The Greek explorer and historian Megasthenes wrote that Taprobana was divided by a river and abundant in pearls and gold. Taprobana was located somewhere in the Indian Ocean and usually shown on historical maps as a large island south of India. There have been many theories about the identity of the island. Some thought Taprobana […]
There aren’t many official maps of the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine. In fact, we would not expect to find any at all, for the country arrived into this world on the morning of March 15, 1939, and passed into history that very evening, a fatality of the common maladies afflicting vulnerable, neo-natal states, i.e. poor timing, […]
Every month on our home page, we provide a monthly list of maps that have been scanned and added to the online collections of the Geography and Map Division. As has become tradition (previous Year in Review posts), to celebrate the end of a year and to ring in the new, I take a look […]
As we learned in my previous blog, surveying is the art of measuring land. During the 18th century colonial surveying was relatively crude. A fixed “beginning point” such as a tree or a rock was established as the starting point for the survey. A 66 foot long chain, commonly known as a Gunters Chain, was […]
The map below shows the voting status for American women in 1914. Sadly, after of years of fighting for voting rights most American women had only partial suffrage or no suffrage at all. The exhibit Shall Not Be Denied opened June 4, 2019 at the Library of Congress. It explores the struggles that American women […]
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 […]
This is the first of two posts outlining traditional 18th and 19th surveying methods. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, surveying is the art and science of measuring land. More precisely, it is “a means of making relatively large-scale, accurate measurements of the Earth’s surface.” The authoritative 18th century treatise on surveying, entitled “The Compleat Surveyor or […]
The Library of Congress is proud to celebrate GIS Day on Wednesday, November 13th with a showcase event: In the Shadows of Notre Dame: Geographic Information Science, 3D Mapping and Cultural Heritage Preservation. The all-day series of discussions will be held from 8:30am to 3:30pm in Room LJ-119 on the first floor of the Thomas […]
The title of this post does not refer to the science fiction novel of the same name by Jules Verne. It refers to the phantom island Frisland which was commonly shown on maps of the North Atlantic Ocean during the 16th and 17th centuries. Frisland never existed, however, cartographers believed that the island was real […]
In 1898 Tsarist Russia wrested from China a long-term lease for Port Arthur (Lushun), its new-found warm-water port on the east coast restricted to use by the Russian navy. Under pressure from Great Britain and Germany, two other European powers with concessions in China, Russia agreed to establish an open port on the southern tip […]