The Map Room

Mark Tully writes with a link to the above video, part of the Visualizing Early Washington DC project, which I’ve seen before but (as has sometimes happened) I never seem to have gotten round to posting it. Here’s a description of the project:

UMBC’s Imaging Research Center (IRC) is working to re-create Washington DC in its early years 1790-1820. Remarkably little visual information remains from this time period. What began as a simple effort to use 3D digital re-creation and display techniques has become full-scale research to uncover the original landscape. In 1791, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant arrived in Georgetown Maryland with orders from President George Washington to lay out the new Federal City. What did he actually see as he rode the land on horseback? This is just one question that we are trying to answer.

David Hopp sent me a note about his new website, CLIWOC Repurposed. “The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) was a project sponsored by the European Union from 2001 through 2003. Meteorological data was extracted from the logbooks of ships, sailing primarily under the flags of Great Britain Spain, The Netherlands, and France. […] The intended purpose of this present web site is to explore visualiztions of the CLIWOC data not for their meteorological value, but to illustrate the trade routes of the ships of the four countries.” Which he does with a set of maps, one for each country, showing that country’s Atlantic trade routes.

I’m only now finding out about Texas: A Historical Atlas, thanks to this profile of the book’s author, retired history professor A. Ray Stephens, in the Denton Record-Chronicle. The atlas follows up on the Historical Atlas of Texas, published 20 years ago, which Stephens co-authored. From the publisher: “Practically everything about this atlas is new. All of the essays have been updated to reflect recent scholarship, while more than 30 appear for the first time, addressing such subjects as the Texas Declaration of Independence, early roads, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Texas-Oklahoma boundary disputes, and the tideland oil controversy. A dozen new entries for ‘Contemporary Texas’ alone chart aspects of industry, agriculture, and minority demographics. Nearly all of the expanded essays are accompanied by multiple maps — every one in full color.”

• Buy Texas: A Historical Atlas at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

An animated look at a thousand years of European history through changes in the political map. Pity it’s cropped and doesn’t indicate the years. Thanks to Heather Kinsinger for the link.

German researchers say that they have decoded references in Ptolemy’s Geographia and connected ancient Germanic settlements to present-day German cities, which “makes half the cities in Germany suddenly 1,000 years older than previously believed,” Der Spiegel reports. Via @scilib.

Douglas Knox writes, “Thought you might be interested to know the Newberry recently completed the digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. It has historical boundaries for every county in the U.S., dated to the day, freely available online for noncommercial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“1945-1998” by Isao Hashimoto is a video that maps 2,053 nuclear explosions — all but two of which tests — conducted across the globe; only North Korea’s recent tests are excluded, as they occurred after this video was made…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Collins Maps Blog points to two major collections of aerial photography that are browsable online: the National Library of Scotland’s collection of Ordnance Survey air photo mosaics of Scotland, taken between 1944 and 1950; and the National Collection of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Recent updates to Google Earth include higher-resolution underwater terrain data for some parts of the ocean floor and historical aerial photography taken over European cities during the Second World War….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kottke notices that New York City’s mapping portal has aerial photos of the city from 1924. Deroy Peraza has some fun comparing them to aerial photos from the present day. Previously: NYCityMap….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here are two animated historical timelines that map geopolitical change over time. This one from the British National Archives, which maps the 20th century, proceeds by period; it gets a few colours wrong here and there, and I’m not sure…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Pobediteli: Soldiers of the Great War was a Russian Internet project created in 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II (in the former Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War). It involves an incredible…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Don’t look now, but the Gettysburg National Military Park’s defunct Electric Map may be making a comeback of sorts: the presentation was recorded before the map was dismantled earlier this year, and the Park plans to show it alongside another…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Randy Plemel, who we last saw working on accessible transit maps, writes to let us know about the latest episode of his Smogr Alert podcast, in which he interviews Charles Graves, the author of The Genealogy of Cities (see…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Charles Graves writes to tell us about his upcoming book, The Genealogy of Cities, “a compilation of ancient and modern city plans, from 350 BCE to the present, depicting both built and proposed plans. … [I]t is illustrated with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Just one more New York Times interactive map, I swear (at least for today), but this one is fantastic. It shows U.S. immigration patterns since 1880: where immigrants came from, and how much of the population (per county) they…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping the Holocaust: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website has a substantial map section; the maps are fairly basic, at the level of presentations or history textbooks, but not abounding in detail. There are some animated map-based presentations and a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A visualization of immigration to the U.S. from 1820 to 2007 by Ian Stevenson. Via Andrew Sullivan….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A debate on the question of what GIS can offer world history, based on this article by J. B. Owens (PDF), triggered a lengthy discussion on MapHist earlier this month. Unfortunately, the MapHist discussion was sidetracked by a throwaway comment…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The University of Richmond’s Voting America site says it “offers a wide spectrum of cinematic visualizations of how Americans voted in the presidential elections at the county level, from the beginning of the modern party system to the present day.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

