The world has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, albeit not quite as dramatically as how we see the world. That’s just what’s on display at the David Rumsey Map Collection, whose m...
If we want to know the precise geographical location of, say, a particular church in Madrid, video arcade in Tokyo or coffee shop in Addis Ababa, we can figure it out in a matter of seconds. This...
A beautiful early example of visualizing the flow of history, Sebastian C. Adams’ Synchronological Chart of Universal History outlines the evolution of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the y...
A cool tool. Software engineer Ian Webster has created a website that lets you see how the land masses on planet Earth have changed over the course of 750 million years. And it has the added bonu...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/02/a-web-site-that-lets-you-find-your-home-address-on-pangaea.html
Things change… Especially when you’re tracking the continental movement from Pangea to the present day in 5 million years increments at the rate of 2.5 million years per second. Wherever you ...
Are pinecones related to pineapples? This was the unexpected question with which my wife confronted me as we woke up this morning. As luck would have it, Dominic Walliman has given us an entertai...
FYI: The University of Chicago Press has made available online — at no cost –five volumes of The History of Cartography. Or what Edward Rothstein, of The New York Times, called “the most am...
Cast your mind, if you will, to the city of Ceuta. If you’ve never heard of it, or can’t quite recall its location, you can easily find out by searching for it on your map application of choi...
Even if you’ve never traveled the seas, you’ve surely known at least a few rivers in your time. And though you must be conscious of the fact that all of those rivers run, ultimately, to the s...
“For most of the last two thousand years, the Bible has been virtually the only history book used in Western civilization,” writes Isaac Asimov in his Guide to the Bible. “Even today, it re...
When it comes to maps, your first hit is always free. For you, maybe it was a Mercator projection of the world hung on the wall of an elementary-school classroom; maybe it was a road atlas in the...
In 1835, the New England Institution for Education of the Blind (now known as Perkins School for the Blind) acquired a printing press. Under the leadership of its first director, Samuel Gridley H...
At the moment, I happen to be planning some time in France, with a side trip to Belgium included. Modern intra-European train travel makes arranging the latter quite convenient: Thalys, the high-...
Image by Paul du Châtellier, via Wikimedia Commons In 1900, the French prehistorian Paul du Châtellier dug up from a burial ground a fairly sizable stone, broken but covered with engraved marki...
If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pil...