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
Rocque’s London is a city to explore slowly: dense streets, large institutions, open land and the Thames are brought into a detailed urban plan. Its scale and associated…
Field Notes
Street-by-street colors make social differences visible across northwestern London in this later edition of Charles Booth’s poverty mapping. The sheet brings together neighborhoods around Hampstead, Camden Town and…
Field Notes
The Mississippi becomes a corridor of landings, plantations, sandbars, cutoffs and steamboat routes. This map rewards close inspection because much of its information concerns the river’s changing edges.…
Field Notes
The Philippine archipelago sits at the center of a richly illustrated chart connecting local geography with far-reaching maritime routes. Murillo Velarde’s cartography and Nicolás de la Cruz Bagay’s…
Field Notes
Three sheets organize the Battle of Gettysburg around its first, second and third days. Detailed contours, roads, fences and buildings provide a measured framework for comparing troop positions…
Field Notes
Seven map sections follow a route across the continent at a scale useful for examining its details. Compiled from Frémont’s field records and Preuss’s sketches, the sheets combine…
Field Notes
Mitchell’s large map combines detailed geographic information with an unmistakably British view of North American claims. Its importance extends beyond 1755: it became a reference in negotiations over…
Field Notes
The Mississippi drainage system gives this French map its organizing structure, placing river connections ahead of the state boundaries familiar today. It presents a continent through travel routes,…
Field Notes
Large blank areas make this map a revealing record of the limits of European geographic knowledge in 1802. Alongside carefully assembled coastal information, it preserves the nonexistent Mountains…
Field Notes
The old division between East and West Jersey sits within a richly detailed landscape of settlements, roads, mills, waterways and coastal features. The map’s connection to earlier surveys…
