Image cour­tesy of the David Rum­sey Map Cen­ter

Every­body knows a fact or two about the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, even those who’ve nev­er set foot there. At the very least, they know the US is a big coun­try, but it’s one thing to know that and anoth­er to tru­ly under­stand the scale involved. Today we offer you an arti­fact from car­to­graph­ic his­to­ry that illus­trates it vivid­ly: a 19th-cen­tu­ry trav­el­er’s map of the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er that, in order to dis­play the length of that mighty 2,320-mile water­way, extends to a full eleven feet. (Or, for those espe­cial­ly unfa­mil­iar with how things are in Amer­i­ca, dis­plays the river’s full 3,734-kilometer length at a full 3.35 meters.)

With a width of only three inch­es (or 7.62 cen­time­ters), the Rib­bon Map of the Father of Waters came on a spool the read­er could use to unroll it to the rel­e­vant sec­tion of the riv­er any­where between the Gulf of Mex­i­co and north­ern Min­neso­ta. First pub­lished in 1866, just a year after the end of the Civ­il War, the map “was mar­ket­ed toward tourists, who were flock­ing to the Mis­sis­sip­pi to see the sights and ride the steam­boats.” So writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Cara Giamo, who quotes art his­to­ri­an Nenette Luar­ca-Shoaf as describ­ing the riv­er as “a source of great awe. That kind of length, that kind of spa­cious­ness was incom­pre­hen­si­ble to a lot of folks who were com­ing from the East Coast.”

Luar­ca-Shoaf describes the map, an inven­tion of St. Louis entre­pre­neurs Myron Coloney and Sid­ney B. Fairchild, in more detail in an arti­cle of her own at Com­mon-Place. “The com­plete­ly unfurled map extends beyond the lim­its of the user’s reach, won­drous­ly embody­ing the scope of the riv­er in the time it took to unroll it and in the eleven feet of space it now occu­pies,” she writes. “At the same time, the care required to wind the strip back into Coloney and Fairchild’s patent­ed spool appa­ra­tus reit­er­ates the pre­car­i­ous­ness of human con­trol — either rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al or envi­ron­men­tal — over the mer­cu­r­ial Mis­sis­sip­pi.” We still today talk about “scrolling” maps, though we now mean it as noth­ing more than a dig­i­tal metaphor.

Unwieldy though it may seem, the Rib­bon Map of the Father of Waters must have struck its trav­el-mind­ed buy­ers in the 1860s — some 150 years before tech­nol­o­gy put touch­screens in all of our hands — as the height of car­to­graph­ic con­ve­nience. Despite hav­ing sold out their Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er map quick­ly enough to neces­si­tate a sec­ond edi­tion, though, Coloney and Fairchild did lit­tle more with their patent­ed con­cept. You can see a sur­viv­ing exam­ple of the Rib­bon Map in greater detail at the Library of Con­gress and the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion. The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of riv­er tourists yearn­ing for an under­stand­ing of the sur­pris­ing breadth of Amer­i­ca’s land and depth of its his­to­ry may even con­sti­tute suf­fi­cient mar­ket for a repli­ca. But what hap­pens when it gets wet?

via Atlas Obscu­ra and Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All the Rivers & Streams in the U.S. Shown in Rain­bow Colours: A Data Visu­al­iza­tion to Behold

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

Learn the Untold His­to­ry of the Chi­nese Com­mu­ni­ty in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The genre of ani­mat­ed time-lapse video maps—portraying the rise and fall of empires, the spread of peo­ple groups, the suc­ces­sion of rulers over hun­dreds of years, and oth­er his­to­ries that used to fill entire textbooks—is one of those inter­net-only phe­nom­e­na with use­ful, if lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion. As the bom­bas­tic music that some­times accom­pa­nies these videos sug­gests, one pri­ma­ry effect is the pro­duc­tion of max­i­mal­ly sweep­ing his­tor­i­cal dra­ma through map­ping, which cap­tures the imag­i­na­tion in ways dry pro­sa­ic descrip­tions often can’t.

