An 1898 map allows for a close examination of the natural and political geography of colonization during the "Scramble for Africa" and the never-completed Cape to Cairo Railway.
On October 27, 2022, the Library of Congress held an event for members of the Philip Lee Phillips Society, the Washington Map Society, and the Friends of the Library of Congress. The event was named “Explore the Depths of the Geography and Map Division.” Unusual maps and atlases from the collections of the Geography …
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be …
This is a guest post by Manuscript Division reference librarian Lara Szypszak. On September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate forces met just outside the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland. The battle, known by Union forces as the Battle of Antietam (after the nearby creek) and by the Confederates as the Battle of Sharpsburg (after the nearest …
A few years ago a colleague of mine in the map division wrote a blog about maps of North Korea’s enigmatic capital of Pyongang. One of the maps, published by the Japanese Tourist Bureau in the 1920s, extols the city, renamed by the Japanese as Heijo, as a model of modernization and economic prosperity. At …
The Napoleonic Wars began in 1803 and lasted until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The Geography and Map Division holds numerous maps of the battle. I am sharing images of a few of my favorites. I would like to begin with a brief summary of Napoleon’s final battle and the events that led to …
During World War I, the most hazardous place to be, relatively speaking, was not on the battlefield, but inside a German U-boat. Throughout the war, Germany deployed 375 Unterseebooten, i.e. U-boats or submarines; 202 were lost in action, or about fifty-four percent. Similarly, of the 17,000 sailors who served in them, about 5,100 were lost …
Filled with heavy topics of war and occupation, War map: pictorial and propaganda map collection 1900-1950 contains maps and messages that frequently are pointed, unapologetic, and echo the anger and desperation of nations at war. The collection of 180 maps typifies how cartographs were used to influence popular opinion and garner support for military and political efforts …