Blog

Here we can continue to explore the relationship between maps and history. I welcome your comments, and your maps!

New book on Emma Willard!

This is a long overdue notice that I’ve published a comprehensive account of Emma Willard’s maps of time. These include time lines, graphic visualizations, and maps, all done with her characteristic c...

(Febuary 1 2026) | 19th-century images , art and cartography , graphs and timelines , thematic maps | Read the Post »

How Emma Willard Mapped Time in the Nineteenth Century

This week I had the privilege of posting a story for the Public Domain Review on Emma Willard, one of the most influential educators in the nineteenth century. For decades, Willard dominated the textb...

(January 31, 2020) | 19th-century images , children's maps , graphs and timelines | Read the Post »

Mapping the Paris Peace

This week marks the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919. From January to June, the great powers met at Paris to replace the imperial order with one that reflecte...

(June 28, 2019) | 20th-century images , thematic maps , World War One | Read the Post »

Podcasts, video, and reviews of “A History of America in 100 Maps”

My new book, A History of America in 100 Maps , has been featured in a variety of media outlets recently.

(December 04, 2018) | A History of America in 100 Maps | Read the Post »

Mapping Magic–and Mayhem–in Jazz Age Harlem

In 2016, the Beinecke Library at Yale University paid $100,000 to add Elmer Simms Campbell’s energetic profile of interwar Harlem to its celebrated collection of black history and culture. The Library...

(October 15, 2018) | 20th-century images , art and cartography , pictorial maps , Uncategorized | Read the Post »

A History of America in 100 Maps

I’m proud to announce that my new book– A History of America in 100 Maps –is now available in the US! It is co-published by the British Library Press and the University of Chicago Press. The British e...

(October 10, 2018) | 18th-century images , 19th-century images , 20th-century images , 21st-century images , art and cartography , children's maps , Civil War maps , environmental maps , graphs and timelines , imaginary maps , pictorial maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

The David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University

On April 20 I was privileged to be one of the speakers to open the David Rumsey Map Center in the Green Library at Stanford. The facility is fantastic — a spacious library with every kind of digital t...

(May 02, 2016) | 19th-century images , children's maps | Read the Post »

New online collection of “persuasive” maps

Cornell University has just posted an online collection of “persuasive” maps owned by Paul J. “PJ” Mode, who has been building this collection for years. Some might describe these as “propaganda” maps...

(August 26, 2015) | 18th-century images , 19th-century images , 20th-century images , art and cartography , imaginary maps , propaganda maps | Read the Post »

The Coast Survey maps of slavery: new discoveries!

In April I was privileged to deliver the Vorhees Lecture in the History of Cartography at the Library of Virginia. Our theme was Civil War mapping, and the Library organized a wonderful one-day exhibi...

(July 10, 2015) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

New exhibit of pictorial maps!

This week the University of Denver will open an exhibit of pictorial maps drawn from the private collection of Wes Brown. The exhibit is curated by Rebecca Macey, and located in the Anderson Academic ...

(April 3, 2015) | 20th-century images , art and cartography , children's maps , Colorado maps , imaginary maps , pictorial maps | Read the Post »

Maps of Gilded Age San Francisco, Chicago, and New York

From the mid-1880s through the 1890s, reformers in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York experimented with maps to make sense of an exploding immigrant population. Considered together, what might these...

(March 3, 2015) | 19th-century images , thematic maps , Uncategorized , urban maps | Read the Post »

Sherman’s Christmas gift to Lincoln

On December 22, 1864–150 years ago this week–Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln a brief but powerful message, “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah.” Sherman had cut loose ...

(December 22, 2014) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

How Sherman’s march helped Lincoln win in 1864

We’ve just survived another election season, with the attendant (and often hyperbolic) claims that the nation’s future hinges on the outcome. In the aftermath, it seems fitting to recall another campa...

(November 27, 2014) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

An imaginary map of temperance

In the archives of the American Antiquarian Society lies a strange and captivating map with an even more unlikely story. The map dates to 1838, though this copy was printed five years later. At first ...

(October 20, 2014) | 19th-century images , art and cartography , imaginary maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Schoolgirl maps from the early republic

I’ve been preoccupied lately with student manuscript maps, generally made by girls between 11 and 18 attending one of the many female academies of the American northeast between 1800 and 1830. “Map st...

(September 23, 2014) | 19th-century images , art and cartography , children's maps | Read the Post »

The twisted history of political mapping

We live in what is endlessly described as an era of unprecedented partisanship, with Americans polarized into red and blue camps and no convergence in sight. But much of the nation’s history was chara...

