"Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data-remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century."
Large Database of Interactive historical maps
"The Spatial History Project at Stanford University is a place for a collaborative community of students, staff, and scholars to engage in creative spatial, textual and visual analysis to further research in the humanities. "
Data visualizations that are tied to geography. Quite a few are applicable to US History SOLs
Wow. Just wow. A lot of potential application here for a variety of topics.
- My World History teachers are about to do a Socratic seminar on Rome. The topic is "Haves vs. Have Nots." This map fits perfectly into this discussion.
- Use as a tool to discuss reasons for immigration/emigration
- Locate the most/least poor areas of the US? Why do you believe this is the case?
-Does geography impact poverty? How/Why?
- Compare this map to other poverty maps from the past, specifically during the period of industrialization. Discuss how/why things have changed.
"These maps, published in 1932 in the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States and available through the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, illustrate how arduous travel was in the country's early history. In 1800, a journey from New York to Chicago would have taken an intrepid traveler roughly six weeks; travel times beyond the Mississippi River aren't even charted. Three decades later, the trip dropped to three weeks in length and by the mid-19th century, the New York-Chicago journey via railroad took two days. And the introduction of regional airlines in the 1920s made it possible to travel 1,000 or more miles in a single day."
Possible applications for Westward Expansion
"The GIF below runs through the plates in sequence, from 2348 B.C., "The Deluge" (Quin, not unusually for his time period, was a Biblical literalist) through A.D. 1828, "End of the General Peace.""
So my initial thought upon seeing this GIF was that it is eerily similar to the "fog of war" effect from Warcraft, Starcraft, and other similar games from my childhood. Based on this idea, you might be able to do something with these maps related to the essential question, "How has expansion changed our perception of the world?" (This is probably not phrased perfectly, but gets to the general idea...)
Additionally, this could be an interesting item to analyze when discussing the essential question, "Have we made progress?"
Students could make similar Gifs for shorter time periods to show their understanding of change over time.