Alice Hudson, chief of the New York Public Library’s map division from 1981 to 2009, died in 2024. Last month The Cartographic Journal published a long look at Hudson’s life and career, written by Daniel Anger and Elizabeth Baigent. It was done as part of a special Cartographic Journal issue on women in cartography, which grew out of a 2021 conference on the subject. The issue does not yet have a single page I can point you at, but until it does you can see the contents via the latest articles page. A few articles are free/open access, including the editorial preface, a look at two map librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, an article about the 19th-century mapmaker Selina Hall, and an editorial refuting the notion that women didn’t do cartography.
Tag: NYPL
Alice Hudson, 1947-2024
Alice Hudson, who from 1981 to 2009 was chief of the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and as such responsible for one of the world’s significant map collections, died on 6 November 2024 from complications of kidney disease. She was 77. The New York Times published her obituary yesterday.
Antietam Battlefield Map Shows Burial Locations
A map of the battlefield of Antietam held by the New York Public Library that shows the location of graves of soldiers killed in the 1862 U.S. Civil War battle is the subject of a piece in today’s Washington Post.
Civil War historians are hailing it as an important new way to visualize the toll of the huge battle outside Sharpsburg, Md., in 1862.
“Every one of us who’s looked at this absolutely flips out,” said Garry Adelman, chief historian for the Washington-based American Battlefield Trust, which works to preserve historic battlefields. “This will reverberate for decades.”
The map is the only one of its kind known to exist. It was digitized by the New York Public Library, which owns it, and was spotted online by local historians a few weeks ago.
The map doesn’t just mark graveyards, it notes the burial locations of specific regiments and brigades—and in 45 cases, individual soldiers.
AM New York on the NYPL Map Division
Meanwhile, AM New York takes a look at the holdings of the New York Public Library’s Map Division.
The Hunt-Lenox Globe
The Hunt-Lenox Globe, a five-inch engraved copper globe dating from the early 1500s, is one of the earliest surviving globes, one of the earliest depictions of the New World and one of only two places where the phrase hic sunt dracones (“here be dragons”) can be found. It’s held by the New York Public Library, who are justly proud of it. They’ve received a grant to produce a 3D scan of the globe; once that’s finished, the 3D model will be available online. In the meantime, here are some other images of the Hunt-Lenox Globe from the NYPL. [via]
NYPL Offers High-Quality Downloads of 180,000 Public-Domain Documents
Yesterday the New York Public Library made available high-quality downloads of some 180,000 public-domain photographs, postcards, maps and other items from its digital collection—of which more than 21,000 are maps, based on my quick search. I can see spending an awful lot of time poking around in there, can’t you?