President Millard Fillmore (1800-1874) was elected to the Office of the Vice President of the United States in 1848 and, due to the untimely death of President Zachary Taylor in 1850, Fillmore became the 13th President of the United States. From the standpoint of the Geography and Map Division, however, Millard Fillmore’s most important contribution […]
Letts’s bird’s eye view of the approaches to India by W.H. Payne was published in London during the early 1900s. Letts, Son & Co. sold stationary, maps and diaries, among them is this striking panoramic view that depicts Russian territory in the north marked with a red dotted line along the Amu Darya River. Mountain ranges, the […]
The Union ambitiously tunneled 511 feet to reach the Confederate lines during siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. Unique to this Civil War battle, they set off a massive explosion that created a 170-by-120-feet crater beneath the Confederate lines and stormed the defenses in a failed effort, known as the Battle of the Crater. Thereafter, the Confederates worried […]
Most historians consider the Italo-Ottoman War, 1911-12, as a prelude to World War I. Although it has fallen into obscurity, some relics, such as this compelling panoramic map of the war’s first major engagement, may revive our interest. Italy’s claims to North Africa were rooted in Roman times. Over the millennia, the provinces of Tripolitania […]
To visit Arlington National Cemetery is to know these United States more deeply. It is a place of remembrance and a microcosm of American history. Beneath the shade of firs, maples, oaks and many other trees, the necropolis gently sprawls across 624 acres. The site is in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from […]
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 […]
This is a report and guest post by Giselle Aviles, the 2019 Archaeological Research Associate in the Geography and Map Division on the recent Society of Women Geographers Conference held at the Library of Congress. For women who know no boundaries is the motto of the Society of Woman Geographers (SWG), and it is precisely that […]
This is a special Women’s History Month guest post by Giselle Aviles, the 2019 Archaeological Research Associate in the Geography and Map Division. Giselle interviews Dr. Paulette Hasier, the first woman to serve as Chief of the Geography and Map Division since it was founded late in the nineteenth century. On one of my breaks from […]
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 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) takes place in Washington DC this year and with the conference come thousands of geographers of all stripes, from across this vibrant and rapidly expanding discipline. This year the association will give one its highest honors, the Atlas Award, to the Librarian of Congress, […]