(August 11, 2014) | 19th-century images , graphs and timelines , thematic maps , Uncategorized | Read the Post »

A radically different kind of west

In the decades after the Civil War, Americans rushed headlong into the west. By 1890 Kansas and Nebraska had over a million inhabitants, and over six million lived in the seventeen states and territor...

(June 20, 2014) | 19th-century images , Colorado maps , environmental maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

How an artist reinvented the map in WWII

More Americans came into contact with maps during the Second World War than in any previous moment in American history. From the elaborate and innovative inserts in the National Geographic to the sche...

(May 21, 2014) | 20th-century images , art and cartography , pictorial maps , topographic maps , World War Two | Read the Post »

An interactive map of slavery

Lincoln Mullen has just posted a wonderful interactive map of slavery in the United States. His inspiration begins with the 1861 Coast Survey map of slavery, which identified the ratio of slave to the...

(May 12, 2014) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , digital mapping , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Mapping the progress of the Union Army

One of the most intriguing cartographic developments in the nineteenth century was the effort to map the past. Experiments with historical mapping can be found in the eighteenth century, but the sprea...

(April 8, 2014) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , graphs and timelines | Read the Post »

Mapping early Colorado and the University of Denver

On February 25 I delivered an address on the University of Denver campus to commemorate the 150th anniversary of our institution. My goal was to go beyond the history of the university and instead tel...

(March 10, 2014) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , Colorado maps , environmental maps , topographic maps | Read the Post »

Mapping the threat of slavery, in German!

In early January I had the privilege of visiting the map collection of “PJ” Mode in New York City. PJ has acquired hundreds of maps around the theme of persuasive cartography. The collection includes ...

(February 6, 2014) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

New map exhibit at the Boston Public Library

A vivid exhibit of maps made in Boston in the century prior to the Revolution is open through March 10, 2014 at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center.

(January 26, 2014) | 18th-century images , pictorial maps , urban maps | Read the Post »

Unveiling a new (old) historical atlas

This week the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond has unveiled its latest project , a digital version of the landmark Historical Atlas of the United States, published in 1932 under t...

(December 25, 2013) | 20th-century images , digital mapping , pictorial maps , thematic maps , Uncategorized | Read the Post »

Alexander von Humboldt: master of infographics

Last month I presented a paper at the Nebenzahl Lectures on the History of Cartography in Chicago. My subject was cartographic innovation during the early American republic — essentially the 1790s to ...

(November 19, 2013) | 18th-century images , 19th-century images , environmental maps , graphs and timelines , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Newly discovered anti-slavery map

Last weekend I was at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware for a symposium on historic maps. While there I met several map collectors and dealers, including Tom Hall, the curator for the large private Ma...

(October 17, 2013) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

The earliest American attempt to chart climate?

Last week I was delighted to find what I believe is the earliest American attempt to chart patterns of climate and its effect upon agriculture and vegetation, drawn by Simeon DeWitt in 1792.

(September 11, 2013) | 18th-century images , 19th-century images , environmental maps , graphs and timelines , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Mapping vice in San Francisco

David Rumsey has uploaded a rare 1885 map of San Francisco that represents the height of the anti-Chinese movement in California. The map accompanied a lengthy report of the city’s Board of Supervisor...

(August 6, 2013) | 19th-century images , thematic maps , urban maps | Read the Post »

Civil War Louisiana, measured and mapped

My last post examined a map of Georgia and Alabama made by the Office of the Census during the Civil War, located in the National Archives. This map of Louisiana was made by the same office at the sam...

(July 2, 2013) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Mapping Sherman’s March

I recently came across one of the earliest attempts by the Superintendent of the Census to incorporate census data onto a map, made during the Civil War.

(June 17, 2013) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , environmental maps , thematic maps , transportation maps | Read the Post »

The nation’s first electoral map

A few weeks ago I was working through the massive 1883 Statistical Atlas of the United States,and found what I believe is the first attempt to map election returns in the United States. The map is bas...

(May 16, 2013) | 19th-century images , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Lincoln, maps, and the invasion of East Tennessee

In the spring of 1863–exactly 150 years ago–the Coast Survey was in the midst of an effort to comprehensively map the rebellion on a series of regional maps at a scale of 10 miles to the inch for use ...

(April 12, 2013) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , environmental maps , topographic maps , Uncategorized | Read the Post »

New exhibit of historic maps at the University of Denver

This week the University of Denver will open its remodeled library, although the building has been renamed the “academic commons.” The new space is beautiful, and will include an exhibit devoted to hi...

