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Friday, February 26, 2010

Historic Maps or what looks like maps but could be something different

Amérique campagne.
CREATED/PUBLISHED
1782.

Camp a Huntz Tavern
These maps were drawn and used during the American Revolution.
They are quite detailed. Especially if you consider that they were drawn before GPS and GIS.
Is it me or does this map look sorta like internal organs?


Camp a Bullion's Tavern
"They come from the book The American Revolution and Its Era: Maps and Charts of North America and the West Indies, 1750-1789 represents an important historical record of the mapping of North America and the Caribbean." This is the quote from the website which is really the quote from the cataloger. Catalogers by nature don't seem to be a really creative bunch. I probably would have described this in a wholly and most likely inappropriate way.



Camp a Philadelphie [sic]
This book consists of about 2000 manuscript (manu = hand, script = written) maps from some of the most famous map makers of the time.
Notice that the map maker tells us which way the river flows. Every important info there. I imagine that it is easier to float your boat down river than up.



Peyton's Tavern
Yes, it does seem like they spent a lot of time at the tavern. I understand totally. The thing is that the tavern was more than a place to buy and drink liquor. Sure, they did that but taverns served as the hotel/diner/polling place/social networking place. Let's call them the Facebook of the 18th century.
Okay, more internal organs map.



Camp a Baltimore
Julie; my map librarian extraordinaire, what does Rade mean in historical map speak?




Want to see more? Want to see them in more detail? Want to zoom in and actually see the detail? Well, you'll need to head on over to the Library of Congress website because the big jerks turned off the right click feature. Making it harder for me to pilfer through their collection.
Check out The American Revolution and Its Era at the American Memory Project.

Have a great weekend everyone!
Love,
M

9 comments:

  1. Those are so COOL.

    And there are ways to get around that right-click feature. Oh, yes there are.

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  2. Ville, port, et rade means city, harbor and road en Francais. Were they referring to the road out of town?

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  3. Those are really, damned cool. And they absolutely do look like anatomy drawings. Especially the one showing the direction the Delaware River flows - looks like an esophagus.

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  4. Totally cool! BTW, love the new banner! Aren't you flashy and fabulous! :)

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  5. Thanks MAW :-), it looked French to me and that's as far as I got with it. Yup, you could indeed mistake those landscape features for innards. Love the Baltimore map - i visited that very same red area a few years ago. Looks pretty different now!

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  6. They can't really turn off right-clicking. They can only insert some crummy Javascript to intercept the event. Plenty of firefox addons that will override such tripe, found this on my first search.

    The web is an open platform. If you put something out there - pictures, writing, code - get used to the fact you can't secure it without good authentication (SSL, HTTPS) or trashy plugins (Flash, Silverlight). And there are plenty of limitations to those.

    "Hey Ben can I put this map up on the public internet but make it impossible to copy?"

    The internet does not work that way! Good night!

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  7. Oh! This is just so exciting! I love old maps. And I love history! And I love seeing these.

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

    Linda
    http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com/

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  8. I love maps no matter what the vintage. I learned to read a map when we were on a roadtrip and my father would throw the map into the backseat and tell me to find our next stop.

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  9. That's so funny you said that because I was going to say that map looks like a reproductive system. Is that a sperm map? Left turn at the Fallopian Tubes, dude.

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