Launched in 2009, the World Digital Library [WDL] was a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, with the support of UNESCO, and contributions from libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations around the world. The WDL sought to preserve and share some of the world’s most important cultural objects, increasing access to cultural …
Andersonville Prison, arguably the most horrific Confederate prison for Union soldiers, was constructed in 1864 during the US Civil War and was located a little over a hundred miles south of Atlanta, Georgia. The prison was constructed as an open-air stockade with walls made of pine logs at least fifteen feet high. During its fourteen …
Flow maps are characterized by representing direction and amount of movement between an origin and a destination – and Charles Joseph Minard is widely regarded as the first cartographer who mastered the art of the flow map. He is best known for his flow map of Napolean’s 1812 invasion of Russia titled “Carte figurative des …
In September 1821 a Connecticut educator by the name of William Channing Woodbridge introduced his "Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World," classifying the earth's inhabitants by cultural hierarchies.
The staff of the Geography and Map Division, and the members of the Philip Lee Phillips Map Society, dedicate this important acquisition and blog post to our former colleague, Ed Redmond, who passed away last month and whose life was lived surrounded by maps and manuscripts just like it. In his memoir History Continues, the …
Mars receives more media attention than the other planets in our solar system. People are obsessed with the classic novels The War of the Worlds and The Martian Chronicles. The movies Total Recall and The Martian were huge hits. Mars has polar ice caps, dry river beds and extinct volcanoes, and Martian landscape posters have …
Have you ever wondered how historic maps can be used with today’s modern mapping technologies? One of the ways in which analog maps can be used with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is through a process called georeferencing. Georeferencing is the process of adding digital spatial reference information to an otherwise non-spatial image. Adding spatial reference …
This is a guest post by Kelly Bilz, Librarian-in-Residence in the Geography and Map Division. Beneath the surface of west-central Kentucky winds a complex system of rivers and grottos known as Mammoth Cave. Named “mammoth” for its size, the cave doesn’t have much to do with the creature—although mammoths and mastodons did live in Kentucky near Big …
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 …
