A new exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China, focuses on two extraordinary Chinese maps from the early 19th century printed using Prussian blue pigment.

These maps were presented in an extraordinary format, on eight vertical sheets printed in the style of rubbings. Even more strikingly, they were rendered in a rich blue coloring. The pigment Prussian blue had recently begun to be produced in China, and these maps were amongst the first printed objects in East Asia to make use of the colorant—predating the famous use of Prussian blue by Japanese print artists soon after.

The blue maps were more than just visually astonishing. They also captured Chinese ideas about the relationship between terrestrial and celestial space, and still provide insight today into how Chinese scholars and artists conceptualized the world around them. Beautiful and powerful in equal measure, these blue maps capture details of a transitional moment in the history of China—and the wider world. This exhibition considers these two maps in the context of their production, consumption, and functionality, revealing them as unique objects in the global history of mapmaking.

The online version is full of interesting detail about the maps’ materials and production. The physical exhibition opened last weekend and runs until 31 August 2024. Free admission.

Previously: Emma Willard’s History of the United States; Women in Cartography (Part 3).

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Britain had the Ordnance Survey, France the Cassini family. Japan had Inō Tadataka (伊能 忠敬, 1745-1818), who over a series of expeditions in the early 19th century conducted a systematic survey of Japan using modern techniques. Writing for Nippon.com, Inō’s biographer, Hoshino Yoshihisa, writes a long introduction to Inō’s life and work that is well worth the read. [Tony Campbell]

For more on the history of Japanese cartography, see Cartographic Japan, a collection of academic essays edited by Kären Wigen, Sugimoto Fumiko and Cary Karacas that was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.

During the 19th century, the United States expanded dramatically westward. Immigrant settlers rapidly spread across the continent and transformed it, often through violent or deceptive means, from ancestral Native lands and borderlands teeming with diverse communities to landscapes that fueled the rise of industrialized cities. Historical maps, images and related objects tell the story of the sweeping changes made to the physical, cultural, and political landscape. Moving beyond the mythologized American frontier, this map exhibition explores the complexity of factors that shaped our country over the century.

As usual, there’s a comprehensive online version, which is peppered with acknowledgements of the very white, very settler-colonialist perspective of the maps on display. Which are, of course, justified, but as far as I can see they’re asterisks and asides on an otherwise unchanged exhibit.

The first map produced by the Ordnance Survey, their blog reminds us, was this map of Kent. Published in 1801 at the scale of two inches to one mile (1:31,680), it took three years to complete; the OS started in Kent over fears of a French invasion. As such, the map “focused on communication routes and included hill shading to ensure men at arms could interpret the landscape with precision. Over time, this map design became less focused on these elements and was developed to appeal to a much wider audience.”

The definitive history of the early years of the Ordnance Survey is Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation, which I reviewed in 2012.

Atlas Obscura looks at the cartographic work of early American educator Emma Willard, who in 1829 published a series of maps to accompany her History of United States, or Republic of America, a school textbook that came out the previous year. The book was an early example of a historical atlas: it was “the first book of its kind—the first atlas to present the evolution of America.”

Clifford’s maps reveal a world on the cusp of an evolutionary shift in cartography brought about by the Napoleonic wars. Hand-coloured, manuscript maps depicting the precise and exacting geometry of Vauban-designed fortified cities give way to maps printed from engraved plates, incorporating new techniques and symbology to satisfy the shifting focus onto the surrounding landscape of unordered nature. Maps used primarily for the siege of cities in previous generations are re-placed by maps of vast expanses of territory for a new style of open warfare.

How the maps ended up at McMaster is a story in itself; see the Hamilton Spectator’s coverage. [Tony Campbell]

At the Grolier Club in New York, Westward the Course of Empire: Exploring and Settling the American West, 1803-1869, an exhibition of maps from the collection of J. C. McElveen Jr. 50 maps on display, including Lewis and Clark’s map of the Northwest. Press release. [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.

Christopher Steinke, now a history professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, encountered the map during his graduate studies; he wrote it up for the October 2014 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, which also published an interactive version of the map on its website. (Here’s a link to Steinke’s article.)

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.

Here’s the press release from the Foundation, and here’s We Proceeded On editor Clay Jenkinson on what the map means for “Lewis and Clark obsessives.” [Tony Campbell/WMS]

We’ve seen “serio-comic” or caricature maps before, most of them dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Caitlin takes us behind the scenes with a story about one of the artists behind such maps. The twelve maps published in Geographical Fun: Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries (1868) were the handiwork of a 15-year-old teenager named Lilian Lancaster, who originally drew them to amuse her ill brother. Which is a great and surprising twist. The accompanying text (an introduction and accompanying verses) was by William Harvey (under a pseudonym), who tried to make an educational case for such maps (as one did).

