Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State, which opened on 20 April at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, “traces the cartographic history of Texas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries” through a small (26 item) collection of maps and documents, all of which are reproductions. Press release. [WMS]
Last month the MetroWest Daily News profiled Framington, MA map dealer Carole Spack of Original Antique Maps, whose path to the business sounds rather familiar: “Six years ago, she bought several 150-year-old maps of Worcester County showing towns that were later submerged when the area was flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir, where she often hikes. Intrigued by their detailed evocation of a vanished time, Spack has since acquired 2,000 rare maps ranging from Colonial America to rural China all the way to hand-colored engravings of the ‘Geography of the Heavens’ by an obscure early-19th century astronomer.” [WMS]
A map drawn by an Indigenous guide for Lewis and Clark, recently discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, is the subject of an entire issue of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation’s journal, We Proceeded On. (The issue is not available online.) The map was drawn some time in 1805 by Too Né, a member of the Arikara tribe who in 1804 travelled with the Lewis and Clark expedition in what is now North Dakota, and shows the extent of the territory known to the Arikara at that time.
Indigenous historians and William and Clark scholars don’t appear to talk to one another very much, which is why it’s taken until now for the latter to get so excited about the map Steinke discovered—which in my view is much more interesting and significant as an example of Indigenous mapmaking than it is as a piece of Lewis and Clark lore.
The Climate Atlas of Canada’s interactive map shows the future impact of climate change in Canada. It shows what a number of different weather variables—temperature, number of very hot or very cold days, precipitation, growing season, and so forth—would be under two potential scenarios: one high-carbon, one low-carbon. There’s a lot of data hidden behind a lot of menus; the legends are hidden behind dialog boxes as well. [CBC News]
The general consensus is that the Vinland Map is a modern forgery, not a pre-Columbian 15th-century map showing Norse explorations of North America. That doesn’t seem to stop Yale University from continuing to study the map, which is held in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The map is being subjected to a battery of non-destructive tests to provide better and more precise physical data about its parchment and ink. The results will be published in a forthcoming book edited by Raymond Clemens, who for the record does not believe the map is authentic. (Neither do I, for what it’s worth.) [GeoLounge]
If Shetland gets relegated to inset maps all the time, that goes double for Alaska, which on maps of the United States gets reduced in scale too. In response, this map turns the tables by relegating the lower 48 (as well as Hawaii) to a tiny and crude inset map. The 17×25-inch paper map costs $15. [Maps on the Web]
Zayde Antrim’s Mapping the Middle East (Reaktion, 1 April) “explores the many perspectives from which people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus river valleys over the past millennium. By analysing maps produced from the eleventh century on, Zayde Antrim emphasizes the deep roots of mapping in a world region too often considered unexamined and unchanging before the modern period. Indeed, maps from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, coinciding with the eras of European colonialism and the rise of the nation-state, have obscured this deeper past and constrained future possibilities.” Amazon
Jeremy Black’s Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s Worlds Through Maps (Conway, 10 April) “looks at the England, Europe, and wider world in which Shakespeare worked through maps and illustrations that reveal the way that he and his contemporaries saw their land and their place in the world. It also explores the locations of his plays and looks at the possible inspirations for these and why Shakespeare would have chosen to set his stories there.” Amazon, iBooks
The Texas A&M University Libraries has acquired a rare copy of Stephen F. Austin’s 1830 map of Texas. Called “the first map of Texas printed in the United States” and “the first meaningful map of Texas” (presumably there’s an earlier map of Coahuila y Tejas out there), only eight copies of the 1830 edition are known to survive. (Above is a scan of the Library of Congress’s copy.) The map will be on temporary display from today through May 4th and will be the centrepiece of a future exhibition. KBTX-TV, press release. [Tony Campbell]
Leonia, New Jersey’s decision to close its residential streets to non-residents (previously)—an attempt to deal with the traffic being routed that way by navigation apps like Waze—has also, like the apps that created the problem in the first place, resulted in some unintended consequences. On, for example, visiting relatives and local businesses.
The “President’s Globe” is big—really big and important. Weighing in at a whopping 750 pounds and sized at an impressive 50 inches in diameter, the globe was specially designed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt for use during World War II. The massive representation of the earth helped the president gauge distances over water to allocate personnel and material in support of the war effort against the Axis Powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. This feat of cartographic history was given as a Christmas present to the president in 1942, and he placed the globe directly behind his office chair, often referring to it during his workday.
As promised, Kenneth Field has uploaded the final web version of the quick-and-dirty dasymetric dot density map of the 2016 U.S. presidential election results, which he posted to Twitter last month. Unlike the quick-and-dirty version, the final version is in high resolution and can be zoomed in to quite a preposterous degree. One dot, one vote. [Kenneth Field]