map news

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 ...

Our January Map of the Month is this 1916 map of “The Theatre of War in Mesopotamia”, displaying Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria) and Persia (modern-day Iran) as they appeared in the midst of World War I. This map was published in Edward Stanford’s War Map No. 9  and includes an inset of “The...

Our December Map of the Month is this French map titled “New Mexico, with the Northern Part of Old, Or New Spain”. Among the oldest maps in our collection, this map was made by Rigobert Bonne and was published in 1780 as part of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s famous Atlas de Toutes Les Parties Connues du...