High above the coastal town of Lynn, Massachusetts sits High Rock. Today, High Rock is a city park, but its history ties back to the Hutchinson Family Singers and the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement in the United States.
This blog posts provides an introduction to some early maps produced from images captured by ERTS-1 (later known as Landsat I), the world's first earth-observing satellite.
Many have debated whether the Amazon or Nile is the world's longest river. This blog post explores a time period in American history in which there was another contender: the Missouri River.
The end of the 19th century saw a rise in the proliferation of data visualizations alongside traditional cartography and thematic mapping. A terrific example of this type of work is Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, which “shows by graphic methods [the states’] present condition and their political, social, and industrial development.” The atlas …
Happy GIS Day from the Library of Congress! Today the Library celebrates GIS Day with a virtual event exploring the role of GIS in addressing humanitarian disasters. Today’s event aims to highlight the role that geospatial data and GIS technologies can play in creating positive change in the face of global humanitarian challenges. Geography …
Many things unite humankind across the centuries, but chief among them is the great eternal question: what time can I expect the mail today? In today’s world, we’ve become accustomed to our new-found ability to track packages on our phones as they move toward us in real-time. Let’s take a look back in time to …
In mid-19th Century America, an expanding nation had a major transportation need: rail lines that could stretch from coast to coast. Western explorations and survey crews began to sketch out potential railroad routes in the decades before the American Civil War. Lloyd’s American railroad map of the US, seen below, shows three proposed rail routes: …