The sub­ject of the video above—the British Empire—seems to jus­ti­fy such an approach, giv­en that, as one edu­ca­tion­al web­site notes, “the British Empire was the largest for­mal empire that the world had ever known.” Whether one cel­e­brates or deplores this fact is a mat­ter for polit­i­cal or moral debate—categories that have lit­tle seem­ing rel­e­vance to the pro­duc­tion of ani­mat­ed video maps.

“At its height in 1922,” writes Jon Stone at The Inde­pen­dent, “the British Empire gov­erned a fifth of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and the quar­ter of the world’s total land area.” His com­ment that this lega­cy “divides opin­ion” gross­ly under­states the case. Yet as bare his­tor­i­cal fact, the spread of the Empire is aston­ish­ing, an achieve­ment of mil­i­tary and mar­itime pow­er, unprece­dent­ed com­mer­cial ambi­tion, bureau­crat­ic sys­tem­iza­tion, trade maneu­ver­ing, and the mas­sive dis­place­ment, deten­tion, and enslave­ment of mil­lions of peo­ple.

How did it hap­pen? To para­phrase an often-divi­sive British singer, empire began at home.

The video begins in 519 A.D., after the end of Roman rule in Eng­land, when the so-called Hep­tarchy formed, the sev­en Anglo-Sax­on trib­al king­doms ruled by Ger­man­ic peo­ples who killed off or enslaved the native Celts. From there, we pro­ceed through the Nor­man inva­sion, the Eng­lish attempts to take French ter­ri­to­ry in Europe, Hen­ry VIII’s inva­sion and annex­a­tion of Ire­land, and oth­er col­o­niz­ing and empire-build­ing events that pre­cede British entry onto the far-flung glob­al stage with the found­ing of the British East India Company’s first post in Surat, India in 1612 and Puri­tan set­tle­ment at Ply­mouth in 1620.

We see these events unfold in a split screen map show­ing dif­fer­ent parts of the world, with a box on the side pro­vid­ing con­text and a col­or-cod­ed leg­end. This rush through Impe­r­i­al his­to­ry occurs at a rel­a­tive­ly break­neck speed, tak­ing only 18 min­utes to cov­er 1,500 years.

The long, slow rise of the British Empire was fol­lowed by a pre­cip­i­tous fall. By the mid-20th cen­tu­ry post­war years, Britain saw its major colonies in India, Africa, and the West Indies achieve inde­pen­dence one by one. “By 1979,” writes Adam Tay­lor at The Wash­ing­ton Post, the Empire “was reduced to a few pock­ets around the world.” And by the cur­rent year, the for­mer glob­al power’s over­seas colo­nial hold­ings com­prise 14 small ter­ri­to­ries, includ­ing most­ly unpop­u­lat­ed Antarc­tic land and the Falk­land Islands.

See many more fas­ci­nat­ing ani­mat­ed time-lapse maps, doc­u­ment­ing all of world his­to­ry, at the cre­ator Ollie Bye’s YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

Ani­mat­ed Map Shows How the Five Major Reli­gions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

When will the world end?

We can find seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic answers to this ques­tion, depend­ing on what we mean by “world” and “end.” If civ­i­liza­tion as we cur­rent­ly know it, cli­mate sci­en­tists’ worst-case sce­nario points toward some­where around 2100 as the begin­ning of the end. (New York mag­a­zine points out that it “prob­a­bly won’t kill all of us”). It’s pos­si­ble, but not inevitable.

If we mean the end of all life on earth, the fore­cast looks quite a bit rosier: we’ve prob­a­bly got about a bil­lion years, writes astro­physi­cist Jil­lian Scud­der, before the sun becomes “hot enough to boil our oceans.” Still not a cheer­ful thought, but per­haps many more crea­tures will take after the tardi­grade by then. That’s not even to men­tion nuclear war or the epi­demics, zom­bie and oth­er­wise, that could take us out.

