geography

Maps are the Record of Humans' Imagination of the World

by Meredith F. Small

World maps have always been made without regard for practicality. Useless for navigation or for demarcating ownership, they are imaginative and expressive of a society's view of the world—which makes them important. 

To Grasp Geopolitical Transformations, Don't Forget to Look at the Map

by Tim Marshall

Historians and thinkers in other fields could benefit from a greater attention to geography and a greater understanding of how ideas, politics and identities are anchored to the physical space of the earth. 

Latitude: The Pioneering International Mission to Measure the Earth

by Nicholas Crane

The scientists and technicians of the Geodetic Mission to the Equator did more than measure a degree of latitude; they showed how a disparate group of human beings from different countries and backgrounds could pool their collective resources and solve problems.

The Internet’s Favorite Catalog of Weird Places Rewrites History

The popular internet site Atlas Obscura has undertaken to rewrite many of its articles to include more diverse perspectives on the unusual places they describe. 

Stark Differences Make Many Mass. Communities Neighbors in Name Only

The boundaries separating the many small towns of Massachusetts don't just contribute to local color; they've historically worked to structure significant inequalities even among neighboring municipalities. 

Appalachian Hillsides as Black Ecologies: Housing, Memory, and The Sanctified Hill Disaster of 1972

by Jillean McCommons

The Sanctified Hill disaster exposed the vulnerability of Black people to climate events due to a combination of placement and neglect.

What Street Names Say About Us

A geographer who studies the civil rights movement told Deirdre Mask, “We have attached the name of one of the most famous civil rights leaders of our time to the streets that speak to the very need to continue the civil rights movement.”

See the Mississippi River's hidden history, uncovered by lasers

Using hyperprecise LiDAR data, a cartographer maps the river’s bends and channels over time with mesmerizing results.

What’s in a Name? Meet the Government Employees Who Make the Call

A little-known patchwork of bureaucratic boards are tasked with deciding when to change the names of geographic places

Historian Daniel Immerwahr Explores What America’s Territories Reveal About American History

In “How to Hide an Empire,” Daniel Immerwahr explores America far beyond the borders of the Lower 48

Eric Jaffe: Why Historical Maps Still Matter

With 150,000 or so old print maps to his name, David Rumsey has earned his reputed place among the world's "finest private collectors." But the 69-year-old San Francisco collector doesn't have any intention of resting on his cartographic laurels. He continues to expand his personal trove as well as the digitized sub-collection he makes open to the public online — some 38,000 strong, and growing."I'm pretty old for a geek map guy," he says. "But I stay young by embracing new technologies all the time."

Aaron David Miller: How Geography Explains the United States

Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His forthcoming book is titled Can America Have Another Great President?. "Reality Check," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.Do Americans have a worldview? And is there a central organizing principle that explains it? To frame the question in Tolkienesque terms: Might there be one explanation that rules them all?I think there is.Sigmund Freud argued that in the human enterprise, anatomy is destiny. In the affairs of nations, geography -- what it wills, demands, and bestows -- is destiny too.It can't explain everything, to be sure. Britain and Japan are both island nations. That might explain their reliance on naval power and even their imperial aspirations. But what accounts for their fundamentally different histories? Other factors are clearly at play, including culture, religion, and what nature bestows or denies in resources. Fortune, along with the random circumstances it brings, pushes them in different directions.

Slaves’ forgotten burial sites, marked online

They have been bulldozed over by shopping centers, crept over by weeds and forgotten by time. Across the country, from Lower Manhattan to the Deep South, are unmarked slave burial sites, often discovered only by chance or by ignominious circumstance as when construction crews accidentally exhume bodies when building a shopping mall.Compounding the problem of preserving and locating slave graveyards, there is no comprehensive list of where they are and who lies within them. The situation troubled Sandra Arnold, 50, a history student at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies at Fordham University, who traces her ancestry to slaves in Tennessee.“The fact that they lie in these unmarked abandoned sites,” Ms. Arnold said, “it’s almost like that they are kind of vanishing from the American consciousness.”...