A Brief Look at "The American Revolution"

In between obsessing over 30 Day Map Challenges I’ve been watching The American Revolution on PBS. It’s impressive in its scope and ambition and the map content is wonderful. Lines are animated across historical maps, many of which I’ve never seen before, to show troop movements in red (British) and blue (American). Here is an example from the series that you can watch a clip of on their web site

This shows Brooklyn, NY and the Battle of Long Island. George Washington’s army was forced to retreat after failing to secure the Jamaica Pass over the Gowanus Heights. I had no idea that Brooklyn had such heights as to require people to travel through passes. I’ve never had much trouble getting through that area-it’s the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway around the perimeter that will kill you.

Here is an interactive map where you can click various battle sites to get more content. I like that when you choose the Battle of Trenton it starts snowing across New Jersey.

I have not had a chance to explore much of their web content, but having spent most of my life traveling between Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and seeing signs for these battlefields all over the region, there will be much for me to explore. I may come back to this for a more in depth post in the future.

 

30 Day Map Challenge 2025 - Days 13-19

This was a difficult week for my personal 30 Day Map Challenge. I’ve been using the Gulf of Mexico as my theme. Some of the recent prompts have little to do with the Gulf and the results have neither been very inspiring and nor educational. Looking ahead, I think next week’s prompts will be better. Anyway here’s another 7 days.

Day 13 - 10 minute map

I drew this map during a work meeting. I did not have any visuals available so the accuracy is not great and Florida looks especially saggy.

Day 14 - this is one of the “Data Challenge” days - use OpenStreetMap. For Day 8 (urban) I had made a map of Veracruz, one of the larger cities on the Gulf Coast. I used OpenStreetMap for that data but it wasn’t very satisfying. Here I got a more complete data set and tried to flesh out the map. I like the silly idea of creating a guide to a place I’ve never been.

Day 15 - Fire. The Gulf Coast is not an area known for volcanoes or wildfires so I had to dig a little deeper. Power generation is a big part of the local economy so I went with power plants, and to double up on the theme made it into a heat map. The data is from a few Google searches, including some in Spanish to get sites in Mexico and Cuba. I removed hydro and wind power stations as they do not produce fire.

Day 16 - Cell. This is an unusual prompt. From the 30 Day web site ”This could be a geographic cell (raster, tessellation), a cellular network, or a biological/social process (e.g., disease spread).” I found an image of skin cells via study.com and overlaid it to look like the cells are colored by the Gulf’s geography.

Day 17 - A new tool. For this challenge I used MapLibre, a software library I’ve wanted to use for a while. I spent much time working on tutorials and trying things out but the end result was just taking one of Dr. Qiusheng Wu’s examples and mainly changing the location, bearing and pitch to get a 3D map of the Gulf of Mexico. I used the southernmost part of the Gulf because that is where the most dramatic topography is. Most of the rest of the region is quite flat.

Day 18 - Out of this world. Interesting idea for a prompt but not one that relates well to the Gulf of Mexico. I simply found an image on iStockPhoto and marked it up a bit.

Day 19 - Projections. Again a tricky one to relate to my theme. I did a recent post featuring the Spilhaus Projection and remembered how the Gulf of Mexico appears on it twice in many versions. I tried to make my own map, but two different software packages gagged on drawing that projection so I took a Wikipedia image and marked it up.

These last two days could be described as mostly effortless and uninformative but I’m taking what the challenge is giving and running with it. I’ve learned more about the Gulf in the last few days despite the meager output and hope to be able to show some of that knowledge over the next week.

30 Day Map Challenge 2025 - Days 6-12

Another week of my Gulf of Mexico 30 Day Map Challenges. Last week's are here.

Day 6 - Dimensions

The prompt “dimensions” can mean height, depth or multidimensional data. Since my focus is on a body of water, I went with bathymetry (water depth) using the same data from Day 5 but rendered with an attempted 3D look. 3D is definitely a weakness of mine and it shows here.

Day 7 - Accessibility

Again, here’s a prompt that can mean many things. I went with public beach access. The data came from a couple of different Google Map queries but it seems very incomplete, especially in Mexico.

Day 8 - Urban

This challenge should ideally be a learning experience for me and all of us. Veracruz is a large city, regional center and significant port that I know little about. Here is a map showing some of the city’s amenities. The data is from OpenStreetMap. I will be revisiting this for my Day 14 map.

Day 9 - Analog

I made a cut paper map of the Gulf of Mexico. Here it is presented with the land on top of a glass coffee table at my mother’s apartment against a piece blue fleece and the water piece in the back.

