history news

¡Bienvenidos todos a la Ciudad de México! From the chinampas of Xochimilco to the National Palace in the city center, Mexico City is one of the most historically significant cities of Latin America. With it being the largest city in the western hemisphere, Mexico City is also one of the most economi...

The distribution of particular surnames on the island of Ireland lends clues as to the history and movement of its people. Primarily, Irish surnames originate from the Irish language. These names are often preceded by an “O’”, “Mc”, or “Mac” in their anglicized forms. (In their original Irish form “...

Project Gemini was the precursor to the famous Apollo program. The main goal of Project Gemini was to support the Apollo program’s main mission: Putting a man on the moon. Developing orbital maneuvers to dock with another orbiting spacecraft, demonstrating mission endurance for crewed flight as the ...

Our previous Map of the Month (May 2024) came with a surprise, as it was hiding a secret. This month, let’s explore the mystery found hiding underneath the canvas backing of the previous map. It can be seen faintly in the image below, but it’s an entirely different map! The map hidden behind canvas ...

This month, we’re going to travel to the birthplace of civilization: Mesopotamia. The earliest known human settlements are found in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, and they have had constant human habitation since.  The map, published in the middle 1916 as part of Edward Stanford’s ...

The political boundaries of North America have gone through many changes. As part of New Spain, Central America was known as the Captaincy General of Guatemala, or the Kingdom of Guatemala. The territory of Mexico used to contain the entire southwestern United States, and extended as far north as th...

A new Web App, 1918 National Parks and Monuments, is now live on ASU Geodata. This App digitizes a map of the National Park and Monument system in its infancy and overlays it across a modern map of the United States, allowing the user to explore the NPS two years after its creation. ...

The United States National Park Service (NPS) currently administers 63 National Parks and 85 National Monuments, among the astonishing 423 total areas managed by the agency. That scope wasn’t always so large. In the years after its 1916 inception, the NPS oversaw only a small fraction of the nationa...

A new web map, 1959 World Less Polar Regions, is now live on ASU GeoData. The web map indexes a newly digitized series of maps produced by the Army Map Service in 1959. The maps depict the world at the small scale of 1:11,000,000, while featuring many interesting features and some peculiarities. ...