips Society and the Library of Congress Professional Association, to attend the Material Foundations of Map History, 1450-1900, course held by the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. The course was taught by Matthew Edney, Osher …
Edo (present day Tokyo) served as the seat of the Tokugawa Shogunate from 1603 to 1867. During the Tokugawa period, the Tokaido Highroad was the most important route in Japan. The Tokaido road stretched over 300 miles from Edo to the capital city of Kyoto. A cartographer named Ochikochi Doin surveyed the route in 1651. …
The staff of the Geography and Map Division, and the members of the Philip Lee Phillips Map Society, dedicate this important acquisition and blog post to our former colleague, Ed Redmond, who passed away last month and whose life was lived surrounded by maps and manuscripts just like it. In his memoir History Continues, the …
The Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology and History of the Early Americas contains important archaeological artifacts, rare books, manuscripts, maps, and graphic works of art, which survey the earliest history of the lands that would become known as the Americas. In 2004 Jay I. Kislak, a businessman, philanthropist, military aviator, and collector, donated …
William Hacke was one of the most prolific manuscript chart makers for his time. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Hacke produced over 300 navigational charts from 1682 to 1702. In this post I will briefly discuss his career and his role in the pardon of the notorious pirate Bartholomew Sharp. William Hacke was …
This is the second in series of guests posts by Giselle Aviles, the 2019 Archaeological Research Associate in the Geography and Map Division, where she is delving into the treasures of the William and Inger Ginsberg Collection of Pre-Columbian Textiles and the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the History and Archaeology of the Early Americas. …
The Library of Congress staff is excited to launch Story Maps, interactive and immersive web applications that tell the incredible stories of the Library’s collections! Story Maps, created within a Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based software platform created by Esri, combine text, images, multimedia, and interactive maps to create engaging online narrative experiences. Under a program …
I love watching the Olympic Games, both summer and winter! So with the Winter Olympics starting this week in P’yongch’ang, I decided to dive into our collections to learn more about historic maps of Korea, encompassing what is now North and South Korea. As I began browsing our digitized collections, I was first struck by …
Writing is a strange invention. One might suppose that its emergence could not fail to bring profound changes in the conditions of human existence… –Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques Time and money are spent in collecting the remains …
