When Charles Paullin’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States first appeared in 1932, it was hailed as a “monument to historical scholarship.” Its 700 maps traced nearly every dimension of American life across the country’s geographical bounds—its natural history, its settlement by Europeans, the spread of railroads, state boundaries, suffrage, and much else.
Paullin, a naval historian, hoped his meticulous research and beautiful renderings would inspire new research into history’s old narratives. They did. And yet for nearly a century, no other project really attempted to match its depth.
Inspired by the scope and intellectual ambition of its predecessor, a new project promises an American historical atlas for the online era. Produced in collaboration by the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab and cartography firm Stamen, the American Panorama is an array of maps that revive the country’s most formative stories in modern, digital form.
“We don’t want it to be faithfully following the look of a historical atlas,” says Jon Christensen, a partner at Stamen and scholar of history at UCLA. “We want these to look like maps made in the 21st century.”
[For more of this story, written by Laura Bliss, go to http://www.citylab.com/design/...21st-century/420390/]
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