But of course, for a not incon­sid­er­able num­ber of people—including a few cur­rent­ly occu­py­ing key posi­tions of pow­er in the U.S.—the ques­tion of the world’s end has noth­ing to do with sci­ence at all but with escha­tol­ogy, that branch of the­o­log­i­cal thought con­cerned with the Apoc­a­lypse.

The­o­log­i­cal thinkers have writ­ten about the Apoc­a­lypse for hun­dreds of years, and the world’s end was fre­quent­ly per­ceived as just around the cor­ner for many of the same rea­sons mod­ern sec­u­lar peo­ple feel apoc­a­lyp­tic dread: dis­ease, nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, wars, rumors of wars, impe­r­i­al pow­er strug­gles, uncom­fort­ably shift­ing demo­graph­ics….

Take 15th-cen­tu­ry Europe, when “the Apoc­a­lypse weighed heav­i­ly on the minds of the peo­ple,” as Bet­sy Mason and Greg Miller write at the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic blog All Over the Map: “Plagues were ram­pant. The once-great cap­i­tal of the Roman empire, Con­stan­tino­ple, had fall­en to the Turks. Sure­ly, the end was nigh.”

While a niche pub­lish­ing mar­ket in the nascent print era pro­duced “dozens of print­ed works” describ­ing the “com­ing reck­on­ing in gory detail… one long-for­got­ten man­u­script depicts the Apoc­a­lypse in a very dif­fer­ent way—through maps.” As you can see here, these maps con­vey the unfold­ing of worse-to-wors­er sce­nar­ios in a num­ber of visu­al reg­is­ters: tem­po­ral, sym­bol­ic, geo­graph­ic, the­mat­ic, etc.

At the top, the nest­ed tri­an­gles depict the rise of the Antichrist between the years 1570 and 1600. The cen­tral con­cern for this author was the sup­posed glob­al threat of Islam. Thus, the next map, its “T” shape a com­mon Medieval world map device, shows the world before the Apoc­a­lypse, the text around it explain­ing that “Islam is on the rise from 639 to 1514.”

Then, we have a cir­cu­lar map with five swords point­ing at the edges of the known world, illus­trat­ing the author’s con­tention that Islam­ic armies would reach the edges of the earth. The oth­er maps depict the “four horns of the Antichrist,” above, Judge­ment Day, below, (the black eye at the bot­tom is the “black abyss that leads to hell”), and, fur­ther down, a dia­gram describ­ing “the rel­a­tive diam­e­ters of Earth and Hell.”

Made in Lübeck, Ger­many some­time between 1486 and 1488, the man­u­script is writ­ten in Latin, “but it’s not as schol­ar­ly as oth­er con­tem­po­rary man­u­scripts,” write Mason and Miller, “and the pen­man­ship is fair­ly poor.” His­to­ri­an of car­tog­ra­phy Chet Van Duzer explains that “it’s aimed at the cul­tur­al elite, but not the pin­na­cle of the cul­tur­al elite.”

Point­ing out the obvi­ous, Van Duzer says, “there’s no way to escape it, this work is very anti-Islam­ic,” a wide­spread sen­ti­ment in medieval Europe, when the “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” nar­ra­tive spread its roots deep in cer­tain strains of West­ern think­ing. This par­tic­u­lar text also “includes a sec­tion on astro­log­i­cal med­i­cine and a trea­tise on geog­ra­phy that’s remark­ably ahead of its time.”

Van Duzer and Ilya Dines have stud­ied the rare man­u­script for its insight­ful pas­sages on geog­ra­phy and car­tog­ra­phy and pub­lished their research in a book titled Apoc­a­lyp­tic Car­tog­ra­phy. For all its the­o­log­i­cal alarmism, the man­u­script is sur­pris­ing­ly thought­ful when it comes to ana­lyz­ing its own for­mal prop­er­ties and per­spec­tives.

