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
The new United States takes shape here through the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War, but the map also looks forward. It outlines proposed western divisions that did…
Field Notes
Lines connecting telegraph stations show a continent beginning to communicate at a new speed. The map makes infrastructure visible that could otherwise be reduced to a story about…
Field Notes
France’s new administrative geography becomes a spiral board game. Players move through departments toward Corsica, while the sheet surrounds the journey with revolutionary symbols and instructions. The result…
Field Notes
Property lines and business names make this a detailed record of San Francisco’s Chinatown, but its racial and occupancy categories also reveal the viewpoint of the officials who…
Field Notes
A national capital appears here as a deliberate design rather than an accumulated city. Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 manuscript plan connects streets, broad avenues and public sites, revealing…
Field Notes
Chicago’s stockyards become a sprawling landscape of connected buildings in Charles Rascher’s hand-colored view. Packing houses, livestock pens and railway tracks show the concentration and circulation that made…
Field Notes
This map measures recovery through buildings. The burned district provides the outline, while new and ongoing construction records the city’s progress two years after the 1906 earthquake and…
Field Notes
Sea creatures, ships, elaborate emblems and a sweeping American landmass give this map immediate visual impact. Yet its decoration is part of a political message: the work asserted…
Field Notes
A canal profile above a small map of Panama turns a narrow strip of land into an engineering challenge. Published in 1904, the sheet belongs to the period…
Field Notes
Geological color transforms a general map of the United States into an argument about what lies beneath the landscape. Maclure’s early national-scale work shows how a familiar geographic…
