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Norfolk County, Massachusetts, Map, 1858: David Rumsey collection
Before Dorchester, Roxbury, and West Roxbury were annexed by Boston and Suffolk County, making Brookline an exclave of the county.
Before satellites, TV networks used coax cables and microwave links to relay programming from station to station across the country. This map shows lists TV stations in 1955 and shows the routes that programming followed. A trunk line snaked its way west, roughly parallel to I-70 to Kansas City, then followed the Kansas Turnpike to Wichita and I-35 to OKC and Dallas, with a branch from near Stillwater to Tulsa. At this time, Tulsa had two stations (KOTV 6, KVOO 2), while Muskogee's KTVX 8 would later move to Tulsa as KTUL, while Enid's KGEO 5 would move to Oklahoma City to become KOCO. But stations in Ada (KTEN) and Lawton (KSWO) would remain independent. The number of UHF stations (channels 14 and higher) are surprising.
From the American Guide Series, a look at Texas in 1940.
PowerPoint presentation with US map represented as individual states that can be colored and outlined separately. (Just beware what you're clicking.)
American State Flags: The Good, The Bad, & Nebraska | National Review
"States with flags that require an extreme makeover might hold contests. That's what Oklahoma did nearly a century ago. Its first state flag was red, with a star in the middle that enclosed a big '46,' because Oklahoma is the 46th state. The Daughters of the American Revolution thought it looked vaguely Communist, so they sponsored a competition to replace it. The winner recommended an image of a Choctaw shield and peace pipe on a light-blue background. This proposal, formally adopted in 1925, came from a woman with a wonderful name: Louise Funk Fluke."
(It's actually an Osage shield; the only thing Choctaw on our flag is the name Oklahoma, but the Choctaws were the only tribe historically with a flag, which is why they're the only tribe to claim one of the Fourteen Flags Over Oklahoma. Here's another description of the 14 Flags, and Leonard Sullivan's explanation of why the display of the 14 Flags isn't on the state capitol grounds any more.)
Hastain's township plats of the Creek Nation : Hastain, E : Internet Archive
This handbook has a pair of pages for each 36 sq. mi. township showing which citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation citizen was allotted each parcel. The letters before the roll number on each parcel indicate the allottee's status:
C = Creek Indian
F = Freedman
MC = Minor Creek
MF = Minor Freedman
NBC = New Born Creek
NBF = New Born Freedman
It's fascinating to see how much land was allotted to freedmen -- descendants of slaves who had belonged to Creek citizens and were freed by the 1866 post-Civil War treaty.
Ethnographic map of Austrian Monarchy (1855) - Wikimedia Commons
Fascinating map shows the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its acquisition of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and before its cession of the kingdoms of Lombardy and Venice to Italy in 1866. The map shows the 21 constituent krönlander -- the kingdoms, principalities, duchies and grand duchies that constituted the empire. Place names are in German (Lemberg instead of Lviv, Laibach instead of Ljubljana). Shading shows major linguistic/cultural groups -- Germans in red, speakers of Slavic languages in shades of green, speakers of Romance languages in shades of yellow, and Hungarians in white. Isolated language groups show up on the periphery of the empire, such as the Sudeten Germans in northern and western Bohemia and Hungarians and Germans in Transylvania.
Tables show land area of each division (in Austrian square miles, which is 22.2 square statute miles) and population by language by division. Numbers are divided with commas after millions and periods after thousands, and a raised dot for a decimal point. Longitude is in degrees east of the Ferro Meridian, named after the westernmost Canary Island and defined as 20 degrees west of Paris, or about 17.7 degrees west of Greenwich. Of the 36.4 million people in the empire, 7.9 million spoke German, 4.9 million spoke Hungarian, 14.8 million spoke a Slavic language (Czech, Moravian, Slovakian, Ruthenian, Polish, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian), 8.0 million spoke a Romance language (Italian, Romanian, Friulian, and Ladin).
Louisiana Purchase Exposition St. Louis - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Beautiful color map of the 1904 World's Fair, showing the state, territorial, and national pavilions, Model City, Intramural Railway, connections to steam and electric railways. A massive Philippine Exhibit included a model of Manila's Intramuros walled city, a map of the islands, and a Lantern Slides building. The Pike, an entertainment midway, included such attractions as Creation, Hereafter, Infant Incubator, Scenic Railway, Water Chutes, Boyntons Naval Exhibit, Battle Abbey, Galveston Flood, Old St. Louis, Ancient Rome, and Cairo. A large scale model of Jerusalem's Old City dominates the map. Be aware that South is up, and that the fair's boundaries extended from Oakland on the south to Lindell on the north, and from DeBaliviere / Hampton Avenues on the east to Big Bend Dr on the west.
Official guide to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at the city of St. Louis
The Internet Archive has the official guidebook for the 1904 World's Fair. Page 135 has a photo of the Indian Territory Building and a description of the attractions along The Pike. The entrance to The Pike was graced with Frederic Remington's "Cowboys Shooting Up a Western Town" -- the description sounds like his "Coming through the Rye." On page 138, we learn that the International Olympic Committee has designated all sports and competitions during the World's Fair as Olympic events, with the Olympic games proper occupying one week (Mon-Sat only) from August 29 to September 3. A photo of the Oklahoma Building appears on page 154. The description of St. Louis and its amenities, starting on page 176, is also interesting.
Explore a map of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis
This is an Adobe Flash application, published in 2010, so your browser may complain, but it lets you see how the 1904 World's Fair Map lines up with present day landmarks.
The 1904 World's Fair Society has a page of links related to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
New South Wales Rural Fire Service: Fires Near Me
This is an interactive map showing the extent of the burned area and the status of fires in New South Wales and neighboring parts of Victoria and Queensland. Here is the fire map for Victoria, the road closure map for Victoria, and the road closure map for NSW. There are a few contained bushfires and grass fires in Queensland at the moment.
I'm sad to see roads I drove and towns I visited under threat. Three years ago, in October 2016 during the Australian spring, I took a four-day drive that included the beautiful Australian Alps and Murray River Valley. The town of Corryong, Victoria, home to a museum about the times depicted in the poem "The Man from Snowy River," is surrounded by burned areas, and roads out of town are closed to traffic. Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales, home to the highest peak on the continent, has been evacuated and the Alpine Way scenic highway is closed through the entire park, from Bullocks Flat to the Murray River on the border with Victoria. The Falls Creek ski resort is under mandatory evacuation. Residents of Bright, a pretty resort town in the foothills of the mountains, are being advised to leave.
The History of Land Fill in Boston
A series of five maps illustrating the growth of Boston through the use of landfill, showing the original Shawmut Peninsula in 1630, the filling of the Mill Pond (Causeway Street really was a causeway), the filling of the Great Cove, South Cove, and West Cove, and the massive addition of the Back Bay after the Civil War.
Online exhibit from the West End Museum in Boston on the use of tidal ponds (like the Mill Pond filled in with the top of Beacon Hill in the first decade of the 1800s) to power mills.