(March 22, 2013) | 19th-century images , 20th-century images , Colorado maps , graphs and timelines , pictorial maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Mapping the efficiency of slave labor

Recently I wrote a piece for the Disunion series on Edward Atkinson, who creatively used a map to demonstrate the inefficiency of slave labor.

(February 22, 2013) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

The future of thematic mapping?

Several people have sent me this population map , made by Brandon Martin-Anderson, which represents one dot for each person counted in the 2010 U.S. Census. The link takes you to an interactive and zo...

(January 30, 2013) | 19th-century images , 21st-century images , thematic maps | Read the Post »

The legacy of Francis Amasa Walker: graphic, infographic, and cartographic

This past week I wrote a piece for Fast Company Design about the legacy of Francis Amasa Walker. As the Superintendent of the 9th Census in 1870, Walker took the Census in new directions. He proposed ...

(January 13, 2013) | 19th-century images , graphs and timelines , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Civil War maps at the Library of Congress

On November 12th I was lucky enough to catch the opening of the new Civil War exhibit at the Library of Congress. Thanks to the curatorial work of Ed Redmond (of the Geography and Map Division at LoC)...

(January 2, 2013) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps | Read the Post »

The many maps in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”

I just saw Steven Speilberg’s film “Lincoln,” and was amazed by the space given to maps on the set. The maps are never referenced directly, for the plot of the film is the passage of the Thirteenth Am...

(November 25, 2012) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

An unrecognizable United States

In late October I gave a talk at Syracuse University, and was honored to have Donald Meinig in the audience. Meinig’s four-volume The Shaping of America (Yale) is written from a geographical perspecti...

(November 5, 2012) | 19th-century images , Uncategorized | Read the Post »

A schoolgirl maps her nation in 1828

Next week I am speaking at Middlebury College, which reminded me of a charming document I came across a few years ago: the 1828 penmanship journal of Frances Henshaw, located in the David Rumsey Map C...

(October 19, 2012) | Read the Post »

The cartographic response to the secession crisis

Last April, CSPAN taped a lecture in my Civil War course for its “American History TV” program. The lecture aired this weekend, and I was heartened that people would actually watch a 90 minute lecture...

(October 1, 2012) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

A picture of American faith

I have a piece today in Fast Company Design about the nineteenth-century origins of modern infographics, both thematic maps but also other forms of graphic knowledge like timelines.

(September 25, 2012) | 19th-century images , graphs and timelines | Read the Post »

An alternative map of the American west

Could the map of the west have been drawn in a fundamentally different way?

(September 12, 2012) | 19th-century images , Colorado maps , environmental maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Why Republicans mapped slavery in the 1856 election

Jon Dotson, owner of Old World Auctions , recently showed me a political broadside from the 1856 campaign, when the new Republican Party ran its first presidential candidate, the celebrated western ex...

(August 22, 2012) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , thematic maps | Read the Post »

How maps get used, then reused

In late July I gave a lecture on early maps of what eventually became the Colorado Territory, as part of a conference hosted here at DU on the mapping of the west. I used the following map to illustra...

(August 15, 2012) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , Colorado maps , environmental maps , transportation maps | Read the Post »

Private Sneden maps the Civil War

I have a piece in today’s “Disunion” blog at the Times on Private Robert Knox Sneden, a soldier with artistic talents who was attached to the Third Corps of the Army of the Potomac throughout 1862.

(July 31, 2012) | 19th-century images , Civil War maps , environmental maps , pictorial maps | Read the Post »

New exhibit of thematic maps

John Delaney, a curator of the Historic Maps Collection at Princeton University Library, has created an excellent online exhibit of thematic maps (it may take a minute to load). In it he traces the or...

(July 19, 2012) | 19th-century images , thematic maps | Read the Post »

Charting the flow of political power

Timelines were very popular in the nineteenth century, in classrooms as well as living rooms. An intriguing example is this “Conspectus of the History of Political Parties” (1880). Created just after ...

(July 5, 2012) | 19th-century images , graphs and timelines | Read the Post »

Mapping the Mail

This is one of the earliest maps made in the new nation. In 1790 the first Postmaster General appealed to Congress for funds to create a comprehensive map of the postal network. Existing maps were ina...

(June 26, 2012) | 18th-century images , transportation maps | Read the Post »

The Center of the World

Thanks to Wendel Cox, senior manuscripts librarian at the Denver Public Library, for sending me this map issued by the Denver Planning Commission during World War Two. This unconventional world map ce...

(June 26, 2012) | 19th-century images , 20th-century images , transportation maps | Read the Post »

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