Day 10 - Air

I took an air quality map from PurpleAir and mixed and expanded the colors to try and present a more regionalized picture of air quality. The problem with that data is that because there are many fewer sensors in Mexico than the United States, the one in Tampico that had a very high (bad air) reading made the entire region look worse than it is. There was another sensor in Tampico with good readings but there are too few of them to moderate the bad readings. I probably should have moderated the map a bit more and not spread the red color so far and wide there. Veracruz was also impacted by a negative reading from a town over a hundred miles inland from there.

Day 11 - Minimal

For the minimal theme, I revisited the paper cut map, mainly because I liked this version I had made for Day 9 and here was an excuse to use it. This one is presented against my blue nylon jacket, standing in for the water.

Day 12 - Map from 2125

We are instructed to make a speculative map showing 100 years into the future. I used predicted sea level rise data from NOAA, a US agency, so there is no Mexico data. These estimates are conservative and are not as alarming as they maybe could be. I did a little airbrushing of the colors representing inundated areas and added some Chinese text to list the Chinese States of America, Mexico, the Gulf and the Special Administrative Autonomous Region of Houston. Just having some fun speculating, nothing to take too seriously.

Next week - more! 

30 Day Map Challenge 2025-Days 1-5

Another November means another #30DayMapChallenge. As I mentioned in last week’s post I’m doing this again, focused on the Gulf of Mexico. This is mainly as a protest at how the major map providers have voluntarily followed a silly and non legally binding executive order on renaming it based on the whims of one person’s ego.

I don’t know very much about the Gulf and have spent little time in the regions surrounding it (see Day 4’s map) so this should be a learning experience for me. I’m already finding it challenging to tie every theme to the Gulf while also trying to be at least a bit creative. Here it goes, each days theme is listed below with commentary where needed:

Day 1 - Points. 

Oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Data source: databasin.org

Day 2 - Lines

Oil and gas pipelines. Data source: NOAA

Day 3 - Polygons

States surrounding the Gulf of Mexico. In the case of Cuba these are provinces. I intentionally left country names and boundaries off to try and show this as more of an international region, however the boundaries are still pretty clear.

Day 4 - My Data. The prompt is to “map something personal” so here is a hand drawn map of where I’ve been along the Gulf.

Day 5 - Earth. Bathymetry of the Gulf of Mexico. Data source: Gulf Coastal Ocean Observing System. 

I found this fun sinking font called Titanic. At first I only had the Gulf labeled but then I was reminded of the Tragically Hip’s song “New Orleans is Sinking” and decided I had to see how that looked in this font. 

Next week - hopefully more! 

As the United States slides deeper into fascism, here is a map showing new and expanding prison facilities, largely to house people, whose only crimes are to have arrived here without documentation, just as most of our ancestors did (see graph below if you doubt this). 

-via Mother Jones

The map above is originally from the Washington Post, but due to their paywall you likely won’t be able to see it there. It was reprinted as part of an article in Mother Jones on trump’s detention state. 

From their article you can zoom and click away to see details like “Work Ethic Camp” in Nebraska, a name that eerily sounds like Auschwitz’s “work will set you free” motto.

If you’re thinking we need these “camps” because these people must have done something wrong, this graph from the Guardian, linked in the Mother Jones article shows the vast and criminal increase of detentions of people with no criminal history.

Program Note: In November I will be embarking on another 30 Day Map Challenge. I skipped it last year but this Spring, after being annoyed at the quickness of major mapping services to cave into the renaming places based on the whims of an arrogant president, I told my social media followers I would do a challenge where every map is of the Gulf of Mexico. I plan to keep that promise but also promised myself that I won’t let it take over my life for the next month so don’t expect too much cartographic brilliance.

 

 

 

 

 

Remrkable River "Map"

This “map” should absolutely not be used for navigation. More of an illustrative graphic than a true map, it is geographically accurate in many ways while placing rivers that are continents away as neighbors.

-via David Rumsey Map Collection

Titled “A Map of the Principal Rivers Shewing Their Courses, Countries, and Comparative Lengths“, it was created in 1834 in England by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Rivers radiate around a circle based on their orientation of flow. That is how you get Italy’s Po River situated between China’s Yangtze and the Amazon in South America - all east-flowing rivers.

The amazing trick of this map is how the authors were able to fit river courses into each other with minimal distortion of directions or lengths. Here you can see how the Amur River flows over the top of the Great Lakes with the entire area nestled into the Amazon’s curving headwater tributaries.

Some sacrifices had to be made here such as cutting off the major south flowing tributaries of the Amazon but I love the way they folded Brazil and Peru around Mongolia.

There is a cliche (at least here in North America) that few rivers flow northwards. This map shows that many of the world’s longest rivers including the Nile, Lena and Yenisei (Ienisei on here) flow north.

At the top of the map is a legend. The word “character” is confusing here but I think it just refers to the different line symbols (dots, dashes, etc) used to distinguish the river by their continents.