The Unwritten Record, a blog by staff at the U.S. National Archives’s Special Media Archives Services Division, announced last month: “Civil War maps are always popular at the National Archives, and the Cartographic Branch is pleased to announce the digitization of over 100 Confederate maps from Record Group (RG) 109.  All are now available to view or download through our online catalog.” [Texas Map Society]

The Bodleian Map Room Blog posts some excerpts from an 1882 Austro-Hungarian guide to mapmaking. “The Schlüssel und vorlageblatter für den situations zeichnungs unterricht (which translates roughly as ‘Key and template for drawing lessons’) is a teaching aid created by the Institute of Military Geography in the Austro-Hungarian Ministry of War in 1882 for the drawing of maps. Inside there are a number of different terrain examples and sheets showing scales, text, topographical features and legends.” As the blog post points out, the purpose of the guide was to ensure uniformity in military mapmaking. [Benjamin Hennig]

A rare copy of James Palmatary’s 1857 map of Chicago is being auctioned next week, Crain’s reports. Only four copies are known to exist of the map, a bird’s-eye view that depicts the city as it was before the Great Fire; this is the only one in private hands. The remaining surviving copies are held by the Chicago Historical Society, the Library of Congress and the Newberry Library. The map is expected to fetch $20,000 to $30,000. [Tony Campbell]

Federerico Italiano unearths a scarily abstract 1888 weather map of Europe by Emil Letoschek that is nevertheless intelligible (at least if you read German).

Joan Blaeu’s Archipelagus Orientalis is to Australia what Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map is to America: a case where a first appearance on a map is referred to as a country’s birth certificate. The 17th-century map included data from Tasman’s voyages and named New Holland (Australia) and New Zealand for the first time. The National Library of Australia is working on conserving its 1663 copy, but an earlier, unrestored version dating from around 1659 recently turned up in an Italian home; earlier this month it was auctioned at Sotheby’s and sold for nearly £250,000. [Tony Campbell]

Meanwhile, at a somewhat more modest scale, an 1884 hand-drawn map of what would later become the tony Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano by colourful local Sam Greer went for C$24,200—five times its estimated price.

Three academic books out this month deal with the subject of mapping, surveying, and empire-building:

The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence by S. Max Edelson (Harvard University Press) covers the period between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. From the publisher:

Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.

Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.

Maps and visualizations to accompany the book are available online. [Amazon]

The First Mapping of America: The General Survey of British North America by Alex Johnson (I. B. Tauris) seems to cover similar territory, if you’ll pardon the pun, though I have very little information about it. [Amazon]

Finally, Daniel Foliard’s Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 (University of Chicago Press) “vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from ‘the East’ or ‘the Orient.’ In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today.” [Amazon, iBooks]

Related: Map Books of 2017.

On a recent episode of the PBS version of the Antiques Roadshow, Chris Lane appraised a copy of the 1833 Churchman Eagle Map of the United States at $25,000. On the Antiques Print Blog Lane explains how he arrived at that number, which some have thought was a bit on the high side. [WMS]

William Smith’s 19th-century geological maps of Britain are now available online via an interactive map interface. [Maps Mania]

Speaking of the Library of Congress, yesterday it opened a new exhibition both online and at the Library’s North Exhibition Gallery. Mapping a Growing Nation: From Independence to Statehood features the best known copy of Abel Buell’s 1784 New and Correct Map of the United States of North America—“which, among other things, has been recognized as the very first map of the newly independent United States to be compiled, printed, and published in America by an American. Additionally, the 1784 publication is the first map to be copyrighted in the United States, registered under the auspices of the Connecticut State Assembly.” Accompanying Buell’s map are other early maps—often the first maps—of each U.S. state; the maps will rotate on and off physical display for space reasons but will eventually all be featured online. [WMS]

The Wiscasset Newspaper (seriously, that’s what it’s called) of Wiscasset, Maine profiles former resident Gary Flanders, who’s “made it a hobby collecting old colonial maps of the Wiscasset area.” [WMS]

The New Hampshire Union Leader marks the 200th anniversary of Philip Carrigain’s map of New Hampshire; only 250 copies were distributed, some of which are still in the possession of the communities who submitted their surveys to Carrigain. (The above copy comes from the David Rumsey collection.) [WMS]

Running from 29 April to 5 September 2016 at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas, Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State “is a once-in-a-generation, collaborative exhibition covering nearly three hundred years of Texas mapping. The maps, dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, document the birth of Texas, the evolution of the physical and political boundaries of the state and the rise of the Alamo and San Antonio Missions.” [WMS]

Meanwhile, the Texas General Land Office has acquired five rare maps from the 1840-1841 survey of the boundary between the then-Republic of Texas and the United States (see example above). Press release. [Tony Campbell/WMS]

CityLab’s Laura Bliss has a second post on women and cartography, this time focusing on the work of 19th-century women cartographers, geographers and educators in the United States. The Library of Congress’s map blog, Worlds Revealed, focuses on the work (and maps) of one of those women, Emma Hart Willard.

Previously: Women in Cartography; Women in Cartography (Continued).

A copy of an 1853 map of Texas by Jacob de Cordova found in a $10 box of ragtime sheet music sold at auction last weekend for $10,000. The map, once owned by surveyor James M. Manning, who died in 1872, was bought, along with a related letter, by Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi, whose library houses the Manning papers. [via]

An exhibition of the maps of James Robertson (1753–1829), on display at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead, Scotland, wraps up this Saturday. The maps, on loan from the National Library of Scotland, include four maps of Jamaica, where Robertson worked as a land surveyor, and a controversial map of Aberdeenshire that, according to The Press and Journal, “was riddled with ‘inaccuracies’ and spelling mistakes, and sparked a legal dispute which raged until his death in 1829.” [via]

Last week, DC Public Library announced “the release of a century of historic Washington, D.C. maps in Dig DC, the online portal to DCPL Special Collections. These maps cover the District of Columbia and the region from the 1760s to the Civil War. To see them, head on over to the Maps: City & Regional collection on Dig DC!” Of the 8,000 or so maps in the library’s Washingtoniana Map Collection, 250 have been digitized so far; they’re working on scanning the entire collection. [via]

[via]