From the Index
Maps tell stories about how people understand, measure, navigate, and imagine the world. This growing collection brings together historic maps and map-like objects, with descriptions, creators, dates, source institutions, and rights information that help place each work in context.
Field Notes
A proposed waterway across northern Florida is the organizing idea of this survey map. Its rivers and possible canal routes turn a familiar outline into a problem of…
Field Notes
This sheet combines a route map with a longitudinal section of the surveyed line between Tohopekaliga Lake and Lake Winder. It invites readers to look at a landscape…
Field Notes
Six Apollo-era geological maps were brought into one consistent global framework and adjusted using newer lunar data. The resulting colors distinguish units and relationships across the Moon rather…
Field Notes
A coastal chart also preserves a small episode in an artist’s career. During his brief employment with the Coast Survey, James McNeill Whistler etched Anacapa’s eastern headland and…
Field Notes
Dürer placed the stars among finely drawn constellation figures and framed the chart with portraits of earlier astronomers. The design follows a tradition that reached Renaissance Europe through…
Field Notes
This map continues the land surface beneath the oceans, replacing blank blue water with ridges, trenches, and continental margins. ETOPO1 combines regional and global data into a one-arc-minute…
Field Notes
A map does not have to be printed on paper. This New York sampler, made around 1810, was embroidered in silk on silk and measures about fifteen by…
Field Notes
This etched view turns Venice into a city that can be explored from above. Produced by an anonymous Dutch artist and issued by Amsterdam publisher Clement de Jonghe,…
Field Notes
Concentric continents and oceans organize this Jain representation of the universe. Mount Meru stands at the center, while the surrounding rings identify the portion of the cosmos in…