At the bottom is a chart “shewing” the length of each river and some text stating that the concentric circles at 200 mile increments are to give a general idea of the distance to the sea.

Not just impressive in its scope, the map also highlights some beautiful details with hatch lines for topography, parallel lines implying water depth, shading and a very restrained bit of blue shading for water bodies.

Browse this map here.

Sketchy Boats

Sketchy Boats is a site created by maritime researcher Christian Panton. It tracks ships with “murky paperwork, shady ownership, strange port calls, and a suspicious tendency to vanish from tracking systems”. Sketchiness scores are calculated by a number of red flags including switching flags or names, questionable insurance documents, spending time off the coasts of sanctioned countries and going dark from tracking systems. There is a globe you can spin to see a heat map of these ships. 

You can also bring up the list of ships and click for more information.

Here is a detail of the Ocean Embrace, one of the ships with a top sketchiness score, currently sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone.

There are also links below to other tracking sites such as VesselFinder and Global Fishing Watch, which has its own ship tracking visualizations.

More on this project from Christian Panton's web site

 

 

Banned Books Map

Happy Banned Books Week. As book burning fever persists across the land the Little Free Library organization is fighting back with a map showing book bans across the USA.

-from the Book Ban Map, slightly altered to show all map elements together.

The map is a bit confusing in that the numbers are libraries, not book bans. Bans are colored by state, but not shown more locally than that.

You can find your area, get info on specific libraries and 

use their mobile app to find Little Free Libraries to deliver books to.

More on Little Free Library’s fight against censorship here.

 

African Migration Myths and Reality

I saw this very interesting map on Global Threads, a blog from Oxford Professor of Global History Peter Frankopan. 

It shows migration within Africa. Despite headlines and pictures of dangerous boat crossings, the vast majority of these migrations take place within Africa. Less than 1% of Sub-Saharan Africans migrate outside the continent. “In some cases, routes within Africa are more lethal than the highly publicised ones across Mediterranean itself.” These facts are obscured by the focus on European immigration.

The countries receiving the most migrants are Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa. Almost 10 percent of Egypt’s population are migrants though oddly there are no arrows there on this map. Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda are major host countries for refugees despite their own internal problems. The other takeaway is that most of this migration takes place within the major regional economic communities-the colored areas.

To not simply repeat Frankopan’s blog post (though it is well worth reading), I did some research and came across the International Organization for Migration’s annual World Migration Report. It is full of interesting graphics and as you scroll down there are flow arrows connecting the countries or origin (on the left) and destination (right) of migrants. The arrows are sized by numbers with the top five destinations (or origins) listed. Here is an example from Mali showing only one European country at the bottom of its top five destinations.

Looking at a European country’s (Italy) top sources of migrants, only one of these countries is in Africa. France has three (former French colonies) while Germany and Britain have no African countries in their top five.

This south to south, rather than south to north migration is in Frankopan’s words, “binding African economies and societies together in ways that are under-recognised in global debates.”

Selling the Dream of Southern California

Southern California may have lost some of its sparkle in recent decades but in the early to mid-20th Century it was largely seen as the perfect American dream location. A slew of pictorial maps were created to entice people to come and live the dream. A typical example is this “Roads to Romance” map covered in a previous blog post. I took a photo of the map at the La Jolla Map Museum on a visit in 2019.

The map is full of oranges, lemons and happy people fishing, swimming and cruising around in boats. Even the fish seem to be enjoying the place. The full title is "Ride the Roads to Romance along the Golden Coast thru the Sunshine Empire of Southern California".

Another example promotes the city of Pomona highlighting its central location to “the nation’s all season playground”. The bottom right corner lists the distances from Pomona to other nearby destinations.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

The Automobile Club of Southern California had its own agenda of encouraging a good drive to see the beautiful sites. 

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

Back in 1962 even the freeways were fun!

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

The idea of freeway fun these days might seem a bit dated or absurd.

Another very yellow example by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce invites you to make their city your vacation headquarters.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

Also, don’t forget Hollywood, the “glamour capital of the world”.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

In a slightly earlier era (1928) Fox Films published regular Hollywood Amusement Directories with maps showing the theater locations.

-via Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Inc.

The glamour also captured on a 1953 menu from the Brown Derby.

-via New Yorker

By 1977 Life in Los Angeles had become quite a bit less ideal. Eugene Turner mapped areas of the city using Chernoff faces. The west side is the only truly contented looking area, the rest of the city showing signs of stress. I like this map so much I highlighted it in one of my earliest blog posts.

Since the 1970’s the image of Southern California has taken further hits as exemplified by this postcard.

-via Flicker - I once had this postcard but mailed it away.

Yet the charm persists in maps like those of Dave Stephens maps available on plates, clocks, mugs and pillows at sites like Zazzle.