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Posted by: Meagan Snow
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 …
Posted in: 17th century cartography, 19th century cartography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
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: …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History
Posted by: Meagan Snow
When Prohibition became law across the United States in 1920, legitimate businesses were no longer allowed to serve alcohol, paving the way for illegal speakeasies and related underground businesses. In Chicago, this meant that criminals like Al Capone and Johnny Torrio fought for control of illegal alcohol distribution within the city, sparking an infamous decade …
Posted in: 20th century cartography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
John Bachmann, a Swiss born lithographer, moved to the United States shortly after 1848, and went on to produce a series of bird’s eye maps that depict American landscapes in ways that were groundbreaking around the mid-nineteenth century. His work blurred the line between cartography and fine art, and his landscape prints are held by …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, American History
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Maps can tell us all kinds of things about how others have viewed and shaped the world – from the borders of ancient empires to the layout of your neighborhood street grid. Today, spatial data commonly powers the maps and applications we use to access basic information about the places we inhabit: opening an app …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 21st century cartography, City Histories, Geographic Information Science
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Let’s journey back a hundred years in time to the downtown streets of Seattle, Washington. On a clear day, you can see the Olympic Mountains from the fish markets along Railroad Avenue. Eddie Carlson, who will one day bring the 1962 World’s Fair – and the Space Needle – to Seattle, is now just a …
Posted in: 20th century cartography
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Though much of the history of cartography involves map-makers striving to capture the world in increasingly accurate scientific detail, sometimes the domain of the map-maker is to capture the plane of imagined, metaphorical, allegorical, or even spiritual. Such is the journey you’ll take on the “Gospel Temperance Railroad,” a 1908 map creation by George E. …
Posted in: 20th century cartography, American History
Posted by: Meagan Snow
Today it’s easy to check the weather without even leaving the house: hourly predictions for rain, wind, temperature, and humidity are available to most of us through our phones at the touch of a button. Warnings for severe weather flash across our screens to help keep us safe – but how did we get here? …
Posted in: 19th century cartography, 20th century cartography, Geographic Information Science
Posted by: Meagan Snow
This is a guest post by Meagan Snow, Geospatial Data Visualization Librarian in the Geography and Map Division. Whether you’ve used an online map to check traffic conditions, a fitness app to track your jogging route, or found photos tagged by location on social media, many of us rely on geospatial data more and more …
Posted in: 21st century cartography, Geographic Information Science