270towin.com has, in addition to an interactive map to play with for 2008, historical electoral college maps from every single U.S. presidential election in history — all the way back to George Washington. I admit, I looked at every…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press on plans to create online maps of the Chattanooga battles of the U.S. Civil War. Via GeoCarta….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mother Jones’s interactive map showing U.S. military presence worldwide from 1950 to 2007 is making the rounds online. But it’s a little misleading: it’s a heat map, but its scale is logarithmic, which tends to overemphasize smaller numbers. Trends,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Good magazine’s interactive map showing some of the more famous journeys from history and literature — everything from Magellan to Moby Dick — is pretty cool. Via Kottke….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Mannahatta Project’s goal “is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sixty-eight years after the Blitz, there are still thousands of unexploded German bombs littering the British landscape, and they’re still being dug up. Now a map of likely unexploded bomb locations has been released, with locations extrapolated from historical records…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Like many large map installations, the Electric Map of the Battle of Gettysburg has gone the way of the dodo. The 30×30-foot map has been illustrating troop movements during the battle using more than 600 light bulbs since it opened…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Atlas of Early Printing “depicts the spread of printing through Europe in the fifty years following the European refinement of the tools and process to make impressions from movable type cast in metal” (i.e., 1450-1500). Via Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The huge Historical Atlas of Canada was published in three volumes between 1987 and 1993. An online version, the Historical Atlas of Canada Online Learning Project, is now being developed by the University of Toronto’s geography department. It would…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The National Association of Railroad Passengers, a passenger rail lobby group, has a collection of maps showing the change in Amtrak route coverage since the national rail carrier was created in 1971. The PDF maps are rather basic, and show…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An animated map depicting the history of the New York subway: “[a]n animated GIF starts with a blank subway map and draws each line in the sequence in which it was built.” For more maps showing the history of New…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NOAA now has an online tool that maps historical hurricane tracks. You can also compare storm tracks against coastal population data. Data are available for storms as far back as the mid-19th century, and they’re exportable: tracks are also downloadable…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Much book-related news has been accumulating over here; past time I shared it. Surveying, Mapping and GIS reviews Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a book about John Harrison, who discovered how to determine longitude. I think I need to read this book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Norman Transcript reports on the publication next month of the fourth edition of the Historical Atlas of Oklahoma; unfortunately (for our purposes), the article focuses on the essays rather than the maps (173 of them), which are dispensed…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping the Medieval Urban Landscape was a two-year project to study the design and planning of towns in the Middle Ages for which historical records no longer exist. The project, which focused on a dozen of Edward I’s “new…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Atlas of Alberta Railways is a collection of historical maps showing the development of railroad lines in Alberta (and western Canada); there are more than 200 maps available through a surprisingly good Flash interface. This is not a collection…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A clickable map of Tlingit tribes, clans and clan houses in the Pacific Northwest. Via Plep. MapPoint B2B on the future of MSN Maps and Directions, viz., none: “The time has come to say good-bye to MSN Maps and Directions…  •  Continue reading this entry.

During World War Two, London County Council kept maps showing the damage caused to the city by German bombs. They did it by hand-colouring Ordnance Survey maps, each colour representing a certain amount of damage. Now, the BBC reports, the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Engineering Timelines Map of the British Isles assembles maps with points depicting events in the history of British engineering generated from search results. I’m having a hard time grasping the concept, much less explaining it, but play around with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This ten-minute animated presentation depicts the growth and territorial development of the U.S. since 1789; with audio. It’s one of several similar products from Animated Atlas aimed at classroom use; the others, though, cost money. Via Kottke….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last year I covered the first volume in Richard Carpenter’s series of historical railroad atlases covering the United States in 1946. I actually got it for Christmas last year: because I’m not familiar with the mid-Atlantic states the first volume…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ireland’s History in Maps has a genealogical focus; the maps aren’t first rate, but they’re informative. Via Plep….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ancient Routes, “[a] site devoted to exploring the ancient trade routes around the Mediterranean,” has a few maps of said trade routes, mostly of the Middle East. Via MetaFilter, again….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of contemporary, black and white World War II maps, provided by the University of San Diego’s History department. Informative: some of the maps cover less-famous theatres of war. Via The Cartoonist….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The BBC’s Civilisations is a Flash-based interactive map that shows the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: select the cultures and the speed, press play, and watch the map change as the years go by. (I’m reminded of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This ambitious Spanish site presents historical maps of the modern period, with the goal of showing the changes in territorial boundaries. It looks like it’s a long way from being complete, but promising nonetheless….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A University of Pennsylvania professor has posted a collection of scans from historical atlases of the Muslim world. Via Politics, Language and Cultures of the Arab World, via Languagehat….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Part of a site on medieval art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, this page of British maps features scans from a 1929 historical atlas. Warning: large file sizes. Via Plep….  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Continuing my crusade to provide you with the finest fictional maps,” says Jeff Patterson, who provides us with a link to Maps of Boccaccio’s Decameron. It’s part of a study site on that work of medieval literature; includes maps from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This month’s Fast Company has a profile of Richard Carpenter, who has published the first volume of his Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946. The maps are hand-drawn and hand-lettered; the article provides fascinating details about their creation….  •  Continue reading this entry.