map news

Last month, we covered the 49th state in the union. This month, we’re heading to number 50: Hawai’i! This archipelago, an independent unified kingdom from 1810 to 1893, was annexed by the United States in 1898 after a coup d'etat by European-American businessmen in 1893. This led to the development ...

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. ...

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...