Historic Map Links

Historic Map Links

October 2011

Thanks to Kimberley Kowal, Lead Curator Digital Mapping at The British Library, for this magnificent list of links to historic mapping sites. Note how thoroughly she attributes her sources, a lesson for many of us 😀

Let me know if you have any more that you want to add.

Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory. https://www.shermansmarch.org

Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin. De Americaensche Zee-Roovers (The Buccaneers of America). Amsterdam: Jan ten Hoorn, 1678. Online exhibition, The Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/kislak/kislak-interactive.html#

Gerardus Mercator. The Mercator Atlas of Europe. 1570. British Library, Maps C.29.c.13 Via Turning the Pages 3-D
https://www.bl.uk/collections/treasures/mercator/mercator_broadband.htm

Roy Military Survey of Scotland, 1747-1755.
Online map by NLS and BL. https://geo.nls.uk/search/roy/

Georeferencer by Klokan Technologies GmbH. https://www.klokantech.com/georeferencer

London: A Life in Maps. British Library exhibition.
https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/londoninmaps/exhibition/roman.html

David Rumsey Map Collection. MapRank Search by Klokan Technologies GmbH https://www.klokantech.com/mapranksearch/

Anglo Saxon (Cotton) map of the world. E 11th c.
British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius B.V., fol. 56v.
Via Digital Mappaemundi https://bob.drew.edu/mappaemundi/

Charles Booth Online Archive. Archives Division of the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science.   https://booth.lse.ac.uk/

EuropeanaConnect Media Annotation Prototype. AIT Austrian Institute of Technology in cooperation with University of Vienna and the Austrian National Library. https://dme.arcs.ac.at/annotation/

1905 Sanborn Insurance Atlas, San Francisco. Maptcha tool.
https://sanborn.maptcha.org/ Road map data CC-BY-SA OpenStreetMap Contributors, Cartography ©2011 GeoIQ

Others

Thanks to Nick Austin for the pointer to American Mapmaking 1782 – 1800 which has some beautiful examples of post colonial cartography. (Oct 2011)

Thanks to Stuart Carter and the team at LB Southwark for their Historic Maps Viewer. Surprising how detailed those old OS maps were! Would be nice if there was away to play with transparency and view old maps against mordern mapping, consider that a feature request please.

The Vallard Atlas

 Thanks to BibliOdyssey for this

Particular points of interest about this rather extraordinary manuscript :::::

  • It was (anonymously) produced by the Dieppe school (France) in 1547 and was either copied from Portuguese maps or was completed with the input of (a) Portuguese cartographer(s)
  • The maps are known as portolan (navigational) charts [previously]
  • Unusually, north is shown at the bottom of the maps in the style of Muslim cartographers (very rare in European Christian mapping)
  • Allegedly, this atlas shows the first ever European record of Australian coastline — some 250 years ahead of Capt. Cook and 60-odd years before the earliest official European discovery/sighting/mapping of any Australian coastline by William Janszoon in 1606
  • The miniatures and marginalia depict 16th century native and colonisation scenes
  • The first[?] use of the name “Canada” in a map

 Old Maps Online

March 2012

This is a great source for searching map archives

London 1893-6

March 2014

Google Maps Gallery has launched a great selection of users’ maps. My early favourite is unsurprisingly the London OS Town Plan from 1893-6 which have been scanned and contributed by the National Library of Scotland. The notes say

This is the most detailed and extensive survey of London by Ordnance Survey from a century ago. It covered the entire built up area of the capital from a survey in 1891-5 at 1:500 scale, in 729 sheets, which have been georeferenced and seamed together here. The maps provide excellent detail of the whole urban infrastructure, including residential and industrial premises, schools, asylums, hospitals, parks, canals, docks and railways, and even the interior layout of public buildings, such as cathedrals, churches, and railway stations. Further information.

 If you live in London you can spend a happy hour or two understanding how areas that you know have evolved over the last 120 years. These maps are an impressive testimony of the quality of Ordnance Survey mapping all those years ago.