map news

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. ...

In 1898, Cuba was in the midst of a bloody war for independence from Spain that had been raging for three years. American public opinion swayed dramatically towards support through the 1890s, especially with American journalists fully embracing Yellow Journalism to exaggerate and embellish the atroc...

Salt River Valley, Arizona, 1934. Cartography by T.A. Hayden. In 1934, the Phoenix valley was mostly farmland thanks to the incredibly successful damming of the Salt River with the Roosevelt Dam via the Salt River Project i...

The Grand Canyon is one of the modern natural wonders of the world. It’s been mapped countless times over the years, and is the second most visited national park in the United States. However, the mapping history of the Grand Canyon is relatively young; the first USGS quadrangle maps of the Canyon w...

Our November Map of the Month is this 1919 British War Office map titled “Map of Africa to Illustrate the Progress of Surveys and Explorations”. Originally published in 1914 and updated in this edition, it depicts the entirety of the African continent with data on the topographic surveys that had be...

Our October Map of the Month is this undated Spanish map titled “Corea y Sur de Mandchuria” (Korea and South Manchuria). It depicts the Korean Peninsula and Southern Manchuria just prior to the start of the Russo-Japanese War, before Japanese occupation and the Division of Korea. It includes various...

Our July Map of the Month is this 1848 “Mexico & Guatemala” map published just before the end of the Mexican-American War by S. Augustus Mitchell. It features a detailed depiction of the various international and state boundaries of Mexico and Central America at the time, many of which were alte...

The index for our new map series index, Southwest Germany to the Alps, is now available to the public in this interactive web map. The Southwest Germany to the Alps map series index is an interactive web map that displays the topographic features and municipalities of ...