environmental maps Posts

A History of America in 100 Maps

I’m proud to announce that my new book–A History of America in 100 Maps–is now available in the US! It is co-published by the British Library Press and the University...

October 10, 2018 | 18th-century images, 19th-century images, 20th-century images, 21st-century images, art and cartography, children's maps, Civil War maps, environmental maps, graphs and timelines, imaginary maps, pictorial maps, thematic maps | Read More »

A radically different kind of west

In the decades after the Civil War, Americans rushed headlong into the west. By 1890 Kansas and Nebraska had over a million inhabitants, and over six million lived in the...

June 20, 2014 | 19th-century images, Colorado maps, environmental maps, thematic maps | Read More »

Mapping early Colorado and the University of Denver

On February 25 I delivered an address on the University of Denver campus to commemorate the 150th anniversary of our institution. My goal was to go beyond the history of...

March 10, 2014 | 19th-century images, Civil War maps, Colorado maps, environmental maps, topographic maps | Read More »

Alexander von Humboldt: master of infographics

Last month I presented a paper at the Nebenzahl Lectures on the History of Cartography in Chicago. My subject was cartographic innovation during the early American republic — essentially the...

November 19, 2013 | 18th-century images, 19th-century images, environmental maps, graphs and timelines, thematic maps | Read More »

The earliest American attempt to chart climate?

Last week I was delighted to find what I believe is the earliest American attempt to chart patterns of climate and its effect upon agriculture and vegetation, drawn by Simeon...

September 11, 2013 | 18th-century images, 19th-century images, environmental maps, graphs and timelines, thematic maps | Read More »

Mapping Sherman’s March

I recently came across one of the earliest attempts by the Superintendent of the Census to incorporate census data onto a map, made during the Civil War. The map is...

June 17, 2013 | 19th-century images, Civil War maps, environmental maps, thematic maps, transportation maps | Read More »

Lincoln, maps, and the invasion of East Tennessee

In the spring of 1863–exactly 150 years ago–the Coast Survey was in the midst of an effort to comprehensively map the rebellion on a series of regional maps at a...

April 12, 2013 | 19th-century images, Civil War maps, environmental maps, topographic maps, Uncategorized | Read More »

An alternative map of the American west

Could the map of the west have been drawn in a fundamentally different way? Last month I was interviewed by BackStory with the American History Guys for a show on...

September 12, 2012 | 19th-century images, Colorado maps, environmental maps, thematic maps | Read More »

How maps get used, then reused

In late July I gave a  lecture on early maps of what eventually became the Colorado Territory, as part of a conference hosted here at DU on the mapping of...

August 15, 2012 | 19th-century images, Civil War maps, Colorado maps, environmental maps, transportation maps | Read More »

Private Sneden maps the Civil War

I have a piece in today’s “Disunion” blog at the Times on Private Robert Knox Sneden, a soldier with artistic talents who was attached to the Third Corps of the Army of the...

July 31, 2012 | 19th-century images, Civil War maps, environmental maps, pictorial maps | Read More »