Mason and Miller note that “the author out­lines an essen­tial­ly mod­ern under­stand­ing of the­mat­ic maps as a means to illus­trate char­ac­ter­is­tics of the peo­ple or polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion of dif­fer­ent regions.” As Van Duzer puts it, “this is one of the most amaz­ing pas­sages, to have some­one from the 15th cen­tu­ry telling you their ideas about what maps can do.” This marks the work, he claims in the intro­duc­tion to Apoc­a­lyp­tic Car­tog­ra­phy, as that “of one of the most orig­i­nal car­tog­ra­phers of the peri­od.”

The Apoc­a­lypse Map now resides at the Hunt­ing­ton Library in Los Ange­les.

via Nat Geo

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dicts the World Will End in 2060

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The age of the “uni­ver­sal his­to­ry” has come and gone. The genre flour­ished in times when it seemed pos­si­ble to assume a van­tage point out­side of time—to see pur­pose and pat­tern in thou­sands of years of human action. “It might be pos­si­ble,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “to have a his­to­ry with a def­i­nite nat­ur­al plan for crea­tures who have no plan of their own.” The view assumed by such a his­to­ry tends to exclude the cir­cum­scribed per­spec­tive of the view­er, or—in Ralph Wal­do Emerson’s famous, and oft-par­o­died, phras­ing, “all mean ego­tism van­ish­es. I become a trans­par­ent eye­ball; I am noth­ing; I see all; the cur­rents of the Uni­ver­sal Being cir­cu­late through me; I am part and par­cel of God.”

Few his­to­ri­ans today assume such a gods-eye-view, for bet­ter or worse, but with­out it, we would nev­er have seen the devel­op­ment of its visu­al ana­logue: the time­line map, an info­graph­ic form espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar in the 18th to the ear­ly 20th cen­turies, when thinkers from Schiller to Herder to Kant to Hegel to Marx to Weber pro­duced uni­ver­sal accounts of human his­to­ry that, to vary­ing degrees, pur­port­ed to account for vast his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments as the move­ment of imper­son­al forces toward some def­i­nite goal.

From the per­spec­tive of the time­line map, civ­i­liza­tions grow nat­u­ral­ly from each oth­er like branch­es from a tree, or flow one into anoth­er like a river’s trib­u­taries, or pro­duce, as in John B. Sparks “His­tom­ap,” col­or­ful puz­zles in which every piece has its neat­ly-assigned place….

We’ve fea­tured sev­er­al such maps here, like the His­tom­ap and Eugene Pick­’s 1858 Tableau De L’His­toire Uni­verselle, both from the exten­sive map col­lec­tion of David Rum­sey. In the ver­sion you see here, we have a very unusu­al vari­a­tion on the theme—rather than a his­tor­i­cal time­line map, Edward Quin pro­duced in 1830 An His­tor­i­cal Atlas; In a Series of Maps of the World as Known at Dif­fer­ent Peri­ods.

The ques­tion, “as known by whom?” seems entire­ly rel­e­vant. The per­spec­tive of Quin’s atlas is god­like, gaz­ing down at the world through the clouds, but unlike Emerson’s trans­par­ent view, it does not “see all”—those clouds occlude the vision, restrict­ing it to indi­cate, as the Rum­sey col­lec­tion notes, “the expan­sion of geo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge over time.” You’ll have to read Quin’s text—avail­able here—to under­stand how he accounts for the chronol­o­gy and per­spec­tive.

The atlas begins in 2348 B.C. with “the Del­uge,” the myth­i­cal Bib­li­cal flood. Bib­li­cal his­to­ry inex­plic­a­bly gives way to the sec­u­lar. In a descrip­tion of the atlas by Don­ald A. Head rare books, this strange doc­u­ment “intend­ed to car­to­graph­i­cal­ly depict polit­i­cal change from the time of cre­ation to the year 1828,” when it reveals “the enlight­ened world in the midst of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion…. Divid­ed into twen­ty-one peri­ods… the clouds ful­ly dis­ap­pear at the nine­teenth peri­od: ‘A.D. 1783 at the sep­a­ra­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, from Eng­land.” In his pref­ace, Quin explains his project in the typ­i­cal terms of uni­ver­sal his­to­ry, as illus­trat­ing “by the changes of colour the empires which suc­ceed each oth­er.”

Quin’s descrip­tion of the unchang­ing per­spec­tive he adopts might remind some mod­ern read­ers of cer­tain com­ic book char­ac­ters as much as of the vision of a god or a trans­par­ent, detached eye: “Like the watch­man on some bea­con-tow­er, he views the hills and peo­pled val­leys around him, always the same in sit­u­a­tion and in form, but every chang­ing aspect of the hours and sea­sons….” View Quin’s com­plete His­tor­i­cal Atlas, scanned in high res­o­lu­tion detail, at the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

On our page here, see indi­vid­ual pages from the His­tor­i­cal Atlas. Or, up top, see an ani­mat­ed gif that lets you view all 21 maps in the atlas in chrono­log­i­cal order.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

Ground­break­ing Map from 1858 Col­or­ful­ly Visu­al­izes 6,000 Years of World His­to­ry

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

We start to under­stand his­to­ry by lis­ten­ing to it told to us ver­bal­ly, which lets us visu­al­ize it in our imag­i­na­tion. But how much more might we under­stand his­to­ry if we could see it ren­dered visu­al­ly right before our eyes? That ques­tion seems to have occu­pied the minds of cer­tain of the car­tog­ra­phers of 19th-cen­tu­ry Europe, those who want­ed to take their craft beyond its tra­di­tion­al lim­its in order to do for chronol­o­gy what it had long done for geog­ra­phy. Here we have one of the most glo­ri­ous such attempts in exis­tence, Eugene Pick­’s 1858 Tableau De L’His­toire Uni­verselle — or at least the half cov­er­ing the civ­i­liza­tions of the East­ern Hemi­sphere — as held in the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion.

At first glance, all of the infor­ma­tion on the map might appear over­whelm­ing. But zoom in (look­ing at the cen­ter first, ide­al­ly from top to bot­tom) and you’ll soon grasp how Pick has depict­ed the his­to­ry of the world, as a mid-19th-cen­tu­ry French­man would con­ceive of it it, by draw­ing a kind of net­work of rivers and trib­u­taries.

The “sources” of ancient civ­i­liza­tions, like those of the Greeks, the Phoeni­cians, the Egyp­tians, and the Chi­nese, flow down to those of var­i­ous descen­dants — the Gauls, the Nor­we­gians, the Rus­sians, the Turks — and the mighty empires in which they pool, and arrive at the nations of the Danes, the Swedes, the Bel­gians, the Span­ish, the Per­sians, and oth­ers besides. In total the map cov­ers 6,000 years of his­to­ry, mov­ing from 4004 B.C. to 1856.

This tech­nique of visu­al­iz­ing his­to­ry has its prece­dents, includ­ing Friedrich Strass’ Der Strom der Zeit­en oder bildliche Darstel­lung der Welt­geschichte, pic­tured just above (and lat­er updat­ed by Amer­i­can map­mak­er Joseph Hutchins Colton as The Stream of Time in the 1840s and 1860s.) The David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion notes that, unlike Strass’ map, Pick­’s also has “vignettes of peo­ple, build­ings, his­tor­i­cal scenes and impor­tant places in the his­to­ry of the world” lined up on either side of the main con­tent. It thus illu­mi­nates the abstract and con­tin­u­ous cen­tral ren­der­ing of his­to­ry with rep­re­sen­ta­tive, dis­crete ones, show­ing view­ers every­thing from the Bib­li­cal flood and the Tow­er of Babel to the Great Sphinx of Giza and Agrip­pa’s Pan­theon to Notre Dame and the Arc de Tri­om­phe. It has a cer­tain fran­co­cen­trism, to be sure, but con­sid­er how many in Pick­’s time con­sid­ered France the cen­ter of human­i­ty’s genius. Pro­duc­ing a map as com­pelling as this one could­n’t have dimin­ished that image.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion Mapped in 13 Min­utes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Is Now Free Online

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.