Maps!!

Well there goes my afternoon. That's the downside to working by myself from home. There's nobody but me to keep myself honest. (and working on, you know, work...)

Thanks!

Kevin
 
Wonderful stuff! Those transport maps remind me of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen - he's got a very interesting social analysis of 19th century rural France that ties rail and roads to, among other things, the diffusion of law and the gradual switch from patois to French in daily language.

That 1895 map of Chicago by nationality is also quite the find. I had seen versions of it but had never before noticed a date and this one is much more extensive. The Booth Survey of London had only begun a few years prior - along with DuBois' maps of Philadelphia this has to be one of the earlier attempts to use mapping for social analysis and reform in the US.

This is definitely evidence of how the other half lives, academically at least. I'm just across town from the U of C - our library is being slashed and burned due to budgetary pressures, while UC has a "Bibliographer for Geography, Anthropology and Maps." Sigh.
 
Levi, what a great find. It has something for everybody... Paris in the time of Napoleon, New York City at the turn of the 20th C, the area burned in Chicago's Great Fire, and more.
 
If you are on Twitter and you dig those maps I would recommend that you follow @BibliOdyssey which is who pointed me to them.

Many great finds have come from that feed.
 
originally posted by fillay:

This is definitely evidence of how the other half lives, ... while UC has a "Bibliographer for Geography, Anthropology and Maps." Sigh.
Click to expand...

The UC is a great resource for Chicagoans, it is too bad more people don't seem to use it.

The maps are quite interesting. The hand-painted maps remind me of the Homan maps from the 18th century. He printed large atlases which were subsequently broken up, page by page. They are surprisngly affordable and probably appeal to wine geeks. The fractured principalities, hand painted with village-level detail, make for handsome maps.
 
Thanks much. I developed my whole approach to wine, in a very important respect (to me), by way of my nearly lifelong addiction to maps.
 
I love maps, too. They absorb me.

(C'mon, let's not be literal about it; I don't know what I'd look like, soaked into a map.)

A friend who loves these things has started a printing project for "forgotten maps." I think it's kind of awesome. I used to have a huge Turgot on my wall in Paris.

Forgotten Maps.
 
Mme is welcome!

I've forgotten where I snagged this one from (click to enlarge):
France_vine_metro_map.jpg
 
Here's one to linger over and savor. The Manhattan Borough President's office has just made available a composite of John Randel Jr.'s fantastic set of ca.1820 Manhattan "Farm Maps." It's also at the MCNY Grid show.

Of course, the urban center of 1820 is excluded from the survey; this details solely the portion of Manhattan covered by farms (and hopefully you'll appreciate the humor of that when you see the map.)
 
The map covers from the Northern tip of the island down to 14th St on the West side (to just above Greenwich Village) and all the way down to Houston St on the East side (through the East Village).

Gotta love "Bloomingdale Road".

Hey, Don! There are marble quarries near your